“Going on a Journey”: Space, Time, and Experience in Robert Wilson’s Installations and Museum Interventions

For decades, Robert Wilson’s work has received asymmetrical academic attention. It is striking that even though he is a prolific visual artist who works in various mediums such as drawing, painting, lithograph, photography, installation art, furniture/sculpture, and video, the visuality of his art has mainly been studied in relation to his theatre productions and directorial approach. To mention a few, Bonnie Marranca described Wilson’s theatre as “assemblage art”[1] in her seminal volume on The Theatre of Images. Stefan Brecht called his stagings the “theatre of visions,”[2] Laurence Shyer saw him as a “painter in the theatre,”[3] Arthur Holmberg quoted the director as saying, “I think with a pencil. This is my way of analyzing the play.”[4] The art world, galleries, collectors, biennales, and museums have also acknowledged and appreciated Wilson’s works of art and celebrated him with various prizes, such as the Golden Lion prize in sculpture for his installation Memory/Loss in the Venice Biennale in 1993.

Literature on Wilson emphasizes his background in the plastic arts and mentions that he initially studied painting, graduated as an interior architect at Pratt Institute, worked as Paolo Soleri’s apprentice in 1966,[5] and created performances in his twenties that could be partly linked to John Cage’s and Merce Cunningham’s Events and partly to the Happenings.[6] Indeed, before turning to the proscenium theatre, Wilson considered painting his most important artistic field. According to an early interview, Wilson saw the precursor of his process in painting in the practice of Jackson Pollock, especially the abstract expressionist artist’s “physical involvement”[7] during making an allover picture. As Wilson described his creative method in 1965: “When I am painting, I let the paint take over. I paint from something . . . and that thing takes over. It is much more exciting than if I tried to do it intellectually. The response is emotional instead of rational.”[8] However, in 1966, Wilson gave up painting. This came from a creative crisis that led to a mental breakdown.[9] The artistic reason for this block was, as Wilson pointed out later, that he could not “capture on canvas the overlays of images, the multiple light pictures,” he was experiencing in his head at that time.[10]

Nevertheless, Wilson has never stopped working as a visual artist. Drawing and his special medium furniture/sculpture have always been essential genres in his oeuvre, and installation art became one of the most significant art fields in his lifework by the early 1990s. In fact, his installation art has continued and expanded his originally studied crafts. Arthur Holmberg aptly observed that “[Wilson’s] installations are among his most important works. In a way he has come full circle. In theater, he discovered his signature. He was able to come back and work with static art. . . . He is one of the great contemporary installation artists.”[11] Furthermore, it is important to note that Wilson’s work demonstrates a reciprocal relationship between his theatre and installation art: not only has Wilson’s theatre influenced his installations, but his installation art practice has also created a space for experimentation that informs his theatrical works.

Claire Bishop defines installation art “as a term that loosely refers to the type of art into which the viewer physically enters, and which is often described as ‘theatrical,’ ‘immersive,’ or ‘experiential.’”[12] According to Bishop, one of the main characteristics of installation art is that it engages the viewer as a physical presence in space and provides her with a complex somatic experience. The beholder perceives the work by calling into action all her senses: smell, touch, sound, and not only sight. In this paper, I argue that Robert Wilson structures the viewer’s experience in his immersive installations and museum interventions as a journey through space and time. But what kind of space do we enter, what kind of time do we exist in in a Wilson installation, and where does this journey take us?

To answer the first question, we must examine Wilson’s installations within a historical context. As Bishop points out, the history of installation art typically starts with pioneers like El Lissitzky, Schwitters, and Duchamp. This history includes Minimal art and Kaprow's Happenings and Environments, culminating in fully evolved artworks in the 1970s and 1980s, with a flourishing in the 1990s.[13] However, Robert Wilson’s installations challenge this narrative, with their origins traced back to the re-evaluation of landscape concepts in twentieth-century American theatre and visual art.

As several studies pointed out,[14] in search of a theatre without emotional interruption in the flow of the spectator’s experience, Gertrude Stein conceived the idea of landscape drama. According to her observation, in traditional theatre based on Aristotelian order, the viewer is exposed to an asynchrony between the perception of a given moment of the performance and the progressive development of the linear structure of the plot, forcing her attention to oscillate between the present and the future while becoming more familiar with the story of the unfolding drama. Stein called the tension this experience caused “nervousness.”[15] 

In her lecture “Plays,” Stein explained the genesis of landscape drama: “I felt that if a play was exactly like a landscape then there would be no difficulty about the emotion of a person looking on the play . . . because the landscape does not have to make acquaintance. You may have to make acquaintance with it, but it does not with you, it is there.”[16] For Stein, making acquaintance in the traditional post-Renaissance theatre means a certain “progressive familiarity” that evolves over time through the narrative and other discursive tools that create a plot and characters.[17]

With other words, Stein wanted to create a theatre that resembled the continuous presence of experiencing a landscape, emphasizing spatial and temporal juxtaposition of visual and aural elements over linear narrativity.[18] This way, Stein connected theatre and landscape, referencing a practice that had, in fact, existed for centuries, as noted by Jane Palatini Bowers. This connection involved several concepts, particularly the idea of theatrum mundi (the theatre of the world) and the Italians’ development of the proscenium stage. This sixteenth-century innovation in theatre utilized the vanishing point perspective from landscape painting to create the dimensions of a spectacle.[19]

Simultaneously, alongside Stein’s invention of landscape drama, painting also acquired a landscape-like spatial dimension by the mid-twentieth century. Arnold Aronson highlighted that these iconoclastic tendencies in the twentieth century plastic arts played a crucial role in inspiring the establishment of American avant-garde theatre.[20] He identified Marcel Duchamp as a key influence on American postwar theatre and noted two major pillars of the era’s theatrical aesthetics: the works of Gertrude Stein and John Cage.[21] He also found Allan Kaprow a significant figure in this artistic development who understood that Cubist collage had paved the way for the picture to infinity and saw Jackson Pollock as a direct precursor to his Happenings.[22] 

Indeed, Pollock opened the field for the younger generation, both metaphorically and literally. Rosalind E. Krauss pointed out that young artists in the 1960s utilized Pollock's shift from the traditional vertical axis of the picture plane to a horizontal dimension in their art as a starting point.[23] Krauss called these approaches strong “misreadings” – using the concept of the critic Harold Bloom—which were not misunderstandings but “deep understandings,”[24] creative exploitation of the older artist’s ideas based on the “axial rotation of painting out of the vertical domain of the visual field . . . onto the horizontal vector,” which Krauss called formlessness.[25] Krauss also coined the term “horizontality as a medium,”[26] which is derived from Pollock's own statement about his art: he described placing the canvas on the floor as similar to the method used by the Indian sand painters of the West.”[27] 

Writing about the sweeping step in art when Jackson Pollock revolutionized painting by placing the canvas on the floor and dripping it with paint while being in his picture, Harold Rosenberg, theoretician of Abstract Expressionism, extended Pollock’s self-description of his creative activity. As Rosenberg stated: “the canvas began to appear . . . as an arena in which to act.” He went on, “the canvas was not a picture but an event.”[28] Rosenberg finally compared a painter to an actor and suggested spectators should think about art as action in terms of “its inception, duration, direction.”[29]

The two tendencies, one in theatre and the other in plastic arts, seemed to overlap by mid-twentieth century. The formalist art historian, Clement Greenberg drew a parallel between action painters’ and Gertrude Stein’s sensibility in his essay “The Crisis of the Easel Picture.” He claimed that as “the ‘all-over’ painter renders every element and every area of the picture equivalent in accent and emphasis,"[30] the same logic of equivalence can be applied to Stein's work as well.

Where these two paths in art crossed each other, we can find the work of Robert Wilson. Theatre scholars note a strong connection between Wilson's theatre and Stein's landscape drama. While we know from Hans-Ties Lehmann that Wilson realized he could do theatre after reading Stein's The Making of Americans,[31] Sarah Bay-Cheng explicitly directs our attention to Stein’s immediate influence on Robert Wilson,[32] quoting his “Director’s Notes” written for the staging of Gertrude Stein’s Four Saints in Three Acts produced in 1996 in Houston.

Wilson noted, “In the early sixties I began to read Gertrude Stein’s work and also heard the recording of her speaking. That was actually before I began to work in the theater, and it changed my way of thinking forever. The mental space she created was something foreign and at the same time familiar. I felt a creative dialog with her, especially her notion of seeing a play as landscape. The architecture, the structure, the rhythms, the humor – they invited mental pictures.”[33]

Examining Wilson’s early career, we can say that after giving up painting, the young Robert Wilson transposed the energy of the moving body from the process of action painting to theatre and, at the same time, replaced the canvas with a stage that became the space of a Steinian landscape. Wilson did not associate himself with the artistic trends of the 1960s,[34] but he too had his own “strong misreading” of Jackson Pollock’s invention. Wilson explained his transition from painting to theatre based on the Pollockian “physical involvement”: 

The entire body is involved. It’s the same thing in rock music. And it was necessary for me to go further than the painter to put on stage man and animal, poor and rich, child and old person, physically handicapped and normal person, the blind man who passes with his white cane, the deafmute, and even living animals and fake ones. The real problem is this: What can we do to make it possible for rich and poor, for antagonistic races, for those with unequally fortunate destinies to live together?[35]

Nevertheless, Wilson remained a visual artist whose transition to theatre can be seen as a logical answer to the crisis of the easel picture. He left behind the tradition of the easel painting – which, as Greenberg defined, “cuts the illusion of a box-like cavity[36] into the wall behind it, and within this, as a unity, it organizes three-dimensional semblances”[37] – to create his multilayered images in the inverse form of the traditional easel picture: on the proscenium stage. Wilson replaced the materiality of the vertical picture plane and the fictionality of the picture space with the materiality of the stage space and the fictionality of the picture plane framed by the proscenium arch. At the end of the sixties, he left the world of plastic arts for a while; however, Wilson preserved pictorial quality even in the time-and-space structure of proscenium theatre.

Wilson starts the design of every theatre piece with a series of drawings, the so-called visual book. His sketches, diagrams, and these visual books illustrate pictorially how Wilson sees the architecture of each scene of his stagings, the development of a play, and the skeleton of decisions in the Wilsonian visual dramaturgy. He is not a playwright; Robert Wilson is a playdrawer.

Observing Wilson's working method in theatre, Laurence Shyer noted that “Wilson’s designs are created on a flat plane with simple line drawings, and even in their final form retain something of their two-dimensional origins.” [38] Set designer Tom Kamm adds that in a Wilson production everything happens within the frame of a black box. He compares this to Wilson’s gallery drawings, where he masks the edges before drawing and then removes the mask to reveal a clean border. This approach is similar to how he frames the stage. [39] Wilson places into this frame his staged landscapes like paintings:

Go [to my theatre] like you would go to a museum, like you would look at a painting. Appreciate the color of the apple, the line of the dress, the glow of the light… My opera is easier than Butterly. You don’t have to think about the story, because there isn’t any. You don’t have to listen to words, because words don’t mean anything. You just enjoy the scenery, the architectural arrangements in time and space, the music, the feelings they all evoke. Listen to the pictures.[40]

Based on Wilson’s same instruction, Bay-Cheng points out that Wilson effectively illustrates how a Steinian landscape drama, devoid of plot, characters, and suspense, would appear.[41]

Now that we have seen that Wilson’s theatre shares common qualities with Stein’s landscape drama, we must consider whether we can classify Wilson’s installations as landscape-like formations like his stage productions.

As a start in answering this question, it is important to note that Wilson has some enigmatic phrases regarding his oeuvre which are recurring in his interviews in several variants. He frequently mentions that a common thread connects all his works, regardless of the medium. He stated: “I am not one to make distinctions between theatre, photography, architecture, or what is possible on the stage or in video, painting, dance, design, music, sculpture; it is all one in many ways.”[42] To understand the essence of this Wilsonian conundrum and to gain insight into the nature of Wilson's installations, we must consider what unifies the artworks across various mediums associated with Wilson.

In his book Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer introduced the concept of play to understand the mode of being of artwork.[43] In this concept, the play’s subject is not the group of players or the audience but the play itself. The rules and regulations that prescribe how the playing field is filled determine the nature of the play. The play involves the creators, actors, and audience as a whole, all adhering to the rules of the play, whose “openness toward the spectator is part of the closedness of the play. The audience only completes what the play as such.”[44]

What is also significant here is that Gadamer refers to the process by which “human play comes to its true consummation in being art” as transformation into structure.[45] Here, “structure” refers to “ergon” – not just “energeia” in the Aristotelian sense – which means work or, if we like, an opera.[46] Gadamer argues that transformation into structure elevates reality into truth through mimesis, which he understands as the recognition of “more than is already familiar.”[47] Gadamer applied this conceptualization to various art forms including drama based on Aristotelian order, painting, music, and architecture.

Gadamer’s theory on the ontology of the artwork also serves as a common ground in illuminating the essence of postdramatic theatre, installation art, and other contemporary genres. Furthermore, based on Gadamer’s concept of play, we can compare the rules and regulations of the diverse genres Wilson uses. Undoubtedly, different rules may construct the plays of theatre pieces and installations of the same creator. However, if we identify the same structure in both genres within Wilson's work, we can also recognize the landscape quality in installations, regardless of the spectator's position.

Hans-Thies Lehmann discusses the new status of text in postdramatic theatre in his article "From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy.”[48] He suggests that the term textual landscape [Textlandshaft][49] should be used in this respect with which he refers to Gertrude Stein’s landscape drama and the various new ways of making theatre that are closely connected to the visual dimension of contemporary theatre productions. In his perspective, the stage can be viewed as a landscape that is closely linked to visual dramaturgy, a concept developed by Knut Ove Arntzen. Lehmann views visual dramaturgy as the counterpart to the textual landscape, representing the “other side” of it. He argues that it is not merely a visual practice (the Aristotelian “opsis”) that is separate from text; rather, it signifies an inherent connection to text, possessing its own spatial and architectural qualities, which Lehmann describes as postdramatic.

Arntzen states that visual dramaturgy emphasizes the blending of various expressive elements, drawing our attention to the German term “gleichberechtigt,”[50] This term suggests that textual and visual components can exist independently yet still interact meaningfully with one another. Arntzen points out that “equivalence” in English can convey both a sense of fusion and independent existence, the German word “gleichberechtigt /gleichgestellt” implies a deeper intermingling of expressive forms where each component retains its own identity while contributing to a more complex outcome. Arntzen distinguishes scenographic theatre[51] as one in which the scenographer is the sole author, without referring to a drama text, exemplified by Robert Wilson’s early works. However, visual dramaturgy can be applied to Wilson’s later works, created after his silent operas, in the phases of his oeuvre where he deconstructs language, moves from semiotics to semantics, and confronts the classics—to use Arthur Holmberg’s periodization.[52] 

Wilson learned how to build a piece in a gleichberechtigt way, with equal emphases on the visual and auditory elements, not only directly from Gertrude Stein’s landscape drama concept but also through the influence of John Cage and Merce Cunningham, who mediated Stein’s ideas to him. As mentioned, Wilson studied how to read Gertrude Stein’s text by listening to a recording. In an interview, the artist revealed that the American composer John Cage gave him this Stein recording.[53] Wilson recalled that watching Cage read “Lecture on Nothing” in the 1960s profoundly influenced him. Grateful after the performance, Wilson thanked Cage, and they talked about Stein as well. Wilson told the composer that he admired Stein’s writing but found it confusing. In response, Cage sent Wilson a recording of Stein reading her texts, which, as we saw, inspired Wilson's future stagings.[54] More importantly, after this encounter, the young Wilson saw a dance performance by the choreographer Merce Cunningham and John Cage. It was a shocking aesthetic experience for him, and it not only profoundly impacted his future working method but also inspired him to find his artistic tools to create worlds on stage based on equality.

What captured Wilson’s attention in the Cunningham-Cage piece was that the music was separated from the dance, and the acoustic part was only paired with the dance on the opening night of the production. This was a stark contrast to what Wilson had seen in Broadway theatres and opera. He realized that music had its own structure and laws, while the choreography was entirely different and created independently. It was also fascinating for Wilson that when these two elements were combined, something new emerged that could not be experienced when they were seen or heard separately. The connections between music and dance were discovered purely by chance in the Cunningham-Cage piece.[55] It is important to note that Wilson has never incorporated aleatoric techniques in his operas; he has always constructed his works with precision, timed in seconds. However, in his compositions, he consistently applies the equivalent-based rules and regulations in sound and vision that he learned from Stein, Cage and Cunningham. As he recalled regarding Einstein on the Beach:

In making Einstein, I thought about gestures and movements as something separate. And I thought about light again as something separate, then the décor, the environments, the painted drops, the furniture; and they all separate. And then you take all of these screens, visual images that are layered against each other and sometimes they don’t align either or sometimes they do.[56]

According to Arntzen, the scope of Visual Dramaturgy, and the technique of gleichberechtigt visual-aural composition can be widened beyond the field of theatre. For instance, Visual Dramaturgy can be employed to analyze non-theatrical performances, such as historical re-enactments or non-theatrical events that turn spectacular.[57] Theoretically, the concept of the landscape play can be transposed from the proscenium theatre’s black box to the white cube of the gallery space. Here, the spectator can enter the landscape of an installation.

Remarkably, the experience of entering a landscape is by no means new in the history of art, even though it first appeared in a fictive way. In 1763, Denis Diderot viewed the painting Landscape with Figures and Animals by Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg – who later became Garrick’s stage designer – at the Salon. Diderot’s enthusiastic critique described the composition as if he as beholder had entered the pastoral scene of the landscape.[58] The French philosopher later wrote several times about the experience of imaginative entry into vistas in his art critiques of landscape paintings. For instance, when contemplating the beauty of one of Vernet’s landscapes, he described the experience as follows: “The immobility of beings, the solitude of a place, its profound silence, all suspend time; time no longer exists, nothing measures it, man becomes as if eternal.”[59]

In his book Absorption and Theatricality, Michael Fried discusses Diderot’s fictional entry into the two-dimensional landscape as the “pastoral concept” of mid-eighteenth-century French painting. The American art historian interpreted this conceptualization as one of the “absorptive” strategies of the anti-Rococo era, which reinforced Diderot’s idea of the fourth wall and, at the same time, helped Fried support his own critical aversion towards theatricality. As well-known, for Fried, the theatrical sensibility not only endangered the purity of autonomous modernist artwork but was eminently the “negation of art.”[60]

Art critic and curator Robert Storr provided witty commentary on Fried’s critical remarks regarding minimalist art, which Fried referred to as “literalist art.” In Storr’s article on immersive installations titled “No Stage, No Actors, but It’s Theatre (and Arts),”[61] Storr points out that the assertions of Fried’s furious study on the new art of the 1960s were overall proper and, in contrast to Fried’s desire, beneficial to the emerging tendencies: “The insightfulness of his analysis is a happy by-product of the narrowness of his perspective. When formalist defenders of pure painting and sculpture named literalist art as the antithesis of all they held dear, they unexpectedly defined a broad new aesthetic of which installation has proven the most enduring and varied expression.”[62] In his essay, Storr distinguishes between the works of early “installation improvisers like Mr. Kaprow and his contemporaries” and the so-called “complete immersion environments.” In Storr’s view, the former pieces “alter the world we know rather than replace it with another”; meanwhile, the latter, immersive installations “strike out in another direction, shifting the focus from intervention in the here-and-now to aesthetically self-contained places apart.”[63] Storr includes the Golden Lion prize winner installation Memory/Loss by Robert Wilson in the latter group.

Noah Khoshbin, curator of Robert Wilson’s Watermill Collection and co-curator of several Wilson exhibitions in the past twenty years, points out that in many ways, Wilson uses the same approach in a museum space as in theatre.[64] According to Khoshbin, in a Wilson exhibition or an installation, the visitor enters as if walking on stage. In theatre, the viewer looks through the proscenium arch like a window, a door, or a portal. In Khoshbin’s view, the same applies to Wilson’s museum or gallery exhibitions. The very first consideration in designing an exhibition is determining where visitors will enter. This is crucial because it significantly influences the audience's experience as they embark on a journey through the exhibition. As he said,

[I]f Robert had the choice, there would only be one person allowed in at a time . . . no matter how large a space is, because that individual should be going on a journey. And to condense it to one word, you would say something like discovery. . . . Now, there's the frame of the door that you're entering in the gallery or museum . . . ; the works are then laid out in the same way as the elements in the theater.[65]

According to Khoshbin, the installations blend auditory experiences and visual elements, similar to Wilson’s theatre, particularly in how light is framed. This integration allows viewers to actively engage in framing and interpreting the artworks or sculptures on display. The artworks placed within the architectural setting, enter into a dialogue with one another, taking into account the unique characteristics of the space of the gallery.

This means that Robert Wilson's exhibitions and installations adhere to the same fundamental principles regarding their time-space structure as his theatrical pieces. Furthermore, not only do we find the same rules in Robert Wilson's works in the two fields, but they have also evolved reciprocally and simultaneously and even converged in the actual landscape of Haft Than Mountain in Shiraz in 1972. While some may classify the work I'm referring to as a 168-hour-long theatre piece, it can also be considered the proto-installation, or the ur-installation in the Wilson oeuvre: KA MOUNTAIN and GUARDenia Terrace: a story about a family and some people changing.

The central theme of this work was the journey of an old man, to the extent that each actor played an old man at least once during the production. Wilson created a megastructure with twenty-four one-hour-long segments each day and assigned themes to each twenty-four–hour period: birth, separation, childhood, puberty, marriage, burial, and death. The continuous transformation of the visual elements in this enormous megastructure presented on the seven hills of Shiraz landscape evoked the development of human culture within the metaphorical framework of individual life's growth. The days’ color spectrum progressed from black/violet through cool gray-lime and gray-green, to gray-brown, and finally white, bringing to mind also the passage of solar time. Artworks cited cultural history. Each day featured a different landmark: Stonehenge, an obelisk, the Parthenon, the Arc de Triomphe, a pagoda, and the New York skyline.[66]

One hundred core actors and hundreds of participants/audience members journeyed through the layered time and sky-high space of the landscape on Haft Than’s seven hills. As Laurence Shyer pointed out,

Wilson is not merely a manipulator of time and space, but an artist genuinely concerned with basic human issues and faith of man. The journey is a central motif in the plays and operas of Robert Wilson and in them we travel with all with humanity through time and history, from life to death from apocalypse to rebirth.[67] 

Despite the activities in Ka Mountain's megastructure, this work can be viewed as a proto- installation. The audience and players were visible from all angles, 360 degrees. More importantly, the frame, a constitutive part of every type of theatre,[68] disappeared: the viewer became immersed in the enclosed world of the work. The equal importance of the visual and auditory elements of the structure created an “audio-landscape”[69] similar to Wilson's theatre pieces.

In 1976, Wilson developed another compositional tool in his work, Spaceman, which became a crucial instrument in his installation art and theatre. It structured the viewer’s experience by measuring space according to Wilson's concept of portrait, still life, and landscape. The first version of this artwork, presented in New York City at the Kitchen in January 1976, was a hybrid work of art combining video installation and performance. Its second version, displayed in 1984 at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, was reduced to an installation in which previous human players were replaced by still figures.

This experimental work raised questions about the perception of human culture, and it was initially conceived by Robert Wilson and his artist collaborator, Ralph Hilton, with whom Wilson first worked in 1975 on the production of The $ Value of Man. The original impetus of the video installation went back to Wilson’s work with disabled people in the 1960s.[70]

In 1966–67, he worked at Goldwater Memorial Hospital. On his first day in the institution, he was taken into a ward with about fifty patients in iron lungs. The patients were lying in boxes supported by four legs, with only their heads protruding from the top. Each person had an artificial respirator, providing the necessary support for their breathing. As Wilson remembered: “My first impression was that this was the person of the future, that this was a spaceman. And no one could enter that space. That was his own space.”[71]  He later began collaborating with Hilton to create a series of videotapes that explored the concept of a spaceman. They decided to showcase this work in New York, initially envisioning it as an ongoing project. This original project was planned as a series of walls that resembled a library where Wilson and Hilton could catalog various images related to the idea of a spaceman. Finally, they slightly altered this original concept. As Wilson recalled in connection with the Spaceman installation:

“We divided the wall into three sections. And those three sections thought about the three traditional ways of looking at painting, which are portraits, still lives, and landscapes. And one could imagine that these are the three ways of measuring the space.”[72] 

Wilson often seeks assistance through gestures to clarify his concept of measuring space in terms of portrait, still life, and landscape. He indicates the size of a portrait by making a circular motion around his face and the scale of a still life by extending his arms, and he describes the landscape as if one steps back several blocks to view the horizon.[73]

A member of Wilson’s early performance group, the Byrd Hoffman School of Byrds, Cindy Lubar provided a description about the 1976 installation in her manuscript about Wilson’s and the Byrds’ activity in the 1970s.[74] According to her ekphrasis, visitors began their experience in a small entrance room with a “green thing” resembling the Loch Ness Monster. Its shiny skin reflected light from a plastic-draped TV screen marked “THERE,” with the well-known Wilson typograph from his 1974 theatre piece A Letter for Queen Victoria. The visitors then entered a rectangular main room featuring a tall, narrow performance space. Cushions lined the floor for seating. The space was divided into three sections: “Still Life,” “Landscape,” and “Portrait.”

In “Still Life,” four creatures lay beneath a pale green table lit by bluish-green light. In the “Landscape” section, Ralph Hilton, as a spaceman in a silver space suit, floated above the monitors, while Wilson relaxed by a tilted telephone pole and Sue Sheehy fished from a paint can. An eight-foot fluorescent light cast an amber glow over a sand-covered floor. In the “Portrait” section, Christopher Knowles portrayed an old man typing on a character generator as three men in white recited lines from a “missile script” illuminated by pink bulbs. Various video sequences were projected simultaneously in the three sections and grouped on video monitors into close-ups, medium shots, and full shots. Dialogue and sound effects enhanced the performance, creating an otherworldly atmosphere.[75] 

Even though the work lacked live performance in its 1984 revival due to Ralph Hilton’s death, the installation’s original structure remained the same with its three sections of “Portrait,” “Still Life,” and “Landscape.” Still in 1976, Wilson used the same compositional concept in an event at the Whitney Museum of Art, where he performed a piece, DIA LOG, with Christopher Knowles and Lucinda Childs. Here again, the stage space was divided into the same three sections and Knowles typings were also displayed in a connected exhibition.[76] 

These works foreshadowed the composition of Wilson’s groundbreaking opera Einstein on the Beach that he created with Philip Glass.  Wilson himself confirms it when he speaks about the opera: “I constructed the work like the three traditional ways of looking at painting which are the three different ways of measuring space, and that is in portraits, still lives and landscapes.”[77] Philip Glass revealed that although they wanted to avoid telling a story, naturally, they used different dramaturgical devices. For instance, the recurrence of the main pictorial motifs of the opera – Train, Trial, Field/Spaceship – “implied a kind of quasi-development.”[78] In this visual dramaturgy, the proportions of space played a crucial role. As Holmberg pointed out regarding Einstein on the Beach, the perception of depths for audience changed from close-up portraits in the Knee Plays (the Wilsonian pre-, and interludes), through mid-shot still lives in the Train and Trail scenes, to the spaceship scenes viewed as long-shot landscapes in the opera.[79]

It is important to note that with this concept of measuring space in these threefold categories, the original Wilsonian landscape concept does not disappear, it is enriched; the focus point of our gaze in it is directed by light and the changes in spatial proportions.

Additionally, during the Spaceman exhibition in Amsterdam, Wilson explained his compositional trichotomy by aligning traditional fine art genres – portrait, still life, and landscape – with camera shot types: “close-up, mid-range, and far-away.”[80] This indicates that his compositional categories not only refer to the classifications of painting and his distinctive approach to spatial measurement but also draw from the fundamental types of settings commonly used in film and television. We can add that his compositional practice widens the examples that Helga Finter collected under the umbrella term of the “camera eye of the post-dramatic theatre.”[81]

The space of his other installations and so-called museum interventions have been frequently structured along this trichotomy of the Wilsonian game. Museum interventions are artist-curated exhibitions working with an institution’s collection: extensions of artistic practice into the museum space. In Wilson, the interventions are not installations of artworks but works of installation art since the exhibition itself is the work, constituting an enclosed whole.[82] One of the clearest examples of how Robert Wilson adapted his compositional techniques to the gallery space was his 1993 show when he was invited to Rotterdam to guest-curate an exhibit based on the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum’s collection - after Harald Szeeman’s exhibition in 1989 and Peter Greenaway’s show in 1991.

During the exhibition Portrait, Still Life, Landscape, the arrangement of selected objects and the gallery lighting were designed to enhance visitors’ awareness of shifts in their perception. In the first room, a storage-like space full of vases, furniture, and sculptures, viewers were encouraged to examine the artwork closely, like portraits. The second gallery featured ten small, stage-like rooms visitors could not enter; they could only see the scenes from the small cabinets’ entrance. In this “Still Life” section of the exhibition, theatrical lighting highlighted one object and one painting like actors in each room.  In the third “Landscape” gallery, Degas’s sculpture of the Little Dancer among peaceful reptiles was placed in a vast, brightly lit space, limiting close viewing and allowing visitors to see the configuration of artworks only in relation to its surroundings. As Piet de Jonge, curator of Boymans Museum pointed out the central theme of the exhibition was this intentional shift in focus. He stated that Wilson not only playfully referenced classical painting genres through this arrangement but also the distance between the observer and the object was deliberately designed as “a distance to which the eye must adjust in the three different situations.”[83]

In this exhibition-scale installation, not only has the beholder’s position in space shifted, but also her consciousness of time: awareness of the objects’ historicity, the timeless juxtaposition of artworks, and Wilson’s spiritual, personal statement balanced each other in the sections of Portrait, Still Life, and Landscape. The lighting of the exhibition resembled one of Wilson’s most significant early theatre productions. As the artist said to de Jonge: “This idea of three separate spaces could be very much related to The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud. The first act on the beach, the beach in bright daylight. The second act in a Victorian drawing room, grey. And in the third act in a cave, darker and with animals. And in some ways, these three spaces [in the museum] are part of this continuum.”[84]

De Jonge linked the example of how light could create the dramaturgy of the Portrait, Still Life, Landscape exhibition to another Robert Wilson gallery show titled Robert Wilson Visions, held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1991. This earlier exhibition showcased the artist’s own artwork: drawings, objects, and furniture/sculptures. As de Jonge pointed out, “Wilson made a theatrical installation of his work”[85] at that exhibition. It was titled The Night Before the Day and was designed to take visitors on a journey through the passage of a day, like the Rotterdam show and the seven-day-long piece, KA MOUNTAIN. In Boston, the first room was bright and open, creating a sense of morning light. The second room, filled with Wilson's drawings, had a gray atmosphere, representing the afternoon. Finally, the third room was dark, evoking the feeling of night.[86] 

By examining additional representative museum works by Robert Wilson, we can now identify the type of time present in his installations. In 1991, Wilson’s first museum intervention was displayed at the Pompidou Center in Paris. In this exhibition titled Mr. Boyangles’ Memory, Og Son of Fire,” he created an excavation site of artworks at the foot of a volcano, arranging his artworks amidst the Pompidou Collection's pieces, complementing or conflicting relationships between the works. He built a corridor among the pieces for the viewer to journey through the installation.

The entrance was designed with a hanging uprooted tree, symbolizing the equal importance of the underground and above-ground worlds. Upon entering through the main door, visitors were greeted by a tranquil environment: a gently swaying curtain partially obstructed the view, and calming music played in the background. The main exhibition space resembled an uncovered excavation site, featuring scattered piles of earth and rocks, remnants of unidentifiable objects. Wilson’s furniture/sculptures were arranged throughout the room like found artifacts, with some pieces appearing partially buried. These works were displayed alongside pieces from Pompidou’s permanent collection.

A painted highway did run diagonally through the gallery space, and two-thirds of the way through, a large painted Tyrannosaurus skeleton hung on a scrim above Wilson’s Overture Chair from his piece KA MOUNTAIN and GUARDenia Terrace, which was set in a pool of water. The back wall displayed a canvas of a snow-capped volcano beginning to erupt referencing the last scene of KA MOUNTAIN and the artist Paul Thek’s pyramid. In front of it, the Salome Room installation included thrones for Herod, Herodias, John the Baptist, and Salome. Various video monitors were scattered throughout the exhibit and placed among the furniture and sculptures.

In 1995, in his installation H.G., Wilson created the precursor to immersive theatre productions. The title referred to H.G. Wells, the science fiction writer, whose novel Time Machine was one hundred years old at that time. This exhibition in London allowed one spectator at a time to engage in time travel within an abandoned Elizabethan prison. The building itself became the main feature of the work.[87] Robert Wilson dramatically lit the existing architecture to enhance the grids, columns, walls, and doorways. Each room was filled with unearthly tableaux and was accompanied by Hans-Peter Kuhn’s soundscape.

First, the audience members stepped into a striking Victorian dining room left untouched since the guests departed. Food was still on the table and the sound of a ticking clock filled the room. As one exited from this section, one passed a 100-year-old copy of “The Times” before descending into dark, expansive spaces. After this choreographed introduction, the audience was free to explore the other rooms of the building. Most tableaux were open for wandering, though a few were closed off.[88] Visitors were guided solely by sound and light as they navigated a disorienting network of chambers that evoked 1895. A landscape filled with hospital beds, a volley of golden arrows frozen above the ruins of an ancient temple, a pocket watch with an inscription, the sound of footsteps from above, and a mummy of a man lying on the floor all contributed to the sensation of being in a space that was full of time.

Wilson's quotation technique was redefined in his installation at Villa Stuck in Munich in 1997. The artist recreated the artworks and personal photos of the house’s original owner, Art Nouveau painter Franz Stuck, in three dimensions. Visitors could explore the life and times of Franz Stuck as they moved through the museum’s rooms. Additionally, Wilson revised the iconography of the Stations of the Cross in Oberammergau with his 14 Stations installation in 2000, placing the scenes in fourteen houses inspired by Shaker style, filling them with figures resembling local people and dense networks of new signs and allusions that provided a mystical experience rather than the traditional narrative of Via Crucis.

In 2013, the exhibition at the Louvre titled Living Rooms featured Wilson’s surroundings from The Watermill Center. He intervened Louvre’s collection not in the museum space but in his new artworks: he created video portraits of Lady Gaga based on the theme of death, recreating three paintings from the Louvre: the portrait of Mademoiselle Caroline Rivière by Ingres, Jacques-Louis David's The Death of Marat, and Andrea Solario's Head of Saint John the Baptist. In these Video Portraits, Wilson used light, color saturation, and technique of slow motion to re-create the original composition with Lady Gaga as protagonist.

Robert Wilson, in an interview in connection with how he structures his works, said that he saw “space as a horizontal line and time as a vertical line.”[89] As we can see now, the horizontal line of space unfolds in the arrangement of the installation’s landscape, as Wilson says, “in a way, if we think about it and look at them long enough, the mental spaces become mental landscapes.[90] But what is vertical time, and how do we encounter it in Wilson's installations?

In his interventions, Wilson disrupts the traditional rules of museum displays by challenging the norm of viewing artworks in their frames as independent worlds and reading the installation of the artworks as historical narrative. The sense of time for historical consciousness is horizontal, that is, linear: past events precede and determine the present. The vertical aspect of time in Wilson's installations can be described as “contemporaneous.” This contemporaneity involves two main elements: firstly, the simultaneity created by juxtaposing Wilson’s creations and the pieces of a museum collection, and secondly, the observer’s act of perceiving all components in the installation’s “here and now,” which brings out the true being of all the artworks in an absolute presence. This contemporary nature paradoxically includes its opposite, the heterochrony of diverse cultural layers. These layers, stemming from various visual and auditory elements of the works, are balanced within the installation and provide multiple associations for the viewer.

In her article exploring the relationship between performance, performativity, and memory, Mieke Bal shares her experience with James Coleman’s installation, Photograph.[91] She notes that as viewers immerse themselves in the visual and auditory elements of the installation, which trigger their personal associations, they begin to adopt the role of a performer. Referring to Lehmann’s text “From Logos to Landscape: Text in Contemporary Dramaturgy,” she points out what makes this experience operate: “Memory as stage director. This is what makes the viewer a performer. But the viewer can only be a performer if performance is taken, here, in the double theoretical sense. The viewer ‘plays’ the part scripted by the work, to the extent that he or she ‘acts,’ responding to the perlocutionary address of the work in the present of viewing.”[92]

Memory and free associations also play a crucial role in experiencing Wilson's immersive exhibitions. In his audio-landscape installations, he stages a closed world built from tableaux, music, hums, words, and other auditive fragments. In his most important installation, "Memory/Loss," Wilson explicitly thematized the question of memory as a performative act of the beholder.

In his essay “No Stage, No Actors, But It’s Theatre (and Art),” curator Robert Storr provided a captivating ekphrasis on the work; it is worth citing it in length:

You walk into a room as big as an indoor tennis court. The walls are brick; the floor is a cracked sheet of mud. At the far end of the dim interior, a grilled window gives out onto another brick wall bathed in blue light. Midway a blindfolded man, head bowed, is buried up to his shoulders in the mud. As you approach him, his lifeless features and uncanny immobility become apparent, heightening awareness of your own body and those of other, shadowy spectators. Out of nowhere a voice, interrupted by screams, recites T. S. Eliot’s “Wasteland.” You are left to mill about in an elegant, antique Bedlam.[93]

The installation was based on a letter Wilson received from Heiner Müller. In this letter, Müller described a Mongolian torture based on Tshinghis Aitmatov’s text, where a man’s hair was shaved, and the skin of a camel’s neck was tied to this man’s head. He was buried in the desert from the shoulders down, and he was experiencing an excruciating sensation while the camel’s skin on his head was drying. The man’s hair could not grow out only inward, resulting in memory loss.[94] This work, which also included an object from Tadeusz Kantor’s The Return of Odysseus, reflected that memory has always been a precondition of human act and continuity. As Heiner Müller wrote in his letter: “Without memory, there is no revolution.”

Claire Bishop categorizes installation types based on the viewer's experience. The first model involves psychologically absorptive, dreamlike environments. The second is phenomenological, the third is based on Freud’s libidinal withdrawal and subjective disintegration, and the fourth type considers the activated viewer as the political subject of the genre.[95] Based on Freud's Interpretation of Dreams, Bishop considers Ilja Kabakov’s concept of “Total Installation” as the representative example of the psychologically absorbing type.[96] Kabakov views the viewer as the main actor in his installations. He compares his work to theatre, portraying the installation artist as a director, while the installation immerses and absorbs the viewer, evoking personal memories and associations. Kabakov suggests that installation art is the latest dominant trend in artistic forms and should be perceived as a kaleidoscope of innumerable “paintings.”[97] According to Bishop, this type of art offers immersive qualities akin to absorptive painting[98] and overturns traditional perspective by providing multiple viewpoints.[99] We can add that Wilson’s installations share the total characteristics of Kabakov’s and even uniquely surpass them.

As we saw, the rules and regulations of the Wilsonian play are consistent in both his theatre and installation art. The only difference is the viewer's physical position within the play. In his immersive installations, the traditional division between the stage and the audience, marked by the proscenium arch, dissolves. Along the axis of the proscenium frame, they merge as a united space. This way, the viewer of the installation becomes the protagonist of the Wilsonian drama, which takes place in the museum locale.

In a Wilson installation or a museum intervention, the artist designs the space’s entrance as the turning point, where the viewer can step through ‘the fourth wall’ and, thus, leave it behind. From that moment on, much like in Wilson’s theatre, where figures such as Freud, Stalin, Einstein, and Kafka journey through time and space, in Wilson’s installations, viewers are invited to embark on a journey, regardless of whether this journey is set up in a single gallery or multiple rooms of a museum.

Noah Khoshbin adds that this experience arises from the interaction between the architecture of the gallery space and the displayed artworks, evoking unconscious or psychological responses from viewers. The main artistic aim is “to create an unfolding journey where [the viewers] see the relationships between different periods, cultures and mediums. These juxtapositions create a greater awareness of the space that they are in and the objects.  Then, a question would be posed, “What is this? What am I witnessing here?”rather than trying to present a statement. And that’s what you see on the stage, as well.”[100]

In Wilson’s installations, “memory as stage director” is the primary operational device (in a Mieke Balian sense) that ultimately makes the viewer the work’s performer. This performance oscillates between the internal and the external worlds, for Robert Wilson’s concept of human perception unites the two realms. According to him, “one hears and sees with both external and internal eyes and ears all the time.”[101]  In Wilson’s view, interior images blend with exterior images, resulting in a more unified perception of hearing and seeing through these “various screens.” For instance, the audience obviously experienced this during his twelve-hour play, The Life and Times of Joseph Stalin, when most of the viewers “saw” images on stage that were not in the staging but were their imaginations’ creatures.[102]

Wilson does not provide the spectators with a sharply articulated interpretation of the drama texts in his theatre. He intends to offer no single narrative or story in a play. Multiple stories exist in his stagings because everything is framed in his theatre, too, as a question: “What is it?” As he pointed out in a conversation with Umberto Eco, his responsibility as an artist both in his theatre and his visual art is to create and not to interpret; the artist allows the public the freedom to draw their own conclusion.[103]

In Robert Wilson’s installation art and museum interventions, the viewer-protagonist experiences a journey through the Wilsonian memory-filled vertical time and the artist’s dreamscapes.  She is invited to unite them with the inner visual and audio screens[104] of her memory and free associations. During this travel, the beholder encounters herself through the installation and, in a Platonic way, remembers a surplus she has never experienced before. As Gadamer says, “The work of art has its true being in the fact that it becomes an experience that changes the person who experiences it.”[105]