When all turn right, go left
How long, exactly, is 2 minutes and 37 seconds? If you run the 100-meter dash, it feels like several eternities. If you’re watching an episode of “Breaking Bad,” it seems a nanosecond. But if you’re among an audience of hundreds waiting for a lecturer to start speaking, and he doesn’t, and he doesn’t, and he just stands stock still at the lectern for 2 minutes and 37 seconds, that is both a very long time and an attention-grabber. That inventive silence drew the audience in, put it on edge, and was lesson No. 1 from theater and visual artist Robert Wilson. On Friday evening, before a capacity crowd in a darkened Piper Auditorium at the Graduate School of Design (GSD), he delivered a dramatic and discursive talk on how during his years of art-making he has jumped out of the box that long traditions of theater design and direction had set for...