Finding Water
Like many performance artists, Wilson was first trained not in theater, dance, or time arts but in two-dimensional art. He came to Chicago armed with a merit scholarship in photography. But once he arrived he found himself spending more time on performance than on photography, collaborating with such artists as Mark Alice Durant, in Men of the World, and Robyn Orlin as well as other art students in site-specific performances.
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For his graduation performance at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago he sequestered his audience in a tiny dressing room/storage space for 15 minutes before escorting them into the performance area, causing a minor riot. Some students shook their fists at him and yelled, “Fuck you!” Others simply walked out. This piece has helped seal his reputation as a controversial artist, a reputation belied by his implacable, quiet, and humble demeanor.
At this juncture Cap scoops out a few cups of flour and sifts them into a pail of water, his motions slow and precise. When he’s finished sifting, he throws from the sifter a handful of small nails, which clink and echo on the floor. Cap repeats these motions over and over, sifting the flour into a pail, and later onto the floor. Meanwhile Wilson unfolds the shirts. Each one seems to have a bit of paint, little black finger marks or dots. Wilson bends over and paints each spot white. Back and forth they go, Cap sifting the flour and emptying the nails, Wilson dabbing paint on the shirts, then revealing another stain. Four lights are now beautifully illuminating the Link’s Hall space. For a while I counted the shirts–at first I thought there were three stacks of eight–but I began to fall asleep because of the quiet of the space and the repetition of the movements. When I woke up, Wilson had painted every shirt.
Wilson seems to work best when he creates a moving mandala, in a space that accommodates small,
