In her signature grunge style, Imhof transformed the cavernous main hall of the Armory into something resembling a quintessential high school gym, with the central “court” ringed by a fleet of gleaming black Cadillac Escalades—those ubiquitous symbols of celebrity and anonymity, looming reminders of the omnipresent state. Groups of young, varsity–coded performers roved the space, or perched on top of the cars, reading passages from Romeo and Juliet, Jean Genet’s Querelle of Brest, the poems of Heinrich Heine, and performing works by Bach and Mahler, or covers of The Doors and Radiohead. (Eliza Douglas’s cover of Radiohead’s Talk Show Host, which was featured in Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 film, was particularly moving.) A Jumbotron screen in the center of the court projected closeups of the actors and, intermittently, a clock counting down the remaining time of the performance. The effect was one of stepping into a looking-glass version of an American high school movie circa early 2000s, reimagined for decidedly darker and more sinister times. In this post-optimistic landscape, the past is reworked and inverted, stripped down to stylized markers of an almost-bygone Americana.
As in her other works, Imhof explores the effects of technology, digitization, and spectatorship. In essence, Doom was a choose-your-own-adventure that blurred the line between performance and participation. The audience was free to amble around and go wherever the perceived action was, as if immersed in a collective fantasy or dream. With this pervading sense of ambiguity and restlessness, Imhof successfully captured the universal craving for meaning, so acutely felt in one’s teenage years (and beyond) when one flits from one reference and spectacle to another. The metaphor is equally relevant in the cultural and political moment that we find ourselves in. Doom felt at once personal and political in an unexpectedly touching way, conveying a melancholic sense of lost innocence not only for the individual but for a nation teetering on the edge of a clear inflection point.
Text by Anfisa Vrubel
Photos by Arya Ghavamian and Nadine Fraczkowski
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