Please excuse my ignorance if you have heard of avant-garde artist Robert Wilson and his VOOM portraits before, but I was just today made aware of their existence, and I must say it’s one of the coolest things I’ve seen in some time, at least that is if looked at with the right perspective.
I’m not at all familiar with Wilson outside of stumbling onto his VOOM portraits today so I won’t attempt to give you some grandiose, all-knowing background piece on him, but I did search out some information on just what exactly these portraits are and how they came about and found a Vanity Fair piece from 2006 titled “The Subject as Star” that gives more than enough information on what I’ve featured below.
Described by Vanity Fair‘s Bob Colacello as the “king of the avant-garde”, Wilson’s VOOM portraits are commissioned by private clients, asking for life-size, high-definition-video renditions of themselves. Each is purchased for $150,000 each. Among his clients you have Willem Dafoe, Robert Downey Jr., Isabella Rossellini, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt. Wilson told Colacello, “I got started on these portraits thinking of [Andy Warhol’s] commissioned work as well as those of classical portraitists like John Singer Sargent.” The description of the process goes as such:
Each portrait takes nearly a full day to shoot and is an elaborate undertaking, requiring a cameraman, sound technician, costume designer, hairdresser, and makeup artist. As with his theater productions, Wilson designs the set and lighting himself. The portraits are shot both in horizontal format for viewing on television or on movie screens and in vertical orientation for H.D. plasma flat-screen monitors. The subjects are directed by Wilson to “think of nothing,” and he limits their movement to one or two gestures, in very slow motion. Each video is anywhere from 30 seconds to 20 minutes long, but they are looped, so there is no discernible beginning or end to the finished work. This seamless image is achieved through a custom-designed computer playback system integrated into the flat screen itself. Wilson estimates the cost to produce each portrait at around $40,000.
The name VOOM Portraits comes from Voom HD Networks, a TV company specializing in high-definition entertainment, which was able to provide the technology Wilson needed to execute his idea.
I have included eight of his celebrity portraits directly below and you can find more on YouTube, such as this one featuring a snow owl and this one featuring a skunk.
| Brad Pitt | Johnny Depp |
| Robert Downey Jr. | |
| Willem Dafoe | Steve Buscemi |
| Winona Ryder | |
| Isabella Rossellini | Princess Caroline of Monaco |
More on Robert Wilson and his upcoming exhibitions can be found on his official site.
