Robert Whitman (1935–2024)

Multimedia and performance artist Robert Whitman, whose incendiary Happenings lit up the downtown New York art scene of the 1960s, died at his home in Warwick, New York, on January 19. He was eighty-eight.Newsof his death was announced by New York’s Pace Gallery, which had long represented him. A progenitor of expanded cinema, owing to his early use of projection in performance and film, Whitman alongside compatriots including Allan Kaprow, Jim Dine, Red Grooms, and Claes Oldenburg, pioneered Happenings, the spontaneous, improvised performance works that arose in excited response to action painting and amid a time of profound social change. Whitman was a cofounder, with fellow artist Robert Rauschenberg; Bell Labs engineers Billy Klüver and Fred Waldhauer; and Klüver’s wife, Julie Martin, of Experiments in Art and Technology. More commonly known as E.A.T., the pathbreaking collective promoted collaborations between artists, engineers, and scientists, its efforts spawning some of the first works of computer art.RelatedCREATIVE CAPITAL NAMES RECIPIENTS OF 2024 “WILD FUTURES” AWARDSELKE SOLOMON (1943–2024) Robert Whitman was born on May 23, 1935, in New York, to a family of means.

His father died when he was still a boy, and his mother raised him in the nearby suburb of Englewood, New Jersey. Whitman studied literature at Rutgers University, with the intention of becoming a playwright. Falling in with Allan Kaprow, who was teaching at Rutgers, and who in turn was heavily influenced by John Cage’s scored and performed events, he participated in Kaprow’s inaugural Happening, “18 Happenings in 6 Parts,” staged in 1959 at the Reuben Gallery in New York. Whitman quickly became enmeshed with the city’s avant-garde coterie. Strongly influenced by a youthful encounter with the work of circus clown Emmett Kelly as well as by the films of slapstick comedians Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, he soon deployed the performers’ wordless, physical communication in his own Happenings.

The first of these, 1960’sAmerican Moon, took place at Reuben Gallery. Viewers were packed into makeshift corridors strewn with debris and crumpled craft paper, where they witnessed various silent actions, including those of artist Lucas Samaras, who swung from ropes attached to the ceiling. InPrune Flat, 1965, perhaps Whitman’s most renowned work, the artist projected surreal imagery onto performers, forcing the audience to at once divide and focus their attention on the live and the cinematic. In its use of projection, the Happening echoed his 1964 workBathroom Sink, in which a sink and a mirror are placed on one wall, across from which appears the projection, refracted from the mirror, of a woman performing her daily ablutions. When the viewer steps between the sink/mirror and the projection in order to apprehend either, they become part of the work, serving at once as screen, subject, and audience, reflected in the mirror and bathed in the light and image of the projected film.

In 1966, Whitman was one of a handful of artists participating in9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, organized by Klüver and Rauschenberg at the Sixty-Ninth Armory in New York. Whitman presentedTwo Holes of Water – 3, for which he arranged at the rear of the armory seven cars outfitted with projectors showing film, snippets of broadcast television, and closed-circuit video feeds of live actions taking place within the building. Contact microphones secreted at various sites throughout the armory emitted the sounds of a roaring exhaust pipe, bombastic speechifying, and the clatter of a typewriter. The series presaged the formation the following year of E.A.T., which was predicated on one-on-one collaboration, rather than on any formal structure, pairing artists with engineers or scientists, often in the industrial environments where technological development was taking place. “We wanted a more even, democratic relationship,” Whitman toldArtforum’s Michelle Kuo in 2008, explaining that the group believed there should be no hierarchy in value among the contributions of all involved parties.

“The common ground was our social mission, that commitment to some sort of social energy that went beyond just any one thing.” The efforts of the E.A.T. cohort led to innovations in art and performance and to the realization of numerous projects across the globe, including the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70, in Osaka, Japan, where Whitman was instrumental in creating a massive spherical mirror made of aluminized PET film, which reflected the pavilion’s visitors upside down, as though suspended in space. Though many of his early collaborators, Rauschenberg among them, eventually turned away from Happenings and from performance in general, Whitman continued to mine the vein until the end of his career, sometimes to its detriment as public tastes changed, though his work saw a resurgence of interest as the twenty-first century dawned. Often incorporating audience participation, he never stopped introducing new technology into his works, eagerly embracing cell phones, the internet, and NFTs in turn. For the 2005 workLocal Report, he invited participants in five locations across four states to shoot video “news reports” using their cell phones.

A 2023 series, “New Worlds,” presented NFTs of imagined planets that viewers could explore using a cursor. Despite the many technological and conceptual innovations he introduced to the art world, Whitman all his life remained as captivated by the creative process as he had earlier been by Kelly and Keaton. “Something has to come first, and then that thing has to get out of the way, and so on,” he toldArtforum’s Liz Kotz in 2011. “You get to a certain point where the piece begins to form itself, and you’re just along for the ride.”.