Theater Works
He was a member of the group of visual artists - Allan Kaprow, Red Grooms, Jim Dine, and Claes Oldenburg - who in the early 1960s presented theater pieces on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. Whitman has presented more than 40 theater pieces in the United States and abroad, including American Moon, E.G. and Mouth at the Rueben Gallery. Night Time Sky was his contribution to the First New York Theater Rally in New York in 1965; Prune Flat was first presented at the Cinematheque in New York in 1965 and has been performed numerous times since.
In 1966 Whitman was one of the 10 New York artists who worked with Billy Klüver and more than 30 engineers and scientists from Bell Telephone Laboratories to create works that incorporated new technology for 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, a series of performance artworks presented October 13–23 in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. For this piece, Two Holes of Water- 3, Whitman used seven automobiles on the floor of the Armory, from which were projected film, over-the-air television programs, and closed-circuit television projections of live performances and actions, including images from one of the first fiber-optic miniature video cameras.
A retrospective, Robert Whitman: Theater Works, 1960–1976 held in 1976 sponsored by the Dia Art Foundation and presented six earlier works and the premiere of Light Touch. His theater works have been presented at Galerie Maeght Festival in France, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas, Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Walker Art Center, Vera List Art Center, MIT and many more. Ghost, his most recent theater performance, was staged at PaceWildenstein Gallery in New York City in 2002.
In 2003, Dia Art Foundation, New York presented, Playback, a large-scale retrospective exhibition of Whitman’s works. The exhibition traveled to Porto, Portugal, and opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Barcelona in September 2005. A major book, Playback, a comprehensive study of his work, accompanies this exhibition.
In the fall of 2004, Whitman presented a theater performance, Antenna, in Leeds, England, sponsored by Lumens, as part of the New Media Festival there.
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