Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster "T.1912"
Guggenheim Museum
This event has ended.
Inspired by the Titanic, T.1912 is a site-specific staged audience experience conceived by visual artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster for the Guggenheim rotunda. Presented in two performances on April 14, 2011, the date marks exactly 99 years—to the day—of the historic tragedy that continues to fascinate generations. T.1912 is presented in conjunction with the Guggenheim Museum exhibition "The Great Upheaval: Modern Art from the Guggenheim Collection", 1910–1918, on view through June 1.
At the core of the installation, Gavin Bryars's large symphonic piece "The Sinking of the Titanic" (1969-) will be performed by The Wordless Music Orchestra. This approximately 45-minute conceptual work, composed long before the 1985 rediscovery of the Titanic, is based on reports that the band played a hymn tune in the final moments of the ship's sinking. Although it premiered at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in 1972, Bryars has favored performances in untraditional, overly acoustic spaces such as a swimming pool in Brussels and an abandoned water tower in Bourges, France. Both the acoustics and the architecture of the Frank Lloyd Wright–designed Guggenheim rotunda play an important part in Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation, which will include subtly changing light environments.
On the evening of the performance, audience members will "board” via the museum’s Peter B. Lewis Theater and will be ushered into the rotunda onto designated "decks." During the performance, the audience will be invited to move within the ramps and rotunda in correlation with the shifting of the passengers aboard the Titanic as it began to sink.
Performances are at 20:40 pm and 22:40 pm on April 14.
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Schedule
April 14, 2011 from 20:40