Performance Art Valhalla
The first opera I ever saw was the entire “Ring,” which lasts some 15 hours over four days. This was the 1980 Centennial Ring, or Jahrhundertring, marking 100 years since the world premiere of the cycle, which opened the newly built Festspielhaus in 1876.
I was fresh out of grad school, living in New York. I was the “date” of Robert Wilson, the then-38-year-old, world-renowned avant-garde theater artist-director. He was invited by the Wagner family—they wanted him to direct the next “Ring.” Barely seven weeks earlier, I had been asked to audition for Wilson, winning a small part in his “DiaLog/Curious George” production, which opened on a Lincoln Center stage on June 24, 1980, my 25th birthday. We had only recently met, but he brought me along to Bayreuth.
The intermission included dinner al fresco among the formally attired cultural elite. On the first day, while Wilson was in meetings with the Wagner family, I enjoyed a private tour of the Festspielhaus. Pierre Boulez was conducting, and Patrice Chéreau directed. His radical modern interpretation, set in the Industrial Revolution, met with outrage at its premiere, but for the final performance of its five-year run, the standing ovation lasted 45 minutes. It’s now considered one of the most legendary “Ring” productions ever.
My Rutgers professors had compared my art performance tableaus to an international experimental theater artist and director I had never heard of. They taught me about his famous and controversial “Einstein on the Beach,” a five-hour minimalist and experimental opera scored by Philip Glass and directed and visualized by Robert Wilson. Many in the audience walked out on its opening night at the Met Opera in November 1976. Lucinda Childs and the young, lesser-known Andy de Groat each contributed movement. During my last year at Rutgers, I discovered that Andy would be performing at The Kitchen, one of New York’s oldest experimental art and performance spaces, in its location at 484 Broome Street in SoHo.
De Groat’s “Fan Dance” was ravishing—beauty in a shape I’d never seen yet somehow always known. The dancers simply walked forward and back, stopping and starting in counted numerical patterns to minimalist music. This was punctuated by turns and arm movements, as the dancers opened, closed, and fluttered Japanese paper fans. Exquisitely elegant and straightforward, this dance was brand new. I immediately signed up for a dance workshop with Andy and was won over by his ingenious way of creating beauty from everyday pedestrian movement. Anyone could do it; the system was so democratic. Soon, I was making counted “walking drawings” for my assignments in painter Leon Golub’s drawing class, enlisting fellow grad students as performers.
Enter Stage Left
I met Garry Reigenborn at the Kitchen workshop; he was one of Andy’s dancers, also a choreographer, and Andy’s lover. Later, I learned that Andy had been Robert Wilson’s lover. Garry, like Andy, danced with Lucinda Childs’s company and had performed with Merce Cunningham. (Garry was also a teacher of the Cunningham technique, one of the most difficult in the modern repertoire.) Soon after graduating, I ran into Garry at an East Village gay bar; we exchanged numbers. A few days later, he called.
“Bradley, I’m wondering if you could do me a favor? I was supposed to do it myself, but I must put a dance on a company in Chicago that week,” he said. “Could you possibly consider replacing me in a Robert Wilson piece scheduled to premiere at Lincoln Center later this month? I know, I know, it’s last-minute.”
I remember Garry’s phrasing distinctly: “put a dance on a company in Chicago.”
“The role would only involve simple movement, resembling a shadow figure or Kuroko in Kabuki theater,” he continued. “You will move set pieces and props in a precise and stylized manner. I know you’d be great at it, and I’m sure Bob will love you.”
BOB!
“Oh, let me check my calendar,” I said calmly, silently jumping and screaming on my end of the phone, attached to it, as we were in those days, by a coil.
A few days later, I entered a loft space between the Bowery and Lafayette Street, where Robert Wilson was in early rehearsal. After some simple movement instructions, I got the job. About three and a half weeks later, I opened at Lincoln Center Mitzi E. Newhouse Theatre in “DiaLog/Curious George” by Robert Wilson and Christopher Knowles.
During rehearsals, I hung back in the upper rungs, observing Wilson stage the piece. In truth, I had little to do as one of the Kabuki-esque figures dressed in black. I brought props and set pieces on and offstage or moved them for the two lead actors, Wilson as the Man with the Yellow Hat and Christopher Knowles as the monkey named George.
I couldn’t believe Wilson’s level of perfectionism. It confirmed my own meticulousness, which others of my generation didn’t embrace. Immediately, I understood his use of light as object and character—floating beams, a single point of light. I had already used scrims in my work for their ability to go from opaque to transparent. It was his side lighting from the wings that created the magic. No messy spillage and shadows. If there was light overhead, it was so narrowly focused to precisely match its subject.
I’ll never forget his tantrum when lighting designer Beverly Emmons could not perfect the scrim gradation to his standards, his walking off the set in a rage, the sound of something being thrown, then shattering. Months later, in private, he took credit for her lighting, saying he had taught her everything she knew. He would also claim credit for launching Philip Glass’s career with “Einstein.” (Christof Belka, the executive director RW Work, Ltd., which manages Wilson’s works, told VAN in a statement, “The stage manager of that production does not remember this specific incident. Robert Wilson and Beverly Emmons worked together on several other productions after ‘DiaLog/Curious George’… and remained great friends until late in life.”)
While working on lighting cues or directing Knowles alone on stage, Wilson would examine his work from every angle and distance, moving through the semicircular bleacher seating in the theater. He soon noticed me observing on a high rung in the dark and began asking for my opinions, even bringing me a drink or removing his own jacket to place over my shoulders when he saw me shivering from the air conditioning. I realized I had been singled out when he invited me to lunch with him and Knowles during a break in one of the rehearsals.
Wilson discovered Knowles when someone gave him a tape of the 13-year-old teenager’s recorded poetry. A poet and painter with savant abilities, he could see complex patterns—numbers, letters—as images in his mind, then type them onto paper as drawings from start to finish, as though preordained. He could identify patterns at a glance. Knowles was 20 at the time of “Curious George” and remained every bit the curious, bright child whom Bob could make laugh.
The Loft
Soon, Bob invited me to his loft on Vestry and West Streets in Tribeca. It was painted pure white and minimalist, save for a collection of beautiful small antiquities in a museum case. He had the floor painted white every year, whether it needed it or not. Stand-alone walls in the high-ceilinged loft appeared to float as they divided airy space overlooking the Hudson River.
I was shown the bedroom area, and the contents of a drawer in a low metal medical cabinet, sandblasted back to silver beside the bed. Poppers, dildos, an anal chain, and long, thin glass and metal tools that I learned were urethral probes.
When I refused insertion of any kind, he complained that, until I let go and gave myself over to him—until I trusted him—he could never create a piece for me.
Instead, I let him fumble over my body. There was some kissing and sucking, and he positioned my limbs just so. He liked directing me from across the room, posing my naked body like a prop in the dark, precisely to his specifications: on the floor, on a chair, or once precariously atop a tall bureau while he shone a narrow focused flashlight like a pin spot on my mouth, or where my jaw met my neck, or from my neck to shoulder, or where my pec met my armpit, or on my cock. The coke, weed, and poppers worked against each other as he tried to satisfy himself.
Make no mistake, I volunteered for it. I stayed. The experience confirmed what I’d already suspected: that my looks would eclipse my talent in New York even as they opened doors. The conditions were set long before Wilson by a cruel and narcissistic mother who treated my beauty as her possession and the price of her love. A question I’d pose to myself for years after: Could I forgive those who accepted my looks as currency for admission and, more significantly, forgive myself for brokering the exchange in the first place?
(“I am not aware of any contemporaneous documentation that would allow me to assess the claim” of this encounter, Belka told VAN. “I am likewise not aware of any evidence, either in the archival record or from conversations with longtime collaborators, suggesting that Robert Wilson conditioned casting, artistic opportunities, or professional advancement on sexual relationships.”)
I couldn’t believe this world-famous “genius” was interested in me—though I also guessed I wasn’t the only pretty boy he was involved with. I had left New Orleans for New York to become a famous artist, and quickly I found myself in Wilson’s world. I wanted to stay in it, so I suppressed the part of not finding him physically or sexually attractive. “I don’t want him,” I wrote in my journal later that year, “yet I’m afraid to lose him.”
I suspect he knew this, but it didn’t seem to matter in the least. He also knew I was the type of young man used to being objectified, and that part of me got off on it. Or I simply believed it was my obligation to reimburse an artful seduction and then deal with the consequences. It was an attempt, perhaps, to get that inevitable part of the negotiation out of the way. But then, once my physical attentions and attributes had someone in thrall, I’d become frustrated and offended that the rest of me wasn’t of interest—my mind, my work. This would become a lifelong source of resentment and bitterness.
Choosing to be a performance artist, using my body as the instrument of my work, seemed, then, the logical solution. It’s no wonder, though, that I later developed a phobia of performing on stage and ultimately chose the isolation of a studio artist, making objects to be viewed apart from the body that made them.
The Singer and the Collector
It would start with a call, out of the blue, often with instructions: “Be dressed up and have an overnight bag ready.”
I lived the starving-artist life in a top-floor East Village three-room tenement walk-up, the classic pre-renovated kind, with a toilet closet in the hall and a tiny bathtub in the kitchen next to the only sink. I had just graduated with an MFA in Fine Art with a concentration in performance and film and was waiting tables and performing in New York’s downtown clubs and alternative spaces, primarily centered in this cheap, dirty, rough, exciting neighborhood. It was the first year of what would become the infamous ’80s East Village art scene, probably the final expression of bohemia and the avant-garde in the U.S. before capitalism’s mutation into neoliberalism.
The limo picked me up at my place on East Tenth near Avenue A. The chauffeur, visibly nervous about standing outside in this part of town, held my door open. We were off to see the American soprano Jessye Norman perform a recital in Philadelphia. We went the whole way by limousine. We took her to dinner afterward, just the three of us. Bob was courting her, probably for his 1982 work “Great Day in the Morning.” In performance, she stood like a mountain with a voice commensurate to her majesty, her chiseled head as though already memorialized in bronze. I think it was her stillness that Wilson loved most. I have no memory of what I said or what was said to me by the great Jessye Norman that night, but she treated this awed nobody politely.
Another limo ride took us all the way to East Hampton, New York, near the tip of Long Island. The first stop was to see a renowned art collector, one of Bob’s most loyal patrons. On the way, he lectured me about my “silly” Marxist politics, my ideas about ethical purity, why they were ultimately meaningless if I couldn’t coax money out of the rich for my work. A young idealist, I was shocked and disputatious. There was never a shortage of enthralled wealthy people around Robert Wilson. I had ample opportunity to see him in action, courting and beguiling them. He became a different person, often acting like a child, feigning helplessness, as though he were incapable of tying his own shoe. This he acted out in his best Texas drawl, all flattery and high-pitched howls. Later, in private, he would deride many of them. In hindsight, my future inability (refusal?) to operate in this manner would indeed limit my success as an artist, for better or worse. “Don’t be afraid to court a little,” was a line that stuck out in my journal.
(“I have no evidence supporting that characterization” of Wilson’s relationships with donors, Belka said. “To the contrary, many of Robert Wilson’s relationships with supporters and donors endured for years or even decades, which would seem inconsistent with such a portrayal.”)
I don’t believe he had a left-leaning political bone in his body. He had what seemed a recalcitrant neutrality with shades of the conformist. Wilson talked about our country needing a culture czar who could issue aesthetic diktats on behalf of an ignorant public who didn’t know what was best for them. He was interested only in his vision and absolute aesthetic control. His work is spectacularly gorgeous in its flawlessness; it is also hermetically sealed. Some considered his work aesthetically fascistic. He claimed there was great freedom within limitation, a claim I have come to believe can be true. He placed extreme limits on his actors, choreographing and directing their every move, down to a pinky raised, an eyebrow arched, or a single breath taken.
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The limo pulled up at the Christophe de Menil estate in Amagansett in time for lunch. Christophe was a daughter of John and Dominique de Menil, who made their fortune in oil-drilling equipment and were considered the “Medicis of Modern Art.” Christophe continued the family tradition of collecting and supporting dance and performance, especially Bob’s work, for which she also designed costumes. Much of the family’s vast art collection is now housed at the Menil Collection, the museum in Houston designed by Renzo Piano. I had never seen a private home filled with so much art, and every single piece by someone I had studied in the then-contemporary art canon—Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, etc. (All white men, of course.)
Wilson told me, standing in front of the Barnett Newman painting, that he had four significant influences: Newman, de Kooning, the singer Joe Cocker, and the choreographer George Balanchine. Newman’s minimalist sense of proportion—all about the placement and texture of that vertical line; de Kooning, a hero we shared—those early wild and gestural abstract expressionist or “action paintings”; Cocker—his fearless vocals and spastic body movements, which Bob appropriated into some of his performances; and finally, the great Balanchine—his pure sense of space, of pattern and line. Bob would later take me to the New York City Ballet, where he showed me that from the cheap seats, you could observe the patterns, the logic, and organization of Balanchine’s work.
After lunch with Christophe, the limo took us to another wealthy art collector’s summer estate, empty of its owners, where we stayed for a couple of days. We had dinner in one of the cottages with a New York socialite whose name I have forgotten. There, I had my first leg of lamb and thought I had died and gone to heaven. Other guests included the great Romanian American illustrator, Saul Steinberg, known for his cartoons in The New Yorker, especially the legendary “View of the World from 9th Avenue” cover. The American artist Larry Rivers, the godfather of pop art, was there with his date, a woman, even though Bob later informed me he was a “big queen.” In fact, Rivers had had ongoing relationships with women and several children. He was also known for being the longtime lover of one of my all-time favorite poets, Frank O’Hara, who in 1966 was struck by a jeep on a Fire Island beach and died later that night.
That night after dinner, back in the main house, Bob raided the wine cellar and came up with the dustiest, most expensive bottle of champagne I’d ever drunk. Then we swam naked in the starlit pool.
de Kooning Yellow
The next evening became one of the most memorable of my life. We went to Willem de Kooning’s house for dinner. We arrived late—to my horror, not Bob’s.
De Kooning, who had the whitest hair and most translucent, icy blue eyes I’d ever seen, greeted us at the door. After introductions were made, he went back to his TV room alone. Bob and I were led to the kitchen. We had missed dinner! Elaine de Kooning had to cook what she had saved for us: swordfish on their massive restaurant stove. There was one other person there, the prominent New York socialite.
Elaine and Willem’s legendary open relationship was exacerbated by Willem’s alcoholism. After a long separation, Elaine had recently returned to care for Willem when he had finally stopped drinking and began to decline. This was 17 years before his death, and he was still deep into his painting.
After we ate, Bob and I left the two women in the kitchen and made our way to the couch, sitting on either side of the great, saintly Willem, and started watching TV with him. The latest Noguchi lamps had been sent to the de Koonings by the socialite, I believe, and were set about the modernist interior. The socialite noticed in polite disgust that someone had put yellow bulbs “of all things” into the pristine paper-white, many-shaped lanterns. Suddenly, the two women were making a fuss, finding white bulbs to replace the yellow ones and restoring the lamps to their colorless, monochrome splendor. The socialite and Elaine soon appeared, holding the just-removed yellow bulbs, and stood between us and the TV screen.
The socialite: “Dear-dear! Yellow bulbs in the white Noguchi’s, Bill?”
“No-no-no, dear!” she continued. “Only white bulbs are meant for the Noguchi lamps. Look how much better they look!”
During his reprimand, de Kooning tried in vain to turn off the too-loud TV with his remote but couldn’t because the women were blocking the beam.
The moment they moved away, the TV popped off—too late.
Loud silence…
Willem, sadly but sweetly, to Bob and me: “I liked the yellow.”
I spied a mess of painting and drawing going on in his famous studio. I asked de Kooning if I could have the privilege of visiting it, even though Wilson had said de Kooning’s paintings were boring now because he’d stopped drinking. After gushing something about him being my hero, he let me roam alone through the piles and splatter. Scribbles and sketches were everywhere. I touched, handled, even stepped on them. A large canvas was in progress on his easel.
Oddly, what impressed me most was how he worked, and the layout of things: The high ship-bow balcony above the studio for viewing the painting from afar. The visibly worn spots on the protective paper-covered floor, each in relation to the canvas being worked on. The spot close to and just right of the center of the large painting, where he applied brush to canvas, hung on his retractable easel that could drop the painting below floor level, so he could paint the top. The spot left of that, where he mixed paints at his massive worktable, with its own topography and architecture of painting histories. Another spot, at mid-distance, several yards from the canvas, where he stood between passages to consider where the image was heading. The worn paper spot further back still, directly opposite the painting on the other side of the studio, at the foot of his heavy Dutch rocking chair with wide, flat, paint-stained arms. Finally—the spot for relaxed contemplation, with a paint-stained coffee mug resting on the small table separating his chair from the other like-chair to his right, with clean arms and no worn spot at its foot: the guest’s chair, the art dealer’s chair, Elaine’s chair.
I sat in his chair, touched its arms of still-wet paint, looked at what he saw, then walked the runway between his chair and his painting, standing in all his spots.
In 2012, 15 years after de Kooning’s death, I saw the Museum of Modern Art’s long-overdue “de Kooning: A Retrospective” exhibition. As I entered the last room, I stood before the wall with three of the late paintings, circa early 1980s, looking for the painting I may have stood before the night I roamed de Kooning’s studio in Springs, Long Island, alone. Many of the late paintings were concerned with a dominant warm chrome-yellow color within a white expanse. I remembered my evening spent with him and Bob sitting in front of the television. He liked the yellow.
The Changed Poet
Back in the city, I met another of Bob Wilson’s favorites, someone for whom I have warm and fond memories. Like de Kooning, Edward Denby had brilliant white hair and piercing blue eyes. He was 78 at the time, best known as a dance critic for the New York Herald Tribune, and was a poet and one-time modern dancer himself. Denby had collaborated with Aaron Copland and Orson Welles, knew Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Paul Bowles, and Virgil Thompson. He even did opium with Jean Cocteau and was the longtime lover of the Swiss American photographer Rudy Burckhardt.
But I didn’t know any of this then. Edwin was just a sensitive elderly gentleman poet who saw me that evening. Bob and I picked him up at his loft at 145 West 21st Street and took him out for dinner at a restaurant on the ground floor of the block-long London Terrace apartment complex on West 23rd Street. Denby saw me, even in the shadow of the great Robert Wilson. He addressed me directly, included me in every aspect of our conversation, and appeared genuinely interested in what I did and had to say. For me, poetry has always been the purest art form. Denby was a living manifestation of a life devoted to that purity.
Wilson loved him; that was clear. Years before, Denby had written a glowing review of one of his pieces. At the restaurant, when Bob had excused himself for the bathroom, Edwin asked me how well I knew Bob’s work. I said I hadn’t actually seen any of it but had recently been in one of his productions. He then told me something I will never forget.
“The first piece of his I saw was ‘Deafman Glance,’” Edwin said. “I hated it. I was going to walk out, but something made me stay longer. Suddenly, I realized I loved it, not because it affirmed my established tastes but because it changed them. It changed me.”
Paris to Bayreuth
It was in August of that first summer after graduate school, after the Lincoln Center opening, and after the Hamptons that Robert Wilson invited me to join him in Bayreuth. On the way to the airport, Bob had the limo stop at an address on East Tenth Street, a couple of blocks from my apartment on the same street, to pick up a supply of cocaine. (“I do not have sufficient information to comment on the extent of Robert Wilson’s drug use in or around 1980,” Belka said.) Back in the limo, after a few toots, Bob hurriedly hid the bagged powder in his toiletry bag. Later in Paris, he discovered his cologne had opened and mixed with the unsealed cocaine. He simply left it out to dry; Eau Sauvage Cocaïne became the scent of the trip.
We arrived at Wilson’s rented Paris apartment, where I lay back to rest on an unusual chaise. Wilson identified it as a Thonet and called it Freud’s couch. Freud and Thonet were contemporaries in fin-de-siècle Vienna, but I don’t believe it went any further than that. A spectacularly gorgeous blonde “straight” French actor and his equally stunning redheaded girlfriend started hanging around after our arrival. Being around them was like dying and waking up in heaven as imagined by Godard. Soon it became clear that I rivaled the blond for Bob’s attentions, and he tortured me for it. He made sure I saw his cock every chance he got, the most memorable time when I went to the toilet for a piss. He barged in on me because he “couldn’t wait,” then pulled his dick out and pissed in the sink next to me, where I’d wash my hands and smell him. He made sure his body was turned so I could see everything, while he, with a sexy smirk, stared at my junk and engaged me in conversation. He then insisted on following me into the bedroom and watched me undress and dress for a mysterious dinner party we were about to attend, finally helping me on with a brand-new Brooks Brothers white linen dinner jacket that Wilson bought me especially for the trip. By then, the blond had accomplished what he had set out to do—make me desire him more than anyone else, then deny me.
The secret elite gathering had been arranged so Wilson could reunite with a former patron from Iran named Bijan Saffari. The dinner took place in one of those spacious and elegant apartments like you’d see in a French film—candlelit, with high ceilings, decorative moldings, and glass-paned doors opening onto balconies. The lavish party included about 15 people, just two of whom were women: The lovely Benedicte Pesle, considered the ambassador of American culture to France, and the beautiful redheaded girlfriend of the sink-pissing blond actor.
Saffari had just “crawled” out of Iran, as Bob put it, after the Islamic Revolution of 1979 and was hiding in Paris—he had gotten married in the country’s first (though unofficial) gay wedding. In 1972, in an effort to westernize culture in Iran, the Shiraz-Persepolis Festival of the Arts in Iran had funded Wilson’s “KA MOUNTAIN AND GUARDenia TERRACE: a story about a family and some people changing”—a seven-day, 168-hour-long performance on seven hills of a mountaintop in Iran with 700 participants, including the military. The cost was astronomical. Wilson had been harshly criticized for participating in what was perceived as an extravagance of the Shah, at a time when the left, the liberal press, and many New York artists were protesting U.S. support of the Shah’s oppressive and brutal regime—the result of a 1953 coup orchestrated by the U.S. and the UK. What little I knew of this then came from my ardent, if not fully understood, reading of The Nation. I was a newly minted, innocent radical queer Marxist performance artist from the conservative suburbs of New Orleans.
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The next day, Benedicte Pesle drove us to Bayreuth. Pesle helped establish Wilson’s work in Europe when U.S. audiences barely knew his name and may have been the person brokering a future Bayreuth gig.
“Der Ring des Nibelungen” at Bayreuth is probably the most extreme initiation into opera anyone can imagine. And it was astonishing. Still, after listening and watching night after night on hard wooden seats in the summer with no air-conditioning, the dinner breaks below the stars were a welcome reprieve.
For me, much of the work’s impact—beyond the excellence of the music and voices and the sheer length and scale of the cycle—had to do with the visual design by Patrice Chéreau. Bob deconstructed it over frozen vodkas into the wee hours at the hotel bar. Chéreau’s radical 19th-century setting of the Industrial Revolution placed the “Ring” back into Wagner’s time. His retro-futurist world of giant metal machines and dams, set against mythic landscapes without organic matter, was a Marxist-inspired, dystopian take on man’s dominance over nature.
It was excruciatingly elegant, which was all Bob wanted to discuss: the staging’s formal attributes, its timing, scale, and proportion, never the political content or context. I remember him scribbling over the postcard collection of the scenes with a black ballpoint pen, correcting the proportions that Chéreau had gotten wrong.
It was during this trip that he told me that not only was I Catholic, but also a repressed Catholic. “Just stand there for 5 hours, feel the weight,” he said. “Don’t bat an eye. Repressed emotion could be your future.”
Back in the hotel room each night, I found no rest. During the two or three hours Robert Wilson slept, he ground his teeth, a terrifying sound like a metal cheese grater on cement.
“Could not get back to sleep this anxiety dream timed with the constant excruciating grinding—slow—of Bob’s teeth,” I wrote then. “Driving me mad. I shushed him to silence many times. Is it conscious? Surely. A way, I think, of him vibrating his nerves + self back to sleep.”
I arrived back in New York sleep-deprived, changed, and entirely without peers.
Egg on Face
George, just a couple of years my senior, was a classically trained figurative sculptor of mostly female subjects standing contrapposto in clay, plaster, and ideally, bronze. His work was the furthest thing from my interests in contemporary art; Wilson’s work was equally far out of George’s comfort zone. He was also my first New York boyfriend and possessed the kind of hot Irish looks you’d expect passing an open fire station in New York: handsome men crawling off giant red engines, their faces ash-smudged, removing their hats and peeling off their heavy protective uniforms on their way to what you hoped was a group shower. There was only one problem. For the first six weeks or so of our relationship, he was known to me as Billy Jones, his closeted alias—until that got complicated.
My new involvement in Wilson’s world further drove the wedge between George and me, starting with the Lincoln Center opening of “DiaLog/Curious George” and the after-party at Leo Castelli Gallery uptown, both on my 25th birthday. To exacerbate matters, Castelli uptown was ground zero for the international success of American Pop, Minimal, and Conceptual art—pretty much all the work George rejected.
Bob, largely ignoring George, introduced me to Castelli, Gloria Vanderbilt, and then Andy Warhol. George started drinking heavily. Convinced he’d make a fool out of himself and, by extension, me, I kept excusing myself to find him. He was in the hallway, cock out, starting to piss in a corner. I shoved him into the nearby restroom and told him to wait for me there.
Alone, I said my goodbyes. I could no longer handle the stress. Then Andy, as in Warhol, spotted me and declared, “Bradley, I hear it’s your birthday. You are coming with us to Elaine’s!”
“Oh, thank you so much, Andy. I’d love to, but I can’t.”
Even Bob’s pleas weren’t enough to convince me to stay. I couldn’t bear having an uncool, drunk boyfriend by my side.
Call it loyalty or call it stupidity. Call it self-preservation or losing my nerve. It was too much too fast, and I needed a break. I also knew it was only a matter of time before things got more serious with Wilson—I had been putting it off. But George’s behavior pushed me in Wilson’s direction.
That fateful decision on that fateful night not to go to Elaine’s with Warhol, Wilson, Vanderbilt, and Castelli—then the most powerful dealer of contemporary art—became one of those moments in life destined to be replayed again and again. Whether self-sabotage or survival, I didn’t know how to broker my good luck—my good looks—into fame and fortune. Nine years later, in 1989, when The Andy Warhol Diaries was released, they didn’t mention me in the June 24, 1980, entry. But they did describe Bob’s increasingly depressed mood at Elaine’s.
George and I made it outside the Castelli building and walked half a block down 77th to Fifth Avenue along Central Park. He was so drunk that when a cab finally stopped, the driver noticed and sped off, nearly knocking us down. We argued. I couldn’t believe George would humiliate me this way on the biggest night of my life! I steered us into the darkened park so that no one leaving the after-party in search of a cab would see us. I threw punches. He fell easily to the ground, where I think I may even have kicked him when he was down. In disgust—more with myself—I left him there and caught a cab to the East Village.
After a self-destructive walk through Alphabet City—avenues A, B, C, and D were war zones in those days—I made it to the front of my building on East 10th Street and Avenue A alive, where I bumped into my super with his girlfriend and some friends.
“Hey, Bradley. What’s up?”
“Oh, hey Stephen, not much. Just that tonight, I opened in a Robert Wilson theater piece on the Lincoln Center stage, then turned down Andy Warhol’s invitation to meet him, Wilson, Gloria Vanderbilt, and Leo Castelli at Elaine’s, and after that, I beat up my boyfriend and left him in Central Park. Oh, and it’s my birthday and may be the worst day of my life.”
When Stephan Wischerth wasn’t working as a building superintendent, he was the drummer for Glenn Branca.
“What you need,” Stephan said, “is to get high.”
I shared a joint, hashish, and swallowed an entire Quaalude with Stephen, his girlfriend, and one of Branca’s guitar players, Lee Ranaldo, in Stephen’s cool storefront apartment. (A year later, Lee would form the band Sonic Youth and become an alternative rock star.)
“Are you high yet?” Stephen said.
“No,” I said emphatically. “But I’m starved.”
I said my goodbyes and left for 103 2nd Avenue, the new 24-hour New Wave diner. I ordered one of their all-night breakfasts.
The next thing I remember was the waitress waking me up, face down on my plate of food, with egg, literally, on my face.
The next day, I woke up at home afraid something might have happened to George, considering I had left him nearly unconscious in Central Park in 1980 at night. He got home somehow.
That following Sunday, June 29, I put George to his ultimate test. I planned to march in the Gay Pride parade, when doing so was an act of courage, defiance, and visibility, and George would have to walk alongside me. He failed the test. About a week later, our relationship was over.
Happy Days?
My affair with Wilson lasted intermittently for about two years. There were unannounced nighttime visits, his coming and going. I never thought I was the only one. It ended not because of Wilson’s many unfulfilled promises to “create a piece around me,” one that would “show off the beautiful line of my neck meeting my shoulder, the hollow of my collarbone catching shadow just so” (despite his complaint that my long, dark, curly hair interfered with it). Instead, the beginning of the end came during an all-nighter at my East Village walk-up and a nearby bar.
He had just returned from Japan, where he failed to get the financing needed for his “CIVIL WarS,” a daylong opera in collaboration with Philip Glass and David Byrne, composed by six total composers from six countries, intended for the upcoming 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The work never fully materialized and became a great source of frustration for Bob. He and the Byrd Hoffman Foundation nearly went bankrupt, he said, after ringing my East Village apartment buzzer in the middle of the night straight from the airport.
He needed several things from me that night: a place to go, someone to complain to over frozen vodkas at a 24-hour bar, somewhere to return for sort-of sex, and finally my drawing table, where he stayed up on coke making dozens of his signature dark gestural drawings of “CIVIL warS” stagings till dawn. He dropped them off at his art dealer, Paula Cooper, the next day, because he needed money.
Still at the bar, I complained that he didn’t make it to Sarah Lawrence as promised to see my first and only performance on a proscenium stage there. He finally said, “I’ll never see one of your performances, Bradley.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Because I already know I won’t like it.”
One of the gifts of aging is that my work and intellect have finally taken center stage. As a younger man, I often felt judged. The assumption was that a person like me could not possibly make anything seriously interesting—it should be enough that my looks give me access. That access was often turned against me. Even artist friends could turn on me this way. One, masking a mix of jealousy and anger after hearing I was to travel with Robert Wilson, announced to the room: “Bradley will sleep his way to the top.” Ironically, it was Wilson himself who tried to teach me how. Anything for one’s art.
For Bob’s part, he could separate out the means from the end. He might make compromises to get the money he needed, but he never compromised the work, though I’ve often doubted that one’s work could be completely immune to the means of producing it. Ultimately, I couldn’t be that compartmentalized and transactional.
After Bob’s comment at the bar, I worked even harder to prove him wrong. My solo performance at The Kitchen in 1982, an early gender-fuck work, “was so technically smooth and visually striking that it slid directly into one’s sensations,” wrote Sally Banes in the Village Voice. Tony Whitfield, in The New York Native, noted my “classically androgynous beauty… echoes 1982 Interview and Harper’s Bazaar circa 1959,” but added that “both the strength and the disappointment of Re: Gender(scape) lie in the rarity of Wester’s substantial command of his medium.” Both critics felt my “aesthetic artifice” impeded a deeper exploration of content. Robert Wilson, a no-show, would not have the satisfaction of knowing this.
There were other costs to the affair. I ended up having to pay for the white linen jacket myself… in installments. Then the medical bills for an STD he passed on to me. For a total of four years, I received random postcards from around the world: “I love you, Bob.”
Looking back, Robert Wilson’s generosity—what he exposed me to and taught me—led to a depth of experience and practice that few artists in the world can claim, and that would take years to process. Perhaps the most harmful part may have been the isolation I felt for years after, too experienced to connect with my contemporaries. I think, as a controlling person myself, being under his control terrified me. I wonder. If I had given in, would I have found freedom?
Final Curtain
In 2007, while visiting the West Chelsea galleries in New York during the winter break of my first year in a three-year teaching gig at Ringling College of Art & Design, I ran into Robert Wilson for the last time. I had gone to the Paula Cooper Gallery to see his “Voom Portraits.” One of these looped video portraits features Winona Ryder as Winnie, the character in Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days, buried neck-deep in a mound of sand as the perfect lighting shifts from dark to light and back to dark again. By chance, I spotted Wilson there, slightly heavier and with puffy-smooth skin—schmoozing a group of collectors, I guessed. I walked up to him.
“Hello Bob,” I said, “it’s Bradley,” identifying myself quickly to avoid the embarrassment of him not recognizing an older me.
“Oh, hello,” he said somewhat affectedly, leaning over for an automatic continental exchange of cheek kisses.
“What are you doing now?” he asked.
In hindsight, I’m sure the emphasis was on the word “doing” and not on the word “now,” meaning, “What are you doing with your life now, creatively?” I, however, had interpreted it as, “What am I doing now, at this moment,” as if in the next breath, he’d invite me for coffee so we could catch up.
“Oh, just cruising around Chelsea,” I answered, “checking out the shows, yours in particular.”
At that instant, he turned his back on me and walked away without a word. ¶
