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Robert Wilson

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Robert Wilson

(1941-2025, was born in Waco, Texas)

A House for Edwin Denby, 2000

Furniture, building materials, loudspeakers

750 x 250 x 509 cm

With support from Rappgo AB

Thanks to Ronald Hallgren, Cecilie Manz

For the exhibition WANÅS 2000, Robert Wilson created two artworks dedicated to Edwin Denby (1903–1983), a prominent American poet and dance critic who ended his own life. Wilson is known as a leading artist within avant-garde theater and opera, and to approach A House for Edwin Denby is to step into a drama. The house’s architecture refers to the simple building style developed by the Shaker movement in northeastern USA in the 1800s. The sound creates an ambient soundscape around the artwork, and from inside the house, Wilson’s voice is reciting a fragmentary text written especially for the work. The open book inside the house is the same book that is said to have been the last one Denby read in his life. At the same time as he created the structure, Wilson also developed the work Edwin’s Last Day in one of the barns at Wanås. The first floor of the building was covered with mud that dried and cracked during the exhibition period, and over loudspeakers came Wilson’s voice, reading a text about the last day of Denby’s life, written by the poet’s close friend, filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt.