Oral history interview with Robert Whitman, 2015

Biographical Note

Robert Whitman was born in New York, NY. A visual artist, he worked with other artists to create Happenings on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1960s. Whitman met Robert Rauschenberg around 1957 and struck up an enduring friendship and artistic collaboration. Along with Billy Klüver and Rauschenberg, he was one of ten artists to make performance art for 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering in 1966. Whitman continues to work with performance and the moving image. His recent Swim (2015) was a multisensory experience designed for both blind and sighted audiences

Scope and Contents

Whitman describes his schooling and early work at Rutgers and then his move to New York. He recalls seeing Rauschenberg's Monogram at the Jewish Museum in 1957 and in Rauschenberg and Johns's studio on Front Street the same year. He discusses his first show in 1959 at the Hansa Gallery, and his work with the Reuben Gallery the following year. He discusses seeing Paul Taylor's collaboration with Rauschenberg titled Seven New Dances and provides context on the performance art scene in the 1960s, recalling events at Yoko Ono's loft and Steve Paxton's organization of the First New York Theater Rally. He also discusses his reaction to Rauschenberg's Linoleum and Paxton's Physical Things, which he saw while participating in the NOW Festival in Washington, DC in 1965. He recalls the (unrealized) collaboration with Pontus Hultén and the Moderna Museet in Sweden that led to the inclusion of a significant amount of work by American artists into the Moderna’s collection, as well as the transformation of this project into 9 Evenings. He recalls work from 9 Evenings by John Cage, David Tudor, and describes Rauschenberg’s Open Score in detail. Whitman describes the three iterations of his piece Two Holes of Water, which was performed as part of 9 Evenings

Subjects

• Abstract expressionism--20th century--United States.
• Art and technology--Exhibitions.
• Artistic collaboration.
• Artists--Interviews.
• Interviews.
• Klüver, Billy, 1927-2004.
• Lower East Side (New York, N.Y.)
• Multimedia (Art)--Exhibitions.
• Multimedia installations (Art)
• Nicifero, Alessandra, 1968- interviewer.
• Oral histories (literary works)
• Rauschenberg, Robert, 1925-2008.
• Rutgers University.
• Whitman, Robert, 1935---Interviews.

Access Conditions

Copyright by the Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York and Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, 2014