Robert Whitman: Passport

Dia: Beacon
Riverfront Park, Beacon
17 April

By Jonathan T. D. Neil

Some days I could do without the cultivation of chance. I certainly could have done without it on Sunday. As my wife and I drove north towards Beacon, New York, to see Passport, a new multimedia performance by Robert Whitman set simultaneously outdoors on the banks of the Hudson River and in a theatre at Montclair State University, in New Jersey, it began to rain. Sunday’s showing was the second run. The prior night’s performance had been cancelled due to weather, and Dia: Beacon’s website had been updated to say that Saturday’s tickets would be honoured the next evening. Dia was doubling down, and the bet did not look like it was going to pay off.

With about 30 minutes more to drive, we contemplated turning the car around, but then the rain settled down to just dampening the landscape, so we kept our line, uttering clichés about having come this far and cursing ourselves for not packing raincoats.

It was still drizzling when we parked by Beacon’s train station, which is next to the riverfront and a short walk from where the performance would be staged. People were emerging from their cars, reluctantly, and others were walking down from the railroad platform, heading towards the small white check-in tent. Art martyrs all.


The author's poor attempt at capturing the flaming boat before it passes behind the pickup and horse trailer, which formed the unintended centrepieces of Robert Whitman's Passport at Dia: Beacon, 17 April

After checking in and receiving our complimentary ponchos – basically clear plastic garbage bags that do nothing more than announce that you’re an asshole for not bringing better raingear – we found our bleacher seats and waited for the piece to begin. The rain was now largely absent but looming, and the sky was purpling up. Late evening light was getting flushed under the clouds across the river from the west. Huddled in among the other pilgrims, an impressive number given the circumstances, we found that the wind and cold didn’t bite too hard.

As a prelude, the audience was treated to a backhoe and two guys with shovels working on a large dirt pile. No actual digging was going on, just the impression of it, but watching a virtuoso backhoe operator move his machinery the way a ballerina does her arm and hand makes one appreciate the less visible varieties of instrumental expertise. Once the backhoe pulled away from the pile and shut its engine and lights, the piece began.

What ensued was a series of short events, only a few of which had enough presence to beat back the elements. The smoke machine that was meant to send up a wall of white mist against which the projection part of the performance could be ‘screened’ was a complete failure. The wind simply blew it in a low funnel across the ground. Anticipating this problem (is it never not windy on the banks of the Hudson?), organisers had arranged to have a horse trailer on hand and now duly backed it into place to bring us the first imagery of the evening: a haunting picture of a water faucet spouting fire.

For those not familiar with it, this devilishly leaky faucet is becoming a well-known image in the US and a particularly urgent one for residents of New York. The 2011 Oscar-nominated documentary Gasland aimed its unforgiving lens at the environmental dangers of hydraulic fracturing, or ‘fracking’, a process whereby millions of gallons of water and chemicals are pumped into the ground in order to force out hard-to-reach deposits of oil and natural gas. The energy companies and the geophysicists in their employ claim that the process is safe and does not threaten ground water supplies upon which many populations depend. ‘Safe’ is a relative term in the energy business. As the documentary showed, one affected area in Colorado had so much methane gas in its water supply that tap water lit up like a blow torch when sparked by a cigarette lighter. Energy companies have their eye on the Catskill region of upstate New York, just an hour further north of Beacon, which promises a rich take of natural gas. This area also happens to harbour the main source of New York City’s drinking water.

How or even if the rest of Passport played to these environmental politics is not clear. Oversize white shirts were hoisted into trees and served as screens for Whitman’s now signature rotating moons and suns (again, the wind made this operation only partially plausible and so of limited success). A trio of performers let loose red, yellow and blue streamers (who’s afraid of those colours again?), which promptly plastered themselves to tree branches. A boat ringed with fire (Passport’s press image) was rowed along the river’s edge, but we could only catch glimpses of it because there seemed to be a horse trailer parked directly in front of us.

Other performers wrestled a black-plastic mockup of the dirt mound into view, while the projection on the trailer showed a similar one being brought onstage down in New Jersey. From the tops of both sprang flows of red, blue and yellow ooze (with which, at least in Beacon, the wind threatened to shower the audience). Another scene from the New Jersey stage saw performers walking around followed by chairs, which, intentionally or not, echoed demonstrations for Ai Weiwei’s release that had taken place in front of Chinese consulates around the world that day. Two fabric screens were hoisted ominously into place, one more fully than the other (wind again), and images of a horse and other things I couldn’t quite make out were projected there. It began to rain again, and the desperate rustling of plastic ponchos added some Cagean noise.

The highlight had to be a rather majestic white horse with blue-clad rider (der blau reiter?) that walked slowly across the scene at one point. A bit later, the horse would return, but now with the rider recumbent, as if being carried across to some afterlife (the death of Modernism?).

Which is to say: there were moments. Whitman’s work is often about ‘marking time’, a concern that he has held on to since the 1960s and his early happenings at the Reuben Gallery. But the notion that marking time, that taking account of ‘slowness’ itself – figured nowhere more so in Passport than when a young woman walked towards the audience as if in slow motion – against the backdrop of our oh-so-harried-and-sped-up lives continues to have purchase today is beginning to seem, to me at least, both cliché and reactionary. Against the alterations of the earth and the elements, for which we are increasingly and solely responsible, we need to get much, much faster. We are slow by nature. We need to learn how to move like the wind.