The Art Issue
The Subject as Star
Brad Pitt has done it. So have Sean Penn, Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Winona Ryder. For them it was gratis, but now, for a modest $150,000, any contemporary-art lover can sit for a life-size video portrait (with soundtrack) by Robert Wilson, king of the avant-garde, multi-media performance event.
The Subject as Star
Brad Pitt has done it. So have Sean Penn, Princess Caroline of Monaco, and Winona Ryder. For them it was gratis, but now, for a modest $150,000, any contemporary-art lover can sit for a life-size video portrait (with soundtrack) by Robert Wilson, king of the avant-garde, multi-media performance event.
by Bob Colacello December 2006
Attention, all self-adoring major contemporary-art collectors! Get out your checkbooks and American Express black cards! Or call that Swiss bank and order an instant wire transfer! Robert Wilson, the king of extravagantly avant-garde stage events that mix so many media nobody knows what to call them—theater? opera? performance art?—is going into the commissioned-portrait business. Yes, the high priest of high culture is taking a page out of Andy Warhol's business-art philosophy—and, one might add, following in the footsteps of a small horde of younger masters who also accept commissions, such as Julian "Broken Plates" Schnabel, Francesco "Platter Eyes" Clemente, Eric "Heavy Brushwork" Fischl, and Chuck "A Little Dab'll Do You" Close—and is lining up private clients for life-size, high-definition-video renditions of themselves at $150,000 each, which is peanuts in today's through-the-roof art market. The price includes a soundtrack by one of several composers, among them Marianne Faithfull, Bernard Herrmann, and Michael Galasso, who has collaborated with Wilson on theater projects since the 1970s.
Wilson has already been commissioned by German princess Ingeborg von Schleswig-Holstein, who had him do her 11-year-old son. "I put a fox head on him," Wilson says, "this little prince standing there all dressed up in his Giorgio Armani suit." Paris grande dame Jacqueline de Ribes has also asked for a portrait. In January, Paula Cooper Gallery, Phillips de Pury & Company, and Nathan A. Bernstein & Company, all in New York, will mount simultaneous exhibitions of 30 different video portraits of movie stars and other cultural figures—each of whom was given one in exchange for allowing Wilson to sell another two. The subjects include Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini, Alan Cumming, and Brad Pitt (caught in the rain in his boxer shorts). Paula Cooper will also show 12 variations of Wilson's video portrait A Snow Owl.
"I got started on these portraits thinking of Andy's commissioned work," Wilson says, "as well as those of classical portraitists like John Singer Sargent." But whereas Warhol's working motto was "Fast, easy, cheap, and modern," Wilson's approach is slow, difficult, expensive, and replete with historical references, as one might expect from a man whose works have titles such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, have had casts of hundreds, and have run as long as seven days. He posed ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov as Saint Sebastian, French actress Jeanne Moreau as Mary Queen of Scots ("There's this sense of power going on," says Wilson), and Princess Caroline of Monaco as Sargent's Madame X, but from the back, in homage to her mother's starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Wilson loosely based Winona Ryder's portrait on the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, burying her up to her shoulders in a pile of sand, on which sit a gun, a toothbrush, and a bright-red handbag. Steve Buscemi's portrait—which has the actor, famous for his creepy roles, standing behind the carcass of a cow—seems to channel Salvador Dalí via Damien Hirst.
Each portrait takes nearly a full day to shoot and is an elaborate undertaking, requiring a cameraman, sound technician, costume designer, hairdresser, and makeup artist. As with his theater productions, Wilson designs the set and lighting himself. The portraits are shot both in horizontal format for viewing on television or on movie screens and in vertical orientation for H.D. plasma flat-screen monitors. The subjects are directed by Wilson to "think of nothing," and he limits their movement to one or two gestures, in very slow motion. Each video is anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes long, but they are looped, so there is no discernible beginning or end to the finished work.
Wilson has already been commissioned by German princess Ingeborg von Schleswig-Holstein, who had him do her 11-year-old son. "I put a fox head on him," Wilson says, "this little prince standing there all dressed up in his Giorgio Armani suit." Paris grande dame Jacqueline de Ribes has also asked for a portrait. In January, Paula Cooper Gallery, Phillips de Pury & Company, and Nathan A. Bernstein & Company, all in New York, will mount simultaneous exhibitions of 30 different video portraits of movie stars and other cultural figures—each of whom was given one in exchange for allowing Wilson to sell another two. The subjects include Sean Penn, Willem Dafoe, Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini, Alan Cumming, and Brad Pitt (caught in the rain in his boxer shorts). Paula Cooper will also show 12 variations of Wilson's video portrait A Snow Owl.
"I got started on these portraits thinking of Andy's commissioned work," Wilson says, "as well as those of classical portraitists like John Singer Sargent." But whereas Warhol's working motto was "Fast, easy, cheap, and modern," Wilson's approach is slow, difficult, expensive, and replete with historical references, as one might expect from a man whose works have titles such as A Letter for Queen Victoria and The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud, have had casts of hundreds, and have run as long as seven days. He posed ballet star Mikhail Baryshnikov as Saint Sebastian, French actress Jeanne Moreau as Mary Queen of Scots ("There's this sense of power going on," says Wilson), and Princess Caroline of Monaco as Sargent's Madame X, but from the back, in homage to her mother's starring role in Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window. Wilson loosely based Winona Ryder's portrait on the character Winnie in Samuel Beckett's play Happy Days, burying her up to her shoulders in a pile of sand, on which sit a gun, a toothbrush, and a bright-red handbag. Steve Buscemi's portrait—which has the actor, famous for his creepy roles, standing behind the carcass of a cow—seems to channel Salvador Dalí via Damien Hirst.
Each portrait takes nearly a full day to shoot and is an elaborate undertaking, requiring a cameraman, sound technician, costume designer, hairdresser, and makeup artist. As with his theater productions, Wilson designs the set and lighting himself. The portraits are shot both in horizontal format for viewing on television or on movie screens and in vertical orientation for H.D. plasma flat-screen monitors. The subjects are directed by Wilson to "think of nothing," and he limits their movement to one or two gestures, in very slow motion. Each video is anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes long, but they are looped, so there is no discernible beginning or end to the finished work.
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