“Einstein on the Beach,” a global sensation, was the breakout piece of this period. But it left Wilson heavily in debt. Without the money to buy 147 Spring Street, he lost it. Over the next years, he received offers to create state-sponsored artistic incubators in Europe, where his work found much more support than in the United States, but he wanted a place in his home country.
Eventually he found Watermill, a research laboratory constructed by Western Union in the 1920s. Until the 1960s, it was a hub of innovation in communications; an early version of the fax machine was developed there. When Wilson came across the site, though, it had been abandoned for decades. He saw the broken windows, the leaking roofs and the rusted machinery surrounded by natural beauty, and he had a vision of what it could become.
Wilson didn’t have the money to buy Watermill outright, but through a complicated deal in which the owner lent him money, he bought it in 1989. And he began to use it while it was still in disrepair.
“He made it part of his contracts that if you wanted to hire Robert Wilson, you had to do all of the preproduction at Watermill during the summer,” Khoshbin said.
Wilson brought in collaborators from an array of countries, and they worked on Wilson productions while also working on the Watermill property. As in an artistic commune, performers served as house painters, gardeners, construction laborers. That practice developed into a summer residency that culminated in a yearly benefit performance. In 2006, when construction was finally complete, the residencies became year-round.
WILSON SPENT SUMMERS at Watermill. More permanent was the composition of the site and his art collection of some 8,000 works — about the size of the Whitney Museum’s holdings, Khoshbin said. Around 1,000 are on display at any time. Pieces by Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, Max Ernst or René Magritte might be placed next to a life-size Indonesian Tau Tau figure or an African mask. There are shoes worn by Wilson’s dance heroes (George Balanchine, Rudolf Nureyev, Jerome Robbins). There are more than 600 chairs.
