In 1934 Luigi Pirandello was awarded with the Nobel Prize for Literature to “For his bold and ingenious revival of dramatic and scenic art”. Celebrated Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli will present a restaging of Così è (se vi pare) or Right You Are (If You Think You Are), the renowned play by Luigi Pirandello in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and commissioned byPERFORMA 07. .
Ed ecco, o signori, come parla la verità! Siete contenti?
An extraordinary cast of top-billed actors have responded to Vezzoli’s visionary approach to Pirandello’s jewel of a work, Right You Are (If You Think You Are) that implicates the audience in its examination of celebrity, and that points also to the relativity of truth, the necessity of illusion, and the instability of the human persona: io sono colei che mi si crede.
Written and produced in 1917, 18 june at Teatro Olimpia of Milan, Pirandello’s timeless “Così è (se vi pare)” examines the fundamental ambiguity of truth, and the seductive powers of language in conjuring up a female character who may never fully appear amongst the actors on stage as they obsessively dissect her attributes and identity. Rumor and celebrity mongering become the substitute for a deeply examined life, and Pirandello, as does Vezzoli in his own art, points to these empty vessels as a means of drawing attention to existential and humanist concerns. Credits: A PERFORMA Commission, Produced by Gagosian Gallery, New York, Co-produced by PERFORMA in collaboration with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Francesco Vezzoli at Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
October 27, 2007
at 10 pm.
http://07.performa-arts.org/calendar.php
In June 1943, Frank Lloyd Wright received a letter from Hilla Rebay, the art advisor to Solomon R. Guggenheim, asking the architect to design a new building to house Guggenheim’s four-year-old Museum of Non-Objective Painting. The project evolved into a complex struggle pitting the architect against his clients, city officials, the art world, and public opinion. Both Guggenheim and Wright would die before the building’s 1959 completion. The resultant achievement, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, testifies not only to Wright’s architectural genius, but to the adventurous spirit that characterized its founders.
