Product Details

• Actors: Robert Whitman, Jim Dine, Lucas Samaras, Claes Oldenburg, Simone Forti
• Directors: Robert Whitman, Julie Martin
• Format: Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Region: All Regions
• Number of discs: 1
• Rated: G (General Audience)
• Studio: ArtPix
• DVD Release Date: March 3, 2003
• Run Time: 156 minutes
• ASIN: 0966801040
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #275,739 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Review

Review 1:   For more than fifty years, Robert Whitman has been making theater pieces that verge on alchemy.  In these works, everyday objects take on uncanny properties, as in Prune Flat, (1965) in which a single lightbulb descends from above, its brightness washing out the piece’s projected 16 mm footage and restoring three dimensionality to the world onstage.  In the 1960s, when many artists sought to escape metaphor and illusion, Whitman embraced them, even using stage-show tricks – mirrors, transparent scrims, shadow play and moving props – that hark back to vaudevilee and magic lanterns.  Whitman’s use of media technologies has always been in the service  of something at once more grounded and more dreamlike.  His images are fleeting and evanescent, not totalizing; his aesthetic emphatically tactile.  Whitman is fascinated by events that can never be grasped in their entirety but may be experienced intensely from particular points of view -  a preoccupation evident in American Moon (1060) where he distributed audience members into partitioned “tunnels”.  Whitman uses such devices to layer different times and places, exploring an experiential world that is always occurring both here and somewhere else.

 

Source 1:  Liz Kotz/ Introduction of 1000 Words by Robert Whitman/ Artforum/ April 2011

 

Product Description

Robert Whitman created some of the earliest and most important performance works of the 1960s.  In his performances, the poetic and often surprising interaction of film, lights, sound, live performers, props and objects that take on a a life of their own create a dense visual, non-narrative dramatic structure. Included are three of the most important seminal early works by Whitman including  The American Moon (1960), Flower (1963) and a complete re-staging of  Prune Flat (1965).  Short documentaries accompany the first two notational films and a interview with the artist is featured after Prune Flat, considered one of the most experimental avant garde performances of the 60s.   A bonus video is included of Whitman’s 2002 work titled Ghost with notes by the curator, Lynne Cooke, and by the gallerist, Arne Glimcher.

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