Butler's Lives of the Saints
Ann Wilson with Mary Brecht, Andrew deGroat, Richard Gibson, Kenneth King, Carol Mullins, Gene Rickard, Sheryl Sutton and Stephen Tittle
December 16, 1977 & January 12 & 13, 1978
88 Pine Street
Photo © 1977 Ted Maiser
The title, "Butler's Lives of the Saints," was taken from an eighteenth century chronicle of saints in the church by the Englishman Alban Butler. An environmental and theatrical work at 88 Pine Street, Wilson created an evocation of Gordon Craig's landmark stage design of the set for Hamlet made for the Moscow Art Theatre in 1912. It was a grouping of pale, spare 22 foot tall screens that Wilson saw as a precursor of contemporary minimalist sculpture. A construction of Van Gogh's 'Bedroom at Arles' flanked the set by Craig and the Petrouchka Room from Diaghilev's staging of the ballet "Chez Petrouchka." Wilson also hung five painted scrims along the glass walls of 88 Pine St. - two paintings by Albert Ryder, an American visionary artist; a Chinese mountain; and a line drawing of the plan for the Colosseum. People walked among all of these sets and paintings, based on what Wilson saw as historical saints who also suffered because their visions defied standards of their age but are now accepted as convention. A theatrical performance of "Butler's Lives" took place on January 12 and 13 with fifty artists, dancers, musicians, and actors. The performance was inspired by Green and Japanese theatre, where actors embody the characters and a chorus speaks and sings the libretto. The libretto consisted of excerpts from writings of Van Gogh, Virginia Woolf, Simone Weil, Goethe, Ovid, Gaugin, and Emily Dickinson, among others. Wilson attempted to make the space into a cathedral and to make art history accessible to a general audience. Lectures and performances took place during the day and source books were available to the public. Ann Wilson is concerned with the emotional context of art. Her work may be seen as an alternative to art based on principles of form that had been dominant in the art world since the 1960s.
