9.12.07. This past spring, Johannes Birringer conducted an extensive email interview with Marc Downie and myself for a chapter in the book he is writing on digital art and science. The book is to be published by PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art, whose editor then decided to run the chapter as a kind of book preview in the forthcoming December issue.

A few days ago, she asked us to cut one of my comments since she was now featuring pictures from theater director Robert Wilson’s latest production in the same issue, saying that it would be “untoward, lacking in graciousness” to include criticism of him. Here’s the offending paragraph:

So, yes, I put Wilson’s work in the best possible light [in the Visionary of Theater project] but all the while I was reacting against it and its kind. Too long a philosophical objection to go into here, but I can’t omit the fact that I’m deeply troubled by the severing of causality and of history that you find in Wilson and his forebears (Cage, for instance) and their many followers (who crowd the field of digital art). This objection relates to our critique of arbitrariness, the same critique Marc makes of the arbitrary “mapping” techniques embedded in the digital tools like Max MSP. I think that dream logic, random juxtaposition, asynchronicity, and so on, have become easy evasions of hard thinking. The proof, perhaps, is the degree to which they’ve been gleefully adopted by mass media—advertising, videogames, music videos, and so on. A welter of disconnects.

So much for critical discussion! The old avant-garde has become a sacred cow; it’s no wonder that it’s the same old ideas that keep getting recirculated…

But since we’re now on the topic of Wilson, this puts me in mind of a time that cast him in the poorest light: almost a parody of the arbitrariness characteristic of the artistic tradition I’ve been criticizing.

It so happens that around 1996 a curator of the Museum of the Jewish Diaspora (“Beth Hatfutsoth”) in Tel Aviv had the odd notion of commissioning Wilson to re-envision and re-design the museum’s long-standing exhibit devoted to Jewish emigration to America. So Wilson assembled a small group of collaborators to work on the project, of which I was one (to create and direct the exhibit projections) and Marco Steinberg another (to oversee the architectural design) — and later on (at my suggestion) the late and much lamented Paul Schmidt (to write the scenarios and dialogue).

Bob Wilson had already storyboarded a preliminary conception of the New World Theater, as the piece was to be called, and when I reviewed it I immediately saw that he’d recycled a design from an earlier piece, Death Destruction Detroit II. A truly appalling choice.

For the earlier work was itself a sequel to the first Death Destruction Detroit , which despite its title was Wilson’s surreal meditation on the Nazi war criminal Rudolph Hess. Wilson had happened on a Life magazine photograph of the elderly Hess walking on the grounds of Spandau prison in Berlin, where he was the last surviving war prisoner there, serving out his life sentence for his crimes against humanity. Somehow struck by the poignancy of the old man’s isolation, or at least by this image of it, Wilson went on to fashion the entire non-sequential drama around the figure of the old man (who echoes the old men found elsewhere in his work, for example in KA MOUNTAIN).

For the sequel, DDDII, Wilson created a theater-in-the-round for the Schaubuhne theater in Belin, with audience chairs custom-built to swivel around completely. Here the figure of Rudolph Hess had somehow morphed into Franz Kafka, a bitter absurdity.

The theater-in-the-round was the design he lifted for the New World Theater installation, which was to employ the same set-up of swiveling chairs and enveloping stages. But also the same figure of the old man — Rudolph Hess now turned into a Jewish Everyman, just like that.

(So far as I know, this exhibit never saw the light of day — not as one might hope because its conceptual perversity became apparent to the museum or its funders, but because of its lavish cost over-runs.)