A phantasmagorical Snow White forest, a play about Garry Kasparov and Deep Blue and an electronic music opus staged in an idealized lunar landscape (the audience will slip on white robes) are a few of the highlights announced Monday by the Park Avenue Armory for its 2013 season.
The armory, which converted itself into a performance, concert and art space in 2007 and is now in the midst of a $200 million renovation, is drawing heavily this year on visual artists. Paul McCarthy, the Los Angeles sculptor and filmmaker, will mount - beginning June 19 - his largest United States exhibition to date, “WS,†a raw reimagining of the Snow White story set in a huge artificial forest that will seem to float like a sound stage in te armory’s cavernous drill hall.
On March 20, the armory will host the premiere of “OKTOPHONIE,†
part of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 
major electronic work “Licht,†with a moonscape set designed by the artist Rirkrit Tiravanija. Beginning Sept. 4 in previews, the up-and-coming British playwright Matt Charman will present “The Machine,†chronicling Garry Kasparov’s 1997 mighty chess battle against IBM’s super-computer. Later that month, Robert Del Naja, of the British band Massive Attack, and the documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis will present a new work.
And, ending the year, performance art will assume operatic proportions with Robert Wilson’s new staging of “The Life and Death of Marina AbramovicÌ,†beginning in previews Dec. 12 with Ms. AbramovicÌ playing herself, joined by Willem Dafoe and the musician Antony. The season will also feature the debut of a chamber-music recital series in the armory’s mahogany-clad Board of Officers period room, featuring the! baritone Christian Gerhaher, the violinist Vilde Frang and the pianist Anton Batagov.
Rebecca Robertson, the armory’s president and executive producer, said the season is intended to “blur the line between high art and popular culture†and “ask tough questions about the world in which we live.â€
