Robert Whitman, Artist Whose Happenings Brought Him Fame in New York, Dies at 88

Robert Whitman, a key figure in performance and multimedia art whose rose to fame in 1960s New York, has died at 88. Whitman died at his home in Warwick, New York, according to a statement from Pace Gallery, his long-time representative. His cause of death was not disclosed.

Alongside his peers like Jim Dine and Claes Oldenburg, Whitman is most famous for staging events known as Happenings in Downtown Manhattan. These events were temporary pieces that in some case existed for one night only. With performance and sculptural elements involved, his Happenings stood in stark contrast to traditional art exhibitions, whose objects are more permanent.

Later, looking for ways to break down hierarchies between artists and technicians, Whitman would work with engineers, cofounding Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1966 with Fred Waldhauer and artists Billy Klüver and Robert Rauschenberg. “The common ground was our social mission, that commitment to some sort of social energy that went beyond just any one thing,” Whitman wrote in 2008 in Artforum.

Born in 1935 in Manhattan to Robert Sr. and Cynthia Sainter Whitman, he was raised in New York and later relocated to Englewood, New Jersey, with his mother after his father’s death. Eventually, he would go on to study literature at Rutgers University and considered becoming a playwright. By 1959, his education brought him in the circles of connected faculty and artists like Allan Kaprow and John Cage, who staged the first Happening at the Reuben Gallery that year, with Whitman as one of its participants. Whitman would go on to collaborate with other artists and friends during performances, among them choreographer Simone Forti, whom he married in 1962 and divorced four years later.

The artist had a fascination with bending temporal limitations in performances, writing in 1965, “The thing about theater that most interests me is that it takes time. Time for me is material.”

In 1960, Whitman staged his most famous work, American Moon. During this Happening, Whitman filled a makeshift theater with debris; the audience looked on as amateur performers, acting as puppets, played out inscrutable scenes against a backdrop of plastics, paper, and cardboard-pasted walls.

In works like Prune Flat (1965) and Bathroom Sink (1964), Whitman experimented with projected images, using performers as both subjects and screens. In the former, performers served as objects onto which surreal imagery was projected; in the latter, a woman undergoes a morning routine in a bathroom while Whitman projected a film onto a mirror above the sink, capturing the audience’s reflection.

As Whitman aged, he remained active with the New York institutions that showed him recognition throughout his long-running career. In 2011, as part of a project with Dia Beacon in New York and Montclair State University in New Jersey (the former held retrospectives dedicated to Whitman in 2003 and 1976), he sent a rowboat engulfed in flames down the Hudson River. In a preview of the work’s debut published in the New York Times, Dia’s then-director Philippe Vergne described Whitman’s fleeting performances as key to his generation of artists and the museum’s history.

“Whitman is part of our DNA,” he said.