The artist Robert Wilson with his exhibition at the Villa Stuck
Robert Wilson is a kind of Andy Warhol for the '90s: an artist emblematic of his time and place. The time is now; the place, the world - for "globalization", that catchword of the international marketplace, also applies to art. Wilson's art is global not only in its internationalism, but also in its defiance of categorization: is it theater, fine art, performance art, sculpture? "Robert Wilson at the Villa Stuck" (through February 8) raises all these questions, offers few answers, and, like most of Wilson' s work, takes its audience on a fantastic, evocative journey, whose meaning is difficult to articulate beyond stammering out one's own perception of the experience. "Performance art" is a misleading term to apply to Wilson, since it usually implies an artist doing something directly involved with his or her body; but Wilson's works are certainly performances, and he's best known for his work in the theater. His true breakthrough on the international scene was with Einstein on the Beach, created with minimalist composer Phillip Glass in 1974. As an opera director, he demonstrates a stylized, highly controlled, and minimalist style in his productions. But Wilson has also been consistently active as a "fine artist": that is to say, galleries and museums - Paris's Centre Pompidou, the Venice Biennale - have also served as venues for his works. Whichever venue he's in, Wilson is less concerned with creating plays or sculptures than environments and tableaux. "Robert Wilson at the Villa Stuck" is an environment of 13 tableaux, through which the visitor can move more or less freely. You're immediately aware that you're being directed, cast in the protagonist's role in a narrative of which you are the unifying sense: what brings these images together is the "story" of you experiencing them. And we the audience, accustomed to comfortable anonymity and a passive role in our dealings with art, hesitate at the threshold of a tableau: am I "allowed" in, or should I stop at the doorsill and deal with this as if it were a two dimensional picture ? Sometimes you don't have a choice: in the dining-room, where two toga-clad plaster figures parade before a painted temple, you must weave your way between ruined columns, beneath a hail of arrows suspended overhead."Robert Wilson at the Villa Stuck" is an environment of 13 tableaux, through which the visitor can move more or less freely. You're immediately aware that you're being directed, cast in the protagonist's role in a narrative of which you are the unifying sense: what brings these images together is the "story" of you experiencing them. And we the audience, accustomed to comfortable anonymity and a passive role in our dealings with art, hesitate at the threshold of a tableau: am I "allowed" in, or should I stop at the doorsill and deal with this as if it were a two dimensional picture ? Sometimes you don't have a choice: in the dining-room, where two toga-clad plaster figures parade before a painted temple, you must weave your way between ruined columns, beneath a hail of arrows suspended overhead."Robert Wilson at the Villa Stuck" is an environment of 13 tableaux, through which the visitor can move more or less freely. You're immediately aware that you're being directed, cast in the protagonist's role in a narrative of which you are the unifying sense: what brings these images together is the "story" of you experiencing them. And we the audience, accustomed to comfortable anonymity and a passive role in our dealings with art, hesitate at the threshold of a tableau: am I "allowed" in, or should I stop at the doorsill and deal with this as if it were a two dimensional picture ? Sometimes you don't have a choice: in the dining-room, where two toga-clad plaster figures parade before a painted temple, you must weave your way between ruined columns, beneath a hail of arrows suspended overhead. Each one of these tableaux relates directly to Franz von Stuck. The show may have come about as a result of the Villa Stuck's commission rather than through Wilson's own prior fascination with this artist, but marrying Wilson and Stuck was a happy idea, since Wilson is well-equipped to translate Stuck's brand of decadence into a 1990s idiom. Stuck, too, created "environments": his own lavish, bizarre villa, which he filled with images of mythical creatures. Theater, or play-acting, was another of his passions, manifest in his love of Fasching (the plaster figures in togas are Stuck and his wife, taken from a photograph of them at a costume party), or of costuming his models (such as his daughter, Mary, in a toreador outfit). Wilson confronts Stuck's world head-on. In the grand reception room, he places two life-sized centaurs diagonally across the floor, one shooting the other with an arrow: an image from one of Stuck's paintings, incorporating all of Stuck's excess, weirdness, and pathos. And what better expression of all this than opera - Romantic German opera? Most of the tableaux have their own soundtracks: here, you hear arias from Weber's Der Freischütz, sung by (who else) Maria Callas, the personification of opera, drama, and all things "over the top," which, framed by Stuck's own paintings peering down from the woodwork, this tableau indubitably is. One point is to create a network of allusions and connections linking the various tableaux and also linking the whole environment to the rest of Wilson's oeuvre. A unifying leitmotif in the show is the repeated figure of Stuck himself, in plaster: in a toga, as host; holding a palette to evoke the idea of creation and authorship (twinned authorship: two artist figures, representing the two authors of the environment); seated in evening dress, playing with his dog (there's a similar dog at Mary's feet upstairs). And there are Wilson leitmotifs familiar from other works: the flying arrows; the head of Napoleon on the wall of Stuck's bedroom; a chair suspended from the ceiling. And there are other allusions: the image of Stuck and his dog was taken from an actual photograph, but the red background and spotted dog also evoke the EMI record label, the famous image of "His Master's Voice", which springs to mind all the more readily because of Callas in the background. The fact is, you can't read too much into this: whatever you want to see is there. The result is a vastly enjoyable performance. And it is that: a performance. For if you have to put Wilson's art in a category, it's always going to be theater. You experience this work temporally as well as visually, in terms of the time it takes you to interact with it, like a story or a play, it has a beginning and an end. Furthermore, it's ephemeral: this environment will not outlive the show, and none of its parts is anything you'd want to preserve for an eternity - they're not supposed to be. Wilson is an artist who creates experiences, not objects. And the experience at the Villa Stuck is well worth seeing.