BLACK DIRT 1990

On April 5-7 and April 12-14, 1990, The Arts Company and The MIT List Visual Arts Center presented the world premiere of Black Dirt, a new large-scale performance work by internationally recognized New York artist Robert Whitman. Performances took place in MIT's Experimental Media Facility (the Cube), Wiesner Building, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, MA. 

Along with Claes Oldenburg, Jim Dine and Allan Kaprow, Whitman was one of the key figures associated with Happenings, the phenomenon that revolutionized public notions of art and performance in the early 1960s. Subsequently, he was a pioneer in the development of a type of theater work rooted in psychologically charged images and poetic restructuring of time and space in lieu of more traditional elements of narrative and character.

Despite its importance to several generations of artists working in experimental, multi­media performance, Whitman's work rarely has been presented outside New York and Europe, and this was the first time it was seen in the Boston area. Black Dirt, in fact, was the product of a local three-month residency by Whitman and was developed in collaboration with a number of local artists, performers and Massachusetts College of Art students. After its premiere in Cambridge, it toured to New York, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

The piece utilized and transformed the vast, dramatic setting of MIT's Cube. Juxtapositions of film projections, eccentric props, lighting and sound effects, performed actions and text and spatial shifts within and outside a large mutable structure formed the basis of what occurred in Black Dirt.

Whitman's work characteristically challenges the rational mind; it is both disturbing and beautiful in a fantastic, unearthly way. Describing a previous work in The Village Voice, Sally Banes wrote: "As in a dream, all sorts of things from daily life combine in impossible ways ....Yet Whitman's work is even more marvelous than dreams, since his images live outside of consciousness; they are real events, concrete arrangements of things, taking place in time -- gliding by our wide-open eyes." 

​