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New York Times
06-03-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Doom' Has Everything, and Nothing
A Berlin nightclub habitué 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 'Doom: House of Hope,' an evening-length spectacle of attitude and abjection by the German artist and choreographer Anne Imhof, and may have developed tinnitus as a result. Your ears are not the only organs that may suffer if you come to the Park Avenue Armory, where Imhof's 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'll 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'll 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're on your feet throughout. 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 'Doom' you'll 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's duration ticks down: three hours to go. The experience of 'Doom' is indeed not unlike a night at the club — 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. This is a night of harsh contradictions, and I just can't girdle my judgment into cheer-or-jeer format. 'Doom' is narcissistic, frivolous, sometimes naïve — 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't just staring into space, indulge a youthful nihilism that is obvious and tiresome — until an extraordinary shift in the third hour (by which time much of the opening night's audience had bailed), when they find grand, even Romantic purpose. That 'Doom' 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's 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's trying. This is the first New York presentation in a decade from Imhof, whose lugubrious performances dramatize the effects of digital technologies 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 'Deal.' She hit international prominence with 'Faust,' at the 2017 Venice Biennale, where Imhof's impassive, streetwear-clad dancers stared down audiences at the German Pavilion who waited two hours to get in. With 'Faust,' 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. In the wake of the first Trump election and the Brexit referendum, Imhof's club-kid hauteur and play with totalitarian imagery — her German pavilion equated the Nazi show palace to an Apple store — resulted in an uneasy blend of antagonism and exclusivity, one she shared notably with the Georgian fashion designer Demna Gvasalia. But anyone who sees 'Doom' will clock quite quickly that it is far less fashionable: For better or worse, Balenciaga is out and 'Euphoria' is in. 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's 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 — above all Toon Lobach and Vinson Fraley, two dancers with very different bodies who circle and shadow each other — display the intense self-focus that Imhof has elicited in the past. Instead, and very quickly, 'Doom' 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're standing in the right spot or must crane to catch if you're 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 'Doom' at the halfway mark. More are just cliché — such as the wannabe Velvet Underground songs of Eliza Douglas, Imhof's ex-girlfriend and frequent collaborator — and some are outright humiliating. Over the night you will endure recitations of jejune poetry cribbed from anime scripts ('For heroes there are trials'), 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. Truly, there's a cynical intelligence to the variety-show structure of 'Doom': 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 … well, that's culture in 2025 for you! An ambient bath. A perpetual ooze. This smooth, streaming, unstructured approach — a condition that the literary scholar Anna Kornbluh has called 'immediacy,' in evidence everywhere from no-style autofiction to POV TikToks — is the cultural reflection of our technological and economic disorder, and as you pull out your phone you become one with the defeatism. And yet still, glistening within the gloom of 'Doom,' 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 'Romeo and Juliet' — 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's iPhone. (Much later on comes a witty quotation of another 'Romeo and Juliet' adaptation: the Jets-versus-Sharks opening number of 'West Side Story,' all thrusting arms and kick turns.) These gobbets of Shakespeare, familiar from American school days, are the first signs of leaving behind style for structure. Like 'Doom,' 'Romeo and Juliet' is a play in which love drowns in violence — specifically, the violence of social polarization, which bleeds from an older aristocracy's 'ancient grudge' into the lives of their brawling children and manservants. It's 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. 'These violent delights have violent ends,' 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. The hope lies instead in art — which emerges late in 'Doom,' 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, whose unhurried arabesques have all the melancholy rigor that 'Doom' 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's notorious non-review of Bill T. Jones from 1994). The poses and pessimism recede, and we are finally, exhaustedly, facing what art can and cannot do. 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's a good enough start for a young artist, and 'Doom' at first doubles down on that pose — look at me, my life is over, I'm 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's growing up. 'This little screen has all the power,' goes one lyric in one of the night's many wan ballads, but it doesn't — not yet — and art's most important role today is to fight back against the media zombification that Imhof first located in 'Deal' and 'Faust.' 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. 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.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Disruptor Asks, Is New York Finally Ready for ‘DOOM'?
Barking Doberman pinchers behind chain link fencing and performers who looked like they came straight from the Berlin club scene made the ultracool German performance artist Anne Imhof infamous. But last week, at her first rehearsal for 'DOOM: House of Hope' at the Park Avenue Armory in Manhattan, there were no dogs in sight. There were still those impossibly beautiful performers, though, many very young. They were sprawled on the floor of one of the Armory's rehearsal spaces, sitting at the piano, testing out bits of movement, or rehearsing lines from marked up copies of Shakespeare's 'Romeo and Juliet' — the new project's starting point. Belying her works' fierce, sometimes aggro aesthetics, Imhof was a gentle, observing presence, not so much directing the performers but asking them how they wanted to proceed — utterly unlike the strict rigor of, say, a ballet rehearsal. 'I count on chance and accidents and things that are not planned,' the 46-year-old Berlin-based artist told me. 'There has to be enough openness to it that the performers have agency.' Imhof burst onto the scene at the 2017 Venice Biennale, when her unsettling installation in the German Pavilion won the coveted Golden Lion award. 'For those of us not living in Germany, or Europe, she came out pretty fully formed with that piece,' said RoseLee Goldberg, the founder and director of Performa, the New York biennial that has been evangelizing performance art for more than 20 years. 'It was a powerful takeover — she grabbed the reins of what's possible in performance in a large setting with a big audience.' Starting March 3 through March 12, New York audiences will have a rare opportunity to see Imhof's work when she stages her biggest performance to date in the Armory's 55,000-square-foot drill hall. Despite the amorphous vibe of the rehearsals, there was a subterranean feeling that something big was emerging. Around 50 performers will reimagine Shakespeare's romantic tragedy over the course of three hours. It will feature 26 Cadillac Escalades parked on a floor designed to resemble a school gym, a Jumbotron with a countdown clock and a pirate radio station playing on the vehicles' radios. The performers include skateboarders, dancers from the American Ballet Theater and 'flexers' — practitioners of a form, part dance hall, part hip-hop, that emerged in Brooklyn in the late '90s. Imhof, known for her deep commitment to collaboration, sees her role as providing a scaffold for creative types, many of whom she's worked with for years, to make their own decisions. Instructions for performers might be: 'Hold a pose until you are bored with it,' or 'move until the gesture is pathetic or ridiculous and then push on further past that point.' For all the uncertainty built into Imhof's method, it is remarkably intricate, even more so in this cavernous space. 'This time we have a script, we have a show book, we have a dancing score, we have a ballet score, we have a score that looks insane because it's just my drawings of where everyone is supposed to be,' Imhof said. 'It's very much a score, like it's a SUPER score, like it makes me crazy how much score there is,' she added, laughing. Multiple performers will take on the roles of Romeo and Juliet simultaneously, and the casting is pointedly gender bending. 'I'm making images that I actually want to see,' she said. 'I want to see two women dancing the parts of Romeo and Juliet. I want to see a gender fluid ballet.' In another twist, the piece will start with the main characters' deaths and move toward the beginning of the story — 'I like that we are turning the whole thing around and making the dynamic something more hopeful,' she said. That hopefulness is certainly a departure from the mood of 'Faust,' her Venice Biennale piece. Viewers entered the 1938 Fascist-coded German Pavilion through the back door, flanked by those infamous dogs. Once inside they encountered performers enacting strange, ritualistic activities, setting fires, masturbating, singing or engrossed in their cellphones beneath the glass and steel floor. At points during the five-hour event, they emerged from the claustrophobic space to walk, sing, and scream among the crowd, with industrial music pounding in the background — what one critic described as a 'catwalk show from hell.' The aesthetic drew from corporate architecture, Balenciaga and the Berlin nightclub scene; it was filled with a distinctly 21st-century youthful malaise. The pavilion was packed during its run; lines were up to two hours long. Critical reaction was wildly enthusiastic, though some were put off by the photogenic quality of the work — was it too Instagrammable to be serious art? — while others were skeptical of its refusal to make a clear political statement. As Judith F. Rodenbeck, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of California, Riverside, recalled in a conversation, 'It was hard to tell if the alienation and aggression was supposed to comment on fascism or what have you, or if it was just borrowing its aesthetic.' In 2021, Imhof's 'Natures Mortes, Tableaux Vivants' turned the massive Palais de Tokyo in Paris into a multilevel concert stage. She filled it with her own paintings — her devotion to the medium continues to drive her work — as well as work by other artists, from Théodore Géricault to Rosemarie Trockel. 'DOOM' is not Imhof's first foray in New York — she presented 'Deal' at MoMA PS1 in 2015, in which figures performed abstracted, physical 'transactions' involving a vat of buttermilk and 10 rabbits, surrounded by Imhof's etchings and a video piece. (Klaus Biesenbach, who was the director of MoMA PS1 at the time, is the curator of the Armory show.) 'It was somehow too early for me to face the U.S.,' Imhof said. 'If I had known America better, I would never, ever have done a piece like that. It flew in Europe and in France — they were like, oh, rabbits — but here animal rights activists were putting my name all over the internet.' This time she hopes will be different, not least because she has lived in New York and Los Angeles during the past several years. She has also done research at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts and the Getty Research Institute, where she dug into American ballet, the city's dance scene, performing arts history, and dance criticism, all of which has shaped 'DOOM.' The 'Americana' factor is turned up to eleven. Posters promoting the project around town represent the star-crossed lovers' families as high school mascots — a tiger and a wolf in team hats. The set design evokes a prom that has been crashed by a phalanx of tanklike SUVs, a vehicle that Imhof associates with presidential motorcades and U.S. car culture. At one point, the corps de ballet will be line dancing. The music will echo and quote from Bach and Mahler but also rap, Jim Morrison and Frank Sinatra, in a score composed by Imhof and her collaborators. Despite the title, which seems to point to the anxiety many Americans feel now — Imhof insists that it's not a direct response to President Trump, not least because she began working on the piece more than three years ago. 'The wolves and the lions were originally going to be dressed in red and blue, and I realized, no, that's not going to work, it's too strong of a statement. I don't want to come to America and be loud about American politics.' That said, she added, 'I'm pretty aware that I'm a woman in a privileged position in terms of my career and the opportunities that are open to me, but American politics still affects me in very specific ways,' especially in the administration's repressive actions toward the trans and queer communities, to which she and many of her collaborators belong. Imhof has developed deep relationships with those collaborators scattered across Europe and the U.S., including Ville Haimala, a veteran of the electronic music duo Amnesia Scanner; the multidisciplinary artist and choreographer Jerome AB; the actor Levi Strasser (from 'The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes'); Sihana Shalaj, a model based in Stockholm and Paris; and Josh Johnson, a William Forsyth dancer and choreographer. New faces include Talia Ryder, who starred in 'Matilda' on Broadway; Jacob Madden, a classically trained pianist; and Devon Teuscher, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theater. And then there is Eliza Douglas, the American painter, Balenciaga model and former romantic partner of Imhof, who has been integral to her work for the past nine years — as performer, musician, singer and composer, costume designer and casting director. Her own paintings have been prominently displayed within Imhof's installations. (Not in 'DOOM,' though, which doesn't include any art or sculpture — 'I didn't want objects,' Imhof said.) Douglas and Imhof met in Frankfurt in 2015, when Douglas was a student at the Stäedelschule, the art academy from which Imhof had graduated. She invited Douglas to her show 'Angst' at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. 'I had this funny feeling that I was auditioning,' Douglas told me. The two started dating, and the collaboration developed organically. 'It was so woven into our life. We would be sitting around in our living room, and I would do something strange, and she would like it, and it would become part of the work,' Douglas said. 'I was always kind of performing for her.' The intimacy of their connection even when their romance ended allowed Imhof to remove her own body from the stage, she said. 'Eliza basically took my part, and she was so good,' Imhof explained, 'it shifted for me — I could give away the idea of being this figure inside of the performance.' She is happy to hand over the reins when making her work, a quality that results in a remarkably non-hierarchical environment where performers decide their own path forward. 'Why should I insist on being some singular artistic genius?' David Velasco, a writer and the former editor of Artforum, says a strength of the work is how the performers seem to relate to one another. 'I can always tell in Imhof's work that they are in actual communion,' he said. 'What's revealed is cool to watch unfold.' Perhaps that notion of collectivity is the political thrust of Imhof's art: 'I'm working with people as I dream the world would work,' she said. 'I don't think a performance can effect a total paradigm shift, but I think it can open up the possibility for people of seeing themselves as part of something.'
Yahoo
07-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
SCHOOL BOARD MINUTES INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT #362 October 27, 2010
SCHOOL BOARD MINUTES INDEPENDENT SCHOOL DISTRICT #362 October 27, 2010 The October 27, 2010 regular meeting of the School Board was called to order by Chair Doug Franz at 7:00 p.m. with all members present . Motion by Imhof, seconded by Mastin, and carried unanimously to approve the agenda: The school recognized Students of the Month for September: Jr. High – Garrett Nuthak, Sr. High – Paige Delack Enrollment update; Dental Insurance update; Sports update; Lunch Program Recognition -Kathy Siltman; Update on student trip to see the President. Public Forum: None Motion by Gray , seconded by Knaeble, and carried unanimously to approve the minutes of the September 15th regular meeting. Motion by Imhof, seconded by Mastin, and carried unanimously to approve the invoices in the amount of $ 152,376.86. Motion by Mastin, seconded by Knaeble, and carried unanimously to approve the treasurer's report. Motion by Gray, seconded by Knaeble, and carried unanimously to approve the consent agenda: A. Hire Beth Bachmeier – HS Phy Ed/Health .17 fte B. Hire Sara Kennedy – HS English .17 fte C. Hire Marc Windsnes – HS Social .17 fte D. Hire Lisa Reller – Bus Driver E. Hire Prom Advisor – Trina Little F. Hire Winter Concessions Manager – Heidi Vork G. Hire John Larson – Head Girls Basketball coach Motion by Mastin, seconded by Gray, and carried unanimously to adopt a resolution to support the district application to MN State High School League Foundation. Motion by Imhof, seconded by Knaeble, and carried unanimously to approve the Assurance of Compliance Prohibiting Discrimination. Motion by Imhof, seconded by Gray, and carried unanimously to call a special meeting Nov. 10, 2010, 7:00 p.m. to: A. Canvass Election Returns B. One-Day Bond Resolution Motion by Nelson, seconded by Imhof, and carried unanimously to direct the Superintendent to appoint an assistant girls basketball coach if position is not filled before the season begins. Rachel's Challenge overview given by Angie Williams. Motion by Mastin, seconded by Gray, and carried unanimously to go forward with getting the program here. The Reports contained the following: A. Nutrition Committee update by Superintendent. Motion by Franz, seconded by Nelson, and carried unanimously to temporarily suspend the policy on meal charging. Motion by Mastin, seconded by Imhof, and carried unanimously to adjourn at 7:45 p.m. Monte Nelson, Clerk The Journal December 4, 2010
