The Watermill Center
New York
A Western Union telecommunications lab on Long Island was gutted and turned into a theater laboratory where Lady Gaga once hung on the walls.
The building started out as a research facility for Western Union, the telegraph company. In nineteen ninety-two the theater director Robert Wilson bought it, stripped it down, and rebuilt the whole thing as what he calls a think tank, a contemplative arcade where all kinds of different things can happen. The grounds run to about ten acres, planted with gardens and set with wooden sculptures and megalithic stones brought from Indonesia. The design leans on Bauhaus ideas. Wilson had studied under Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, an architectural scholar married to the Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy. Inside are galleries, a study library, and a collection that jumps from pre-modern China to Arctic indigenous work to Shaker furniture to Robert Mapplethorpe. In two thousand fourteen the place hosted the first American showing of Wilson's video portraits of Lady Gaga. Those portraits had premiered the year before at the Louvre.
This is the first of 2 parts. The rest runs about 2 minutes and is read to you as you drive past. Hear the whole piece.
In 1992, Wilson acquired The Watermill Center's current facilities, which had previously housed a telecommunications laboratory for Western Union, and began to stage experimental performances on site.
Written from Wikipedia, used under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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