Robert Wilson
Robert Wilson
An American author, philosopher, psychologist, and essayist, he co-authored The Illuminatus! Trilogy with Robert Shea. His other popular works include Schrodinger's Cat (a novel) and Wilhelm Reich in Hell (a play).
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth18 January 1932
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
We're so afraid to lose the audience. Let the audience go.
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When I was 12 years old, I went to Natchitoches, La.; it was summer vacation with my family. We visited a plantation, Melrose. And I met an Afro-American woman who was a painter. I already had some idea of what I wanted to do in life, and one of the things that interested me was painting.
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. . . there are periods of history when the visions of madmen and dope fiends are a better guide to reality than the common-sense interpretation of data available to the so-called normal mind. This is one such period, if you haven't noticed already.
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Yes, I've been in love, but I guess I'm too involved with myself and my work. I think I'm in love with my work, and I'm in love with the people I work with.
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As a very young man growing up in Texas, usually I got a shotgun or cowboy boots for Christmas.
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My work is formal, not based on psychology.
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I think by drawing, so I'll draw or diagram everything from a piece of furniture to a stage gesture. I understand things best when they're in graphics, not words.
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My mother was a great typist. She said she loved to type because it gave her time to think. She was a secretary for an insurance company. She was a poor girl; she'd grown up in an orphanage, and she went to a business college - and then worked to put her brothers through school.
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At the end of the 1960s, I was part of the downtown theatrical movement in New York that was making work in alleyways, garages, gyms, churches, non-traditional spaces. The idea was to get away from the illusion of the conventional theatre. But then I thought, what's wrong with illusion?
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I think that in my plays you can come in for 20 minutes and get something out of it. I'd like to do a play that would run for days. I don't think time is that important. Nature doesn't hurry the sky, the changing clouds and sunsets.
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One of the few things that will remain of this time is what artists are doing. They are the journal and the diary of our time.
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Most artists don't understand what they do, and I don't think we have to. Other people do that better - they understand what I do better than I do!
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I'm supposed to be the guy who hates naturalism.
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What was very interesting to me about Clementine Hunter's work is that she couldn't read or write, and she has recorded history of the plantation life and the southern part of the U.S. - the cotton harvests, pecan picking, washing clothes, funerals, marriages - in pictures.