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.
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