\n<\/p>\n
A Berlin nightclub habitu\u00e9 of my acquaintance has admonished me, more than once, not to go to concerts or parties without earplugs; too many D.J.s now crank to dangerous decibels, so have your fun and save your hearing. I forgot his advice ahead of \u201cDoom: House of Hope,\u201d an evening-length spectacle of attitude and abjection by the German artist and choreographer Anne Imhof<\/a>, and may have developed tinnitus as a result.<\/p>\n Your ears are not the only organs that may suffer if you come to the Park Avenue Armory, where Imhof\u2019s massive performance work has been one of the most anticipated events of the winter season, and (thanks to its performers as well as its public) is already one of the most Instagrammed. You\u2019ll start out in a corral with a thousand other spectators, prevented from moving forward by crowd control barriers. Expressionless, glassy-eyed performers will soon move toward you as a droning electronic score blares. You\u2019ll be released to explore the whole 55,500-square-foot Drill Hall soon, but ticket holders should, like sensible Germans, opt for comfortable shoes: You\u2019re on your feet throughout.<\/p>\n Around the large hall are two dozen brand-new Cadillac Escalades, the preferred conveyance of the American oligarchy, whose roofs will become stages for limber dancers and mournful singers, and whose trunks will serve variously as pop-up bar, chess competition venue, vape break area and makeshift tattoo parlor. To follow the action of \u201cDoom\u201d you\u2019ll have to chase the performers around the S.U.V.s, onto several stages, and even into the dressing rooms, while above you, on a Jumbotron scoreboard, the evening\u2019s duration ticks down: three hours to go.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The experience of \u201cDoom\u201d is indeed not unlike a night at the club \u2014 wending your way through a converted warehouse, losing your friends in the darkness, oscillating from moments of excessive emotion to total boredom. If you get bored, you can always look at your phone; to Imhof, your phone, and your boredom, are integral.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This is a night of harsh contradictions, and I just can\u2019t girdle my judgment into cheer-or-jeer format. \u201cDoom\u201d is narcissistic, frivolous, sometimes na\u00efve \u2014 and still, despite all this, feels more important than a hundred cash-and-carry exhibitions in Chelsea. Its roughly 40 performers, who mutter in monotone when they aren\u2019t just staring into space, indulge a youthful nihilism that is obvious and tiresome \u2014 until an extraordinary shift in the third hour (by which time much of the opening night\u2019s audience had bailed), when they find grand, even Romantic purpose.<\/p>\n That \u201cDoom\u201d can feel so pointless and so potent, that I disliked well more than half of this evening on my feet and still left gratified and even moved, is testament to Imhof\u2019s rare attunement to contemporary conditions of spectatorship: above all, to how we look at both art and life through screens driving us to derangement. She is struggling, a lot, with how to make something meaningful and powerful in 2025. But by God, she\u2019s trying.<\/p>\n This is the first New York presentation in a decade from Imhof, whose lugubrious performances dramatize the effects<\/a> <\/em><\/a>of digital technologies<\/a> on bodies, psyches, societies. New York audiences last encountered her at MoMA PS1 in 2015, where her reedy performers cuddled live bunnies and spat troughs of buttermilk in a performance and exhibition called \u201cDeal.\u201d<\/a> She hit international prominence with \u201cFaust,\u201d at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where Imhof\u2019s impassive, streetwear-clad dancers stared down audiences at the German Pavilion who waited two hours to get in. With \u201cFaust,\u201d Imhof clocked early that a major shift had come to the experience of art with the introduction of the cameraphone, wielded by spectators who (unlike at the theater, ballet or opera) reflexively record what they see. She favored young performers whose willowy bodies belied their training and toughness, and who viscerally knew that their movements were being reduced to digital images for transmission and consumption.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In the wake of the first Trump election and the Brexit referendum, Imhof\u2019s club-kid hauteur and play with totalitarian imagery \u2014 her German pavilion equated the Nazi show palace to an Apple store \u2014 resulted in an uneasy blend of antagonism and exclusivity, one she shared notably with the Georgian fashion designer Demna Gvasalia<\/a>. But anyone who sees \u201cDoom\u201d will clock quite quickly that it is far less fashionable: For better or worse, Balenciaga is out and \u201cEuphoria\u201d is in.<\/p>\n The youths of this new performance hew closer to European fantasies of American high school, and the Armory has been overlaid with gymnasium flooring for good measure. Its performers, some of whom wear basketball and cheerleader uniforms, include German and American models, rappers, writers, actors and randoms (Kim Gordon\u2019s daughter, for crying out loud), as well as dancers from American Ballet Theater, who will swap their school-spirit outfits for Balanchine-approved leotards in the third hour. Throughout the night they preen, stare, cuddle and mope, but only some \u2014 above all Toon Lobach and Vinson Fraley, two dancers with very different bodies who circle and shadow each other \u2014 display the intense self-focus that Imhof has elicited in the past.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Instead, and very quickly, \u201cDoom\u201d settles into an episodic format that is less an Armory-filling Gesamtkunstwerk than a revue: a series of frequently sloppy numbers, often around five minutes (a pop song length), that you can see up close if you\u2019re standing in the right spot or must crane to catch if you\u2019re not. Some of these numbers display real passion and intelligence, above all a trio of rap performances by Arthur Tendeng, in French and German, which electrifies \u201cDoom\u201d at the halfway mark.<\/p>\n More are just clich\u00e9 \u2014 such as the wannabe Velvet Underground songs of Eliza Douglas, Imhof\u2019s ex-girlfriend and frequent collaborator \u2014 and some are outright humiliating. Over the night you will endure recitations of jejune poetry cribbed from anime scripts (\u201cFor heroes there are trials\u201d), a white-girl mumblecore cover of the third-tier R&B singer Jeremih, and a deafening band whose baby-punk singer would get booed off the stage at a suburban bar mitzvah, let alone Park Avenue.<\/p>\n Truly, there\u2019s a cynical intelligence to the variety-show structure of \u201cDoom\u201d: If nothing quite coheres, if everything feels like a pose, if you find yourself looking at sexy 10-second video clips of a slack three-hour performance \u2026 well, that\u2019s culture in 2025 for you! An ambient bath. A perpetual ooze. This smooth, streaming, unstructured approach \u2014 a condition that the literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has called \u201cimmediacy,\u201d<\/a> in evidence everywhere from no-style autofiction to POV TikToks \u2014 is the cultural reflection of our technological and economic disorder, and as you pull out your phone you become one with the defeatism.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n And yet still, glistening within the gloom of \u201cDoom,\u201d are the hints of a major artist on the cusp of a breakthrough. You can first detect them in small passages, barely suturing the evening together, from \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d \u2014 the original star-crossed slackers. Imhof arranges them in reverse order, starting with the double suicide in the tomb and leading back to the first encounter at the ball. The balcony scene is performed on the top of one of those Escalades, livestreamed to the Jumbotron from a performer\u2019s iPhone. (Much later on comes a witty quotation of another \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d adaptation: the Jets-versus-Sharks opening number of \u201cWest Side Story,\u201d all thrusting arms and kick turns.)<\/p>\n These gobbets of Shakespeare, familiar from American school days, are the first signs of leaving behind style for structure. Like \u201cDoom,\u201d \u201cRomeo and Juliet\u201d is a play in which love drowns in violence \u2014 specifically, the violence of social polarization, which bleeds from an older aristocracy\u2019s \u201cancient grudge\u201d into the lives of their brawling children and manservants. It\u2019s a play about a failed ruling class, which neither church (the Friar) nor state (the Prince) can control. And if the love of Romeo and Juliet is doomed, the play also insists that young love itself remains rough, disruptive, dangerous. \u201cThese violent delights have violent ends,\u201d the Friar warns Romeo. So it is not youth, for Shakespeare or for Imhof, that offers hope for the future. Youth comes and goes, and Imhof is now 46.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n The hope lies instead in art \u2014 which emerges late in \u201cDoom,\u201d when the action thrillingly shifts from disaffection to the hard work of dance. Around the two-hour mark, the audience clusters beneath the Jumbotron for a virtuosic solo by the ballerina Devon Teuscher,<\/a> whose unhurried arabesques have all the melancholy rigor that \u201cDoom\u201d needed in hours one and two. Soon after, on a stage at the back of the Armory, a whole corps de ballet emerges. There are snatches of Bach, snatches of Balanchine, even a snatch of dance criticism (in the form of Arlene Croce\u2019s notorious non-review<\/a> of Bill T. Jones from 1994). The poses and pessimism recede, and we are finally, exhaustedly, facing what art can and cannot do.<\/p>\n What brought Imhof fame was how her performances showed humans turning (or turning themselves) into objects, into pictures, into digital commodities: first by power structures more bitter than the Montagues and Capulets, and then by the spectators shoving phones in their faces. That\u2019s a good enough start for a young artist, and \u201cDoom\u201d at first doubles down on that pose \u2014 look at me, my life is over, I\u2019m texting through Armageddon, LOL. Yet by the end, through the precision of ballet, Imhof seems at last to be finding the courage to push past fashion, art and music that just mimics our networked commodification. She is finding her way out of immediacy and back to form. In other words, she\u2019s growing up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cThis little screen has all the power,\u201d goes one lyric in one of the night\u2019s many wan ballads, but it doesn\u2019t \u2014 not yet \u2014 and art\u2019s most important role today is to fight back against the media zombification that Imhof first located in \u201cDeal\u201d and \u201cFaust.\u201d There are obvious predecessors for this task: it was the work of the Cubists, who used collage to disrupt newspapers, and of Nam June Paik, who turned video into an arm against television.<\/p>\n Is Imhof up for the same task, and ready now to drop the as-shapeless-as-the-internet attitude and commit to art? Maybe it was the exhaustion, and the heightened emotional reactions you can have in the last hour in a nightclub. But after three hours on my feet I left the Armory with a funny hope that her art is not yet doomed.<\/p>\n Doom: House of Hope<\/strong>
Through March 12. Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, 212-616-3930; info@armoryonpark.org. All tickets are general admission.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n