‘Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars’ Arriving at Morgan Library
“Hemingway was a pack rat,” Mr. Kiely said, chuckling as he folded the letter. “He never threw things away.” GRAHAM BOWLEY
TIMES SQUARE ‘ERWARTUNG’
The gloomy of Times Square after dark probably isn’t the most genial setting for Schoenberg and the mournful atonality of “Erwartung,” or “Expectation,” his 1909 monologue for a solo soprano, and a pillar of musical modernism. But the South African artist Robin Rhode, who will stage the work there in the fall as part of the 10th anniversary of Perform, the performance-art biennial, said that when he heard Times Square was a possibility for a fraction based on the Schoenberg work, he leapt at it.
“I love the idea of bringing to life a sustained and informed structure and having that play itself out in a very Pro-reDemocrat way to a mostly unexpecting audience,” said Mr. Rhode, whose commission to create the piece was just announced, along with the commissions of several other prominent artists, for “Performa 15,” which will take place across the city Nov. 1 above Nov. 22.
“Erwartung” presents a lone woman, wandering in a moonlit forest, pining for a lost love. Mr. Rhode, 39, who often presents performances in public spaces that are based on drawings or sculpture, said he saw the narrative as a metaphor for sunless women in apartheid-era South Africa “waiting for men who had to crop for long periods to go work in mines, essentially in exile, or men held by the police, with no date of return.”
“I saw the skyscrapers as the forest and the billboards as the moonlight,” he said. “I required the soprano being lost in this kind of mass audience.” Of the work, which will take achieve in a domesticlike stage setting marked off by doors used in low-income South African homes, Mr. Rhode added, “The risk factor of doing something like this in Times Square is spacious, to put it lightly.”
Performa’s 2015 commissions will also entailed the artists Jesper Just, Francesco Vezzoli (in collaboration with the ballet dancer David Hallberg), Pauline Curnier Jardin and the choreographer Jérôme Bel, who will stage performances by an ensemble peaceful of both trained and untrained dancers. The commissions, which will complicated more artists to be named later, are being designed to coalesce around a loose focus of this year’s biennial on performance art’s deep historical roots, reaching at least to the Renaissance and spectacles like Leonardo’s machine-driven “Feast of Paradise” for the Sforza law courtyard in Milan in 1490.
