“I do theatre, I do not do meanings”—exchange between Robert Wilson and film director Katharina Otto-Bernstein.

Robert Wilson died after a short illness at his home in Water Mill, New York, on July 31 at the age of 83.

American-born Robert Wilson was a prolific theatre director, who produced and directed dozens of plays and many operas, in additions to teaching and contributing to exhibitions. After making his reputation in the US in the 1970s with plays such as Deafman Glance (1970) and Einstein on the Beach (1976), Wilson worked increasingly in Western Europe, where various countries, such as Germany and France, have a far more developed system of state-subsidised theatre than the US.

Wilson had an intriguing and obviously very difficult childhood, which contradicts his own efforts to deny the role of social and political factors in his work. He was born in 1941 in the town of Waco, Texas, which he has described as a cultural and spiritual backwater. A sensitive and shy child with a pronounced speech defect, Wilson’s first childhood friend was a black boy—a choice frowned upon by his father and much of the backward-looking local community.

Reflecting on his conservative upbringing, Wilson related: “When I was growing up, it was a sin to go to the theater. It was a sin if a woman wore pants. There was a prayer box in school, and if you saw someone sinning you could put their name in the prayer box, and on Fridays everyone would pray for those people whose names were in the prayer box.”

His father was a businessman—for a time the mayor of Waco—determined that his son should follow in his footsteps. Wilson submitted at first to his father’s wishes but then in the early 1960s broke away from his family to embrace the alternative culture scene in New York. Increasingly estranged from his family, his life was further complicated by his struggle as a young man to find acceptance for his homosexuality.

Wilson’s artistic roots lay in the 1960s, in his collaboration with renowned choreographers George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham and Martha Graham, and musicians such as John Cage and later Philip Glass. Unlike virtually any other contemporary director, Wilson sought to control and influence all the various elements of his plays, combining dance, set design, lighting and costumes (he also occasionally performs in his productions) into his own version of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. During the summer of each year, Wilson, undeniably a workaholic, taught students theatre craft at the Watermill Centre on Long Island.

Over the years, Wilson built up a sizeable and enthusiastic lobby of support for his work. Having acknowledged that she had seen Deafman Glance on numerous occasions, critic Susan Sontag concluded that Wilson was “The greatest theatre career of our time.” Among those who have paid tribute to Wilson’s work are the musician David Byrne; the former creative director of the Paris Opera House, Charles Fabius; opera singer Jessye Norman; and many other leading artistic figures.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Wilson rejected the anarchic revolt against traditional theatre and the collective approach associated with ensembles working in New York such as the Living Theatre and Open Theatre, in favour of a much more formalistic, elaborate and almost baroque-type theatre in which he retained a large degree of control.

His productions tend to be consciously formal, cold and distant, without much human interaction or dramatic content. Script and dialogue have always been a long way down the list of priorities. In Wilson’s 1993 version of Hamlet, he scrapped nearly two-thirds of Shakespeare’s text to produce one hour of drama. Earlier, in 1973, he directed and produced what is described as a 12-hour “silent opera” entitled The Life and Times of Josef Stalin. The piece was performed without a script and based largely on Wilson’s own stage directions.

In a text from 1982 ,Wilson described his relation to the written word: “When I write these lines I don’t think about who’s going to say it or what it means. I don’t think about emotions or ideas. It’s just something to hear on a stage.”

Perhaps Wilson’s unease with the spoken word and plot had some basis in his pedagogical work with handicapped and autistic persons, but it certainly complements the emergence of ideological tendencies in the 1970s that increasingly questioned language as a basis for accurately reflecting the objective world. Writing on Wilson, Arthur Holmberg firmly situated him in the orbit of postmodern art and culture. Holmberg described Wilson as the originator of a “radical relativity” in theatre and goes on to delineate the sort of ideological background to Wilson’s work.

“To tell a story,’ [the French author Alain] Robbe-Grillet argues, ‘has become strictly impossible’, and [the French philosopher Jean-François] Lyotard characterises the postmodern condition as the tumbling down of narrative. The grand narratives have collapsed, and we are left with scraps of stories. From these scraps Wilson builds a new acoustical space where texts comment on each other. “Collage,” writes [art critic Harold] Rosenberg, “is the form assumed by the ambiguities that have matured in our time concerning both art and the realities it has purported to represent ... Twentieth-century fictions are rarely made up of the whole cloth... Collage invites the spectator to respond with a multiple consciousness.”

This is the familiar litany of postmodernism. The “grand narratives”—according to Lyotard and others, including Marxism and the class struggle—have collapsed. All that artists and intellectuals can do is rummage amongst the ruins and patch a few shards together in an appealing manner that will win the acclaim of fellow intellectuals. If things still seem confusing, then it is because we are not using a sufficient number of our “multiple consciousnesses”!

It may well be that Wilson found a poor advocate for his work in the shape of Holmberg, but in his own statements and interviews he repeatedly emphasised that the job of the artist was to steer clear of interpretations. The best the artist could do was pose questions: “I’m an artist, not a philosopher. I don’t make meanings. I make art... Theatre that imposes an interpretation is aesthetic fascism.”

While this may be a fashionable point of view is some circles, such a noncommittal, evasive stance is thoroughly blinkered and in the long term counterproductive for compelling and enduring art. Of course there are considerable differences between the artist and the philosopher, just as there are numerous examples in the twentieth century of the degeneration of art into crude propaganda (or interpretation)—most notably at the hands of fascism and Stalinism.

But to then conclude that interpretation—the struggle to make sense of the world and communicate it to others—has no place in the creation of a work of art is both reckless and ultimately, for the artist, a suffocating and limiting influence. The artist may wish to ignore social life, but social life does not ignore him, and, whether he likes it or not, social influences will inevitably find expression in his work.

These are not new questions. Already early in the twentieth century, the Russian revolutionary G. Plekhanov wrote in his analysis of the advocates of “l’art pour art”: “[T]here is no such thing as an artistic production which is devoid of an idea. Even productions whose authors lay store only on form and are not concerned for their content, nevertheless express some idea in one way or another.”

A few sentences further, Plekhanov remarks: “Productions whose authors lay store on form always reflect a definite—and as I have already explained, a hopelessly negative—attitude of their authors to their social environment.”

A brief glance at Wilson’s past work makes this point clear. Wilson exhibited considerable expertise in combining formal elements of theatre to produce at times engaging and attractive images, but, whether he was conscious of it or not, he worked within a definite social and political context.

Alongside the formal aesthetic elements in Wilson’s marathon Einstein on the Beach, the play also had a very definite political and ideological content. The piece ends with nuclear destruction, and throughout the play Wilson pits the figure of the scientist against that of the artist, and he portrays them as possessing two entirely opposed ways of seeing the world. The scientist with his thirst for knowledge leads us to—or takes us over—the brink of destruction. The artist is our potential saviour. We are reminded of the dichotomy introduced by the English Romantic poet William Blake, who once wrote: “Art is the tree of Life.... Science is the Tree of Death.”

Again, in some of his later works—e.g., Black Rider, Alice and Woyzeck—Wilson not only drew heavily on the visual style of German expressionism, but also on its often apocalyptic view of humanity and its future. Thus in the loose adaptation of Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, we are treated to lyrics by singer Tom Waits, “Call no man happy ‘til he dies.... All the good in the world you can put inside a thimble,” in a song entitled, “Misery is the River of the World.” Wilson staked his claim to a leading position in cultural pessimism in modern theatre, wagging his finger in admonishment at the sins of humanity.

In the course of his career, Wilson clearly traveled a long way from his roots in Waco. One is left with the impression of a man, with an obviously restless spirit, who continually fought to overcome hurdles in his life in order to pursue his art, while not giving enough thought to the broader social and political implications of the journey he had undertaken. He was hardly alone in this regard! Capable of glittering, at times intense imagery, there is a lingering emptiness, a vagueness at the heart of Wilson’s work.

The persistent depiction, in his pieces, of mankind driven and manipulated by dark and inexplicable forces indicates in the final analysis...a fundamentally negative and confused attitude towards his social environment.