By Drew Grant 5/23/12 6:43pm

Robert Wilson

Johnny Depp in Robert Wilson Video Portrait (TimesSquareAlliance.org)

Catch Three Minutes of ‘Robert Wilson Video Portraits’ in Times Square Every Night! (Video)

If you happen to be walking on Broadway right before the clock strikes midnight, do not be alarmed when several major video screens turn into digital canvases. It’s just the first of the Times Square Arts installation series, which runs from 11:57-12 a.m. from May 1 – 31. And what better artist to kick off the premiere exhibit than Watermill Center founder and premier artist, director, and curator Robert Wilson? Read More

By Zachary Woolfe 11/01/11 5:22pm

Opera

Basinski, 1994.

Williamsburg’s Arcadian Past: Composer Billy Basinski Stars in Robert Wilson’s Quasi-Opera The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic

On a cold, drizzly morning last week, artist and journalist Ethan Pettit was standing in front of a big steel door in a stairwell in a nondescript loft building on North 11th Street. Mr. Pettit is a genial, hulking guy with broad, friendly features. Even with his curly, shoulder-length hair, matted down by the rain, he didn’t seem like a likely candidate for drag. But in the 1980s and early ’90s, he appeared as Medea de Vyse at parties and events throughout Williamsburg, including ones held in Arcadia, which was once on the other side of the steel door. Read More

By Andrew Russeth 7/27/11 2:25pm

Art

3 Photos

Black Rider, the fragrance. Bottle designed by artist and past Watermill resident Davide Balliano

Capturing the Essence of Director Robert Wilson

“Usually we start with a very creative fragrance and then change it to satisfy a consumer or a brand,” Loc Dong, a perfumer with the New York-based company International Flavors & Fragrances, told The Observer during a telephone interview yesterday. “But with Bob, it can be raw. There are no boundaries.”

The Bob to whom Read More

By Charles Michener 5/01/06 12:00am

Wilson’s Stylized Lohengrin Finds Some New Admirers

Wagner conceived Lohengrin in a bath—while he was taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845. He was immersed, too, in the murky historical and mythological texts that never failed to fire his imagination. He envisioned the opera’s hero, a chivalrous Knight of the Holy Grail, appearing out of nowhere on a boat drawn by a Read More

By Charles Michener 5/01/06 12:00am

Wilson’s Stylized Lohengrin Finds Some New Admirers

Wagner conceived Lohengrin in a bath—while he was taking the waters at Marienbad in 1845. He was immersed, too, in the murky historical and mythological texts that never failed to fire his imagination. He envisioned the opera’s hero, a chivalrous Knight of the Holy Grail, appearing out of nowhere on a boat drawn by a Read More

By Ron Rosenbaum 12/20/04 12:00am

The Underminer: Raid for the Roaches of the Soul

Hey, it’s you! I thought you’d disappeared. No! No! You’re missed! By me, at least. I guess I just haven’t come across your work recently. That’s so you, to disappear off the radar screen like that and not care. So quirky, so indie, so Eastern. Not into mere recognition. It’s all about the work!

And Read More

By John Heilpern 12/18/00 12:00am

Albee and Strindberg Have Bad Dreams

Whenever a play turns out to be pretentious or incomprehensible–or both–take heart. Someone will invariably explain it to you as a dream .

We will be told the piece is “just like a dream” and should be appreciated as such.

Do not reply that anyone who dreams pretentious dreams should be shot. You will Read More