Robert Wilson at ACE, Los Angeles

Voom Portraits
by Andy Cline

Robert Wilson, internationally acclaimed playwright, choreographer, stage designer, and on and on, whose accomplishments in the theatrical and collaborative realms rival any of the most prolific artists in their fields has adorned the walls of ACE gallery with a new collection of Voom portraits, looped video portraits of mostly famous actors and other celebrities such as Princess Caroline of Monaco.
The link above will allow you to view images in still form, but the stills are nothing compared to the actual installation on view at ACE until the end of May. Most of these "portraits" are looped video sequences and the best of them are very subtle. For example, one room at ACE contains 9 Salma Hayek "portraits" in black and white on 42" flat screen plasmas mounted on the wall at standard museum heights. When you first walk into the room these portraits seem like stills, her hair pulled back a la 1920 and adorned with a delicate feather boa, but as you begin to spend time with each image, you notice that occasionally her eyes are blinking and the feathers around her neck are trembling in a gentle breeze. In the periphery, the other images still appear as stills, but you know they are alive and moving in their own rhythms.
The downside to the show is the celebrity domination of the imagery. There is only one piece in the show, an older mechanic with swolen purple hands and a homicidal gaze of fear, aside from the collection of frogs in one room and a lone owl in another and a large panting dog, that get away from Wilson's overarching subject: celebrity. But after getting over the pop value of the installation, one realizes how profound these Voom portraits really are. Not an uncritical observer of the introduction of technological media and processes into the fine art realm, I find these portraits accomplishing what I may have thought not possible, what I admire so in a great Sargent painting, in that they capture the delicate living quality of a human subject. Film and stage alike are rather garish in this regard as compared to painting. Robert Wilson's Voom portraits, at their best, accomplish the subtlety of a figure, the slightly unconsciously changing personality of form.