Milan Design Week 2025: Robert Wilson on the worth of design
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‘I’m 83 however have extra work than ever,’ Robert Wilson stated this January whereas at The Watermill Heart – the multivalent ‘laboratory for the humanities’, basis and residential base he established on the East Finish of Lengthy Island within the early Nineties. He was wrapping up his annual vacation – usually spent in Indonesia – and getting ready for an additional prolific season of opera, exhibition and style present productions, amongst a slew of particular tasks. ‘I’m first headed to Vilnius, Lithuania, the place the Nationwide Opera and Ballet Theatre has commissioned me to develop a brand new work with a younger composer,’ he stated.
Alongside the way in which, he additionally – most probably – made fast stops in Paris, Berlin, and Tokyo; cities which have fostered Wilson’s significantly avant-garde strategy to theatre-making for the reason that mid-Nineteen Seventies. He by no means stops travelling and is commonly discovered on a aircraft, laborious at work sketching new concepts with a easy graphite pencil and printer paper. Maybe most notable amongst the exhaustive raft of tasks deliberate for 2025 are the particularly ‘operatic’ installations and performances he’s conceiving for Salone del Cellular 2025 (8 to 13 April), the world’s pre-eminent furnishings truthful.
For his upcoming work, Mom, Wilson responds to and re-contextualises Michelangelo’s last, uncompleted work – the marble Rondanini Pietà (1564)
(Picture credit score: Salone Del Cellular)
‘Mom’: Robert Wilson’s set up for Salone del Cellular 2025
What unifies every thing for Wilson (or ‘Bob’ as he prefers to be recognized), is mild, a pressure that generally blends the chairs – and different designed objects – into their environment and at different intervals, makes them extra conspicuous. ‘So I can mild this cup, flip all of the lights out within the room, and proceed speaking,’ he demonstrated whereas at The Watermill Heart this January. ‘The sunshine will rapidly turn out to be an lively participant within the dialog.’
That very same philosophy underpins Mom, an set up the revered director is creating for this yr’s Salone del Cellular (see our Milan Design Week 2025 information). Situated in Milan’s monumental Castello Sforzesco, it responds to and re-contextualises Michelangelo’s last, uncompleted work – the marble Rondanini Pietà (1564) – with a 30-minute sequence of multi-directional mild and a rating by inimitable Estonian composer Arvo Pärt.
As Wilson places it: ‘I’m creating my very own imaginative and prescient of the artist’s unfinished masterpiece, torn between a sense of reverential awe and profound admiration. Prevailing over all, nonetheless, is a sense of serenity, of peace with oneself even within the face of the tragedy of demise, which for me has nothing to do with faith. It’s a common picture, a religious expertise that strikes one thing deep in us that wants no clarification.’
‘I’m creating my very own imaginative and prescient of the artist’s unfinished masterpiece, torn between a sense of reverential awe and profound admiration’
Robert Wilson
La Scala – the legendary Milan opera home that has hosted a lot of Wilson’s authentic productions and reinterpreted classics – will stage a one-night-only efficiency of The Night time Earlier than – Objects, Chairs, Opera / Milan. Inaugurating the 63rd version of the furnishings truthful, the piece includes 5 reimagined vignettes drawn from Wilson’s variations of La Traviata, Macbeth, Madame Butterfly, Norma and Othello. Every will function key designed objects – not props – from the unique productions. Michele Spotti will conduct the accompanying orchestra.
‘Each might be quite simple however highly effective stagings,’ Wilson notes. ‘We’ll do the La Scala efficiency as soon as, which is compelling in its personal sense. It’s like a taking pictures star.’ Although efficiency is, by nature, inherently temporal, what stays for Wilson are his sketches, pictures, different ephemera and naturally, the chairs.
Robert Wilson: Chairs, out there to pre-order at Waterstones, £48
Design as an implicit a part of Wilson’s observe
As a brand new ebook titled Robert Wilson: Chairs (to be printed in July 2025) elucidates, design has been a elementary aspect of what he’s completed prior to now 50 years. With early coaching in structure, he has lengthy handled his chairs and different furnishings not as secondary components, however as compositional instruments – serving to to anchor and materialise the ingredient of sunshine – Wilson’s most important instrument
These purpose-designed furnishings have additionally served to demarcate the passage of time, a conference Wilson has repeatedly pushed. Seminal early works like Einstein on the Seaside – developed in 1976 with famend composer Philip Glass – runs for over 5 hours. The KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE , his seven-day ‘out of doors occurring’ on the 1972 Shiraz Pageant in Iran, unfolded with out pause. In one in every of his first performs, The Life and Instances of Sigmund Freud (1969), a suspended steel mesh chair served as a ‘most important character’, slowly descending from the proscenium over three acts, touchdown on the bottom proper on cue.
Past the opera home, Wilson has collaborated with varied main producers and style homes on collectable design ideas and merchandise (together with for Wallpaper* Handmade in 2016) which have, more and more, forayed into the realm of furnishings. On the core of this exploration are his many chairs; ideas which can be as a lot for stage and exhibition as they’re for each life.
The ‘Queen Victoria Cafe Chair’, featured in Wilson’s upcoming monograph
(Picture credit score: Martien Mulder)
‘They’re by no means props,’ explains Wilson. ‘They’re lively members within the manufacturing.’ In his greater than 12 stagings of Madame Butterfly – Italian composer Giacomo Puccini’s early twentieth century masterpiece – the director has constantly deployed a ‘ready chair’. Evident behind a gauze scrim, the skinny wood sofa greets the viewers as they filter into the theatre. Very similar to Wilson himself, it quietly instructions consideration.
Nevertheless pared again, these skillfully made, one-off items usually carry the identify and the essence of a manufacturing’s central determine: Pierre Curie, the Little Prince, Dr. Faustus. The ‘Marina Abramović Rocking Chair’, crafted in maple and birch, took centre stage in The Life and Dying of Marina Abramović, Wilson’s 2011 biographical collaboration with the efficiency artist.
A brand new ebook surveying Wilson’s designs
‘A chair just isn’t an arbitrary kind,’ writes artwork historian and long-time Wilson collaborator Owen Laub in his essay Drawing the Stage Across the Website, a part of the Robert Wilson: Chairs monograph. ‘A chair is a base architectural intervention offering the physique with a whole set of directions. The structure of a chair can largely decide a physique’s stature, posture, gesture, and by extension, energy.’
The ebook, printed by August Editions in partnership with New York gallery Raisonné, additionally options vital texts by Trevor Fairbrother and Glenn Adamson, and presents 45 of Wilson’s designs in chronological order, photographed by Dutch-American artist Martien Mulder, her ethereal lens evoking the fashion of Wilson’s otherworldly stagings. The ebook debuted in late February to coincide with a devoted showcase at Raisonné, which additionally launched 50 restricted re-editions of the 1974 ‘Queen Victoria Café Chair’.
As Laub observes, the connection between object and setting in Wilson’s work is rarely incidental: ‘On stage, as sculpture performing the operate of furnishings, Wilson’s chairs complicate the relation between work and web site. For Wilson, the type of a chair considers its place throughout the composition of a scene. In flip, the scene consists to afford the chair a web site.’
The eating room at The Watermill Heart
(Picture credit score: Maria Baranova)
Whereas Wilson usually imbues his designs with private which means, their function throughout the bigger composition is simply as essential. The German composer Richard Wagner popularised the concept of the Gesamtkunstwerk – a complete murals – and noticed opera as its greatest manifestation – the final word coherence of all artwork varieties – the fullest translation of life – be it literature via dramaturgy or the visible arts via elaborate backdrops.
‘Maybe it took a theatre director to understand {that a} bodily chair and its personal insubstantial shadow may very well be given equal weight’
Glenn Adamson
‘Maybe it took a theatre director to understand {that a} bodily chair and its personal insubstantial shadow may very well be given equal weight,’ writes Glenn Adamson writes in his essay, The Shadow of A Doubt, printed within the ebook. ‘Usually, in design, the article is all – an finish in itself. In scenography, although, it’s all the time half of a bigger scenario.’
(Picture credit score: Maria Baranova)
Watermill: a complete art work in fixed movement
Lots of Wilson’s chairs and picked up items are rigorously positioned all through the 4 hectares (10 acres) of the Watermill Heart – an area that in some ways serves as a extra everlasting and naturally purposeful stage setting.
The ‘laboratory for the humanities’ runs a year-round residency programme and a global summer time programme, the place Wilson works alongside college students, collaborators and impartial artists as they develop new work below his steering.
(Picture credit score: Lovis Ostenrik)
The chairs – together with a broad array of works by Wilson’s friends – are in lively use all through the positioning, and for probably the most half, aren’t positioned behind vitrines as they is perhaps in a museum. This strategy displays Wilson’s perception that life is artwork, and artwork is life. British sculptor Henry Moore as soon as stated, ‘there is no retirement for an artist, it is your way of life so there is no finish to it’ – an ethos Wilson follows emphatically. His legacy in lots of respects, Watermill, as a lot as any opera, exhibition, or style present, is the proper manifestation of a complete murals – from its rigorously planted gardens to the meals served 3 times a day.
Wilson is all the time prepared to take guests across the Watermill himself, providing up humorous anecdotes about how a particular design or art work made its solution to the centre. Many items are sparsely organized in the principle double-height rehearsal room – as soon as a Western Union analysis facility, now remodeled to mirror the pared-back aesthetic of the postindustrial downtown Manhattan lofts the place Wilson lived and labored for a lot of the late twentieth century.
Wooden and stone objects displayed at The Watermill Heart
(Picture credit score: The Watermill Heart)
Right here, there are Frank Lloyd Wright home windows, Frank Gehry armchairs, and varied works featured within the Robert Wilson: Chairs monograph. A portrait of Andy Warhol in drag sits alongside salvaged gadgets discovered on the streets of New York. All are displayed with equal aplomb. A near-unfunctional Philippe Starck stool flanks a much more rational Shaker bench. In a single house, a methodically assembled Donald Judd desk performs properly with a rose-embedded lucite armchair by Japanese powerhouse and Memphis Milano member Shiro Kuramata. A portrait Italian multi-hyphenate Gio Ponti drew of his daughter just a few a long time earlier than hangs on the wall.
Within the basement, a large archive unfolds with illustrious gadgets comparable to Marlene Dietrich’s diamond-studded pumps, a superhero masks picked up at a market in Jakarta, prehistoric wood totems, and the ‘Freud’ lounger – a vital protagonist within the 1969 manufacturing The Life and Instances of Sigmund Freud, additionally featured prominently within the monograph. ‘The room we’re sitting in is a library with the Western Union archive and my very own, in addition to that of the native indigenous Shinnecock Nation that goes again 13,000 years,’ Wilson concluded whereas at The Watermill Heart earlier this yr, looking forward to one other busy yr forward.
Robert Wilson’s Mom might be on present in Milan throughout Salone del Cellular 2025 and till 18 Might, salonemilano.it/en
Verify our information to Milan Design Week 2025 for extra must-sees
