The Watermill Center Collection

Sunday, 22 July 2007 20:40

The Watermill Collection

The Watermill Collection is more than a static accumulation of artifacts. It is very much a living entity that is one of many artistic media in which Robert Wilson explores the relationship between the human body and the surrounding space. In this sense, collecting is an essential component of Wilson's artistic work. His work draws upon a vast and continuously expanding inventory comprising images, objects, texts, music, and gestures. In Wilson's world, all elements that are part of the total experience have similar weight. Foreground and background, down to the smallest detail, don't compete with one another but form a synchronous experiential field of infinite richness. Much of the material for this tapestry of stimuli is drawn from Wilson's intense interaction with his collection.

Robert Wilson started collecting while still in his teens. Over the past fifty years, the collection has grown to currently about 8,000 pieces and still expands at a rate of about 300 pieces every year. Based on Wilson's vision, it is highly personal and eclectic, ranging widely across all continents and from the Stone Age to the present. The collection contains many museum-quality pieces, especially from various Indonesian cultures, and by contemporary artists such as Paul Thek, Donald Judd, Bruce Nauman, Agnes Martin, and Richard Serra. The collection also includes one of the largest privately held collections of chairs by important designers like Carlo Bugatti, Gerrit Rietveldt, Charles Eames, Gio Ponti, Shiro Kuramata, as well as Robert Wilson's original designs. However, its main strength lies in the careful juxtaposition of very different objects, emphatically transcending the distinction between high and low culture, between art and the everyday. Every single work derives its significance through its dialogue with other objects in a carefully controlled arrangement.

Currently installed in Wilson's studio in lower Manhattan, an industrial loft overlooking the Hudson River, the collection will eventually be transferred to the Watermill Center. The collection will be an important thread in the fabric of life at the Center. For participants in the Center's programs, it will be a daily challenge and inspiration as well as a chance to study forms of creative expression directly at their source, in close physical proximity to the artworks.

Visit The Watermill Center at : http://www.watermillcenter.org/

Watermill, NY - The Watermill Center is located on a wooded six-acre site in the Hamptons, Long Island, two hours from New York City. The site includes a former Western Union factory building, where the fax machine was first invented. Robert Wilson has designed and developed the facility at Watermill gradually since he acquired the property in 1992. Many aspects of the master plan were realized in collaboration with participants of the Summer Program. Both the building and the landscaped Watermill Center grounds are characterized by the careful arrangement and integration of natural and man-made components. These features bear the imprint of Robert Wilson's aesthetic ideals and shape the atmosphere of the site.