Review of Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope”
Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
In the opening scene of Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope,” I thought I could make out the words “Love me!” in the shrieking, but was quickly distracted by the monstrous presence of dozens of black Cadillac Escalades parked and shining. Once the performers made their way from the back of Wade Thompson Drill Hall to where the audience was standing behind barricades, I thought I understood the repeated words “Even more! Even more!” from the garbled sounds. I knew the show was well underway when a young performer began repeating, “We’re fucked!”
A new commission by the Park Avenue Armory running through March 12, “DOOM: House of Hope” is a series of vignettes and a study in dynamics: loud and soft, bright and dim, intimate and public, aggressive and tender, clear and chaotic. Through the theatrical haze emerged a story of loss and love intertwined, situated in a dreamlike stream of consciousness that I first resisted and eventually gave into.
It was hard to catch the vibe of death and destruction upon entering the venue, as it was quickly apparent the entire New York art world was present, and friendly stop and chats were frequent. But the ominous feeling crept up on me quickly as the chatter dissipated, and I wondered what I was in for, having avoided reading any reviews. “It’s super long,” whispered someone nearby, as I finally focused on the digital red lettering of a jumbotron noting 03:00:00 to go. I spied performers silently pushing a car into place about thirty feet away.
Perla Haney-Jardine in Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
After a brief few minutes stuck behind barricades, the audience was freed to roam around the entire hall in virtual darkness. Stages were built atop many of the parked cars, and a circular arena beneath the stadium screen was promising. A scene emerged: a dancer embracing himself tightly while waltzing, a crowd quickly forming around him. Then a reenactment of a scene from Romeo & Juliet, the former in a Marilyn Monroe shirt and grey hoodie and the latter tossing a pill bottle. It was hard to hear all the words, and I resorted to watching the live iPhone footage projected on the screens due to sight limitations. I felt myself acclimating to what seemed like a long night ahead.
Then I spotted Eliza Douglas using her iPhone (likely for affect) while lying on the roof of a car in casual observation from above. I wondered if who I had identified as “main characters” would stay that way, but perhaps the point was to try and follow who’s a character and what the storyline is in the first place. The buzz of a tattoo machine began, and a model/performer bared her back for fresh ink. I wondered if the tattoo would say DOOM and imagined Imhof taking volunteers, the model saying, “Fuck it, just do it.”
The tide of the crowd shifted, and I ambled past white table-clothed banquet tables with weighted balloon decorations and a wall of silver tassels that could have been plucked from my 7th-grade Valentine’s Day dance. A drum kit and band setup were staged there, and my heart leaped with excitement for the promise of live music. A car door snapped shut and shook me out of my middle school nostalgia.
Suddenly, Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings rung out over the speakers, and a performer in an orange shirt atop a car roof danced emotively along to one of the composer’s finest pieces. The friction in my body between the pulsing, richly scored waltz of the string instruments and the threat of giant Succession Escalades suddenly powered and possibly running us over was hard to reconcile, especially as we wandered around in the blue light of a blank jumbotron, the trunk of a nearby car ajar.
The following scenes did not enchant me: a performer drawing on themself with Sharpie like my 7-year-old nephew; somewhat random ballet pantomiming (yes, I remember crossed arms mean death from my days en pointe); and more scenes from Romeo & Juliet. The latter came off like a freshman rehash, with students who think projecting their voices is old-timey due to their reliance on FaceTime camera proximity. Indeed, the glitchy iPhone live feed footage persisted on the screen while a somewhat jovial crowd hobnobbed, the violins angled piercingly, and a performer carefully and articulately vaped. Next, there was a call-and-response, half-hearted and protest-march-esque: “For heroes there are trials / For saints there are temptations / For me there is you / You are not born with venom in your veins / You learned it.” I started to lose hope.
Sihana Shalaj being tattooed by Dean Violante in Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory.
Our gaze shifted to a new focus: a performer rapping in French (auto-tuned?) dressed in a Roberto Cavalli hoodie. The only words I could make out were “Bill Gates, mais” and the rhyme “Make some money.” We wandered like aimless cattle who no longer cared to graze, and as the countdown clock descended, I wondered if I should approach this more methodically, by perhaps following Eliza Douglas around specifically or poking my head into every car window from left to right, in search of a secretly intriguing who-knows-what. I became self-conscious of my opinions and wrote the caveat, “Review written as a totally ignorant attendee, having only seen one Anne Imhof performance in my life.”
A man in a sweatshirt that said “Pray For Magic” caught my attention, and then, a breathy exchange between performers called out “I need discipline” and “I won’t disappear” simultaneously. At this point, a couple casually started twirling to the music, holding their own dance party and either giving in to the vibe or trying to lighten the mood. Cut to a group of performers holding their hands in what first looked like a salute, but then I realized they were miming holding a gun to their heads. Then, pause. Is it the awkward transitions between one segment and the next, lacking the normal formalities of clapping or cheering, that make this art? The crowd seemed trained for the silences, like a classical music pro who keeps their hands folded between Beethoven movements.
While gazing up during an oddly tender balcony scene from Romeo & Juliet, I couldn’t help but notice Juliet’s gently furrowed brow, as if she was looking down from the heavens, deeply concerned about humanity’s state. But then, “Goodnight, goodnight, as sweet repose…” was interrupted by a soft car horn. A thought entered my mind: are we supposed to interact with the cars more? If so, we were all being terribly polite.
Eliza Douglas in Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
In a particularly nice musical moment, the tattoo artist wrote in beautiful script on the small arm of a model, “I have a soul of led.” As I pondered the spelling of the last word, a singer sang out, “Remind me why I am here in this world!” An Enya-like backtrack began and distracted me from any further emotional investment. And on to the next moment! Performers in lettered jackets, ties, and cardigans swept through us, and audience members were left to fill in their wake. I quickly tried to catch up: it looked like Wolves against Tigers in a face-off, a la West Side Story’s Jets and Sharks. One member from the Tigers approached the other team, skateboard in hand, and we heard, “Go girl, happy nights to happy days!” Emboldened, she set out the board, and suddenly, a brief mix-up of skateboarding and movement ensued.
Sharleen Chidiac (guitar), Eva Bella Kaufman (drums), Lia Wang (vocals), Jaxob Eilinghoff (bass) in Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
To my left, Douglas was being embraced tightly around the knees by a school mascot of a prep academy. As I watched, Douglas bit the mascot’s head with her teeth and managed to remove it from the head of the other performer, to which he responded by biting onto the other ear of the bear. I decided it was time for a five-dollar Poland Spring, and as I was walking out, I heard a distorted rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner. After a brief break (concessions included Skittles and Boom Chicka Pop) and a moment to admire the Louis C. Tiffany interior of the Armory’s “Veterans Room,” I felt I had somehow missed the crux of the whole performance.
I walked back into a battle of the bands-esque scene, with an all-girl punk band performing whisper screamo and a crowded mixer of Capulets and Montagues gone wild. Watching the crowd surfing through a windshield’s tempered glass, I spotted performers in Mercutio and Benvolio jerseys and felt a sense of familiarity in the way one does when mistaking a celebrity for an acquaintance (“Where have we met?”). Having come of age in the AMC theater during Baz Luhrman’s Romeo & Juliet at the exact moment of seeing Leonardo DiCaprio smoke that cigarette on the pier, I longed to don my own athletic mesh and jump in the mosh pit. In this third hour, I began to succumb to the world I was now a part of and somehow recall like deja vu: the rumbling, angsty elegance of teenage determination.
I sort of lost the thread after getting distracted by the sudden appearance of a grand piano littered with sheet music. Some spoken word version of “I would do anything for love” broke down into a calm and assertive voice reciting obituaries of renowned ballet critics from The New York Times. This voice belonged to a woman who plunked herself down and started playing the piano, saying, “I have always insisted that what I was reviewing was not a dance itself but an afterimage, imprinted in my mind something personal and partial to throw out there in the cultural conversation whatever that might be.“
Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
Eliza Douglas, who had been writhing under a white sheet blowing vape smoke through the fibers, was now topless, stuffing a pomegranate into her mouth and squeezing the juices over her body with a shaking, raised fist. The assertive voice said, “How lucky we are that I saw what I saw when I saw it and lived to tell the tale.” Then she lay down on the floor next to the bear mascot performer, and the two exchanged the phrase, “I want to see the sun come up tomorrow,” while Douglas methodically crammed playing cards into her mouth. What is the meaning of eating Aces and Spades? Rejecting fate, or social classes? The opposite of following suit? It was disarming to watch, and I imagined internal paper-cuts before realizing the cards were edible and had the texture of a communion wafer.
Imhof’s “DOOM” is a masterclass in deflection. Before I could ponder the relationship of the pomegranate’s symbolism of fertility, death, and resurrection too much, an electric guitar struck up in the mezzanine. We all forgot the present and headed towards an exciting future that certainly awaited us on stage at the back of Drill Hall. After enjoying a brief chapter of ballet dancers in studio attire presenting themselves as if during a curtain call, we were once again wrenched back to a different area of the hall by the dancers moving back to center stage.
One of the major factors of this performance is navigating one’s own body and personal space alongside hundreds of other people determined to get a good glimpse. This is not just relegated to audience members though—performers must adeptly weave through the crowd to take their place just as well. At one point, I observed Klaus Biesenbach, curator of the performance, hanging back with a cool distance as we followed each other like sheep.
I particularly enjoyed Eliza Douglas’ and Anne Imhof’s original songs, the latter of whose “For Real” devolved into a refrain of “Love me, love me, love me, love me, love me!” and seamlessly transitioned into Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host” (lyrics: I want to be someone else or I'll explode…).
Even more ballet capped off the last thirty minutes (danced by an incredibly beautiful cast of serious professionals), and I mused at Imhof forcing the arty crowd to enjoy classical music and dance. I was knocked off my high horse when two dancers entered into a full make-out session, which I quickly adapted to like the rest of the performance.
Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
As the clock reached 5:00 minutes left, the audience began craning their necks to check the countdown while Douglas dismounted the roof of a nearby Escalade, and another performer took to center stage to sing “The End” by The Doors. I wasn’t familiar with the song, but the lyrics “Of our elaborate plans, the end / Of everything that stands, the end / No safety or surprise, the end” feel so apropos to our cultural moment that I was thrown off balance by the transition to the ascendant “We Can,” an original song by Douglas.
Throughout the performance, I found her voice arrestingly intimate because it was somehow on and off pitch as well as simultaneously apathetic and sincere, appearing as though she was singing only for herself. In the closing song, which had Douglas reaching into her soprano, she sang the startlingly rhythmic lyrics, “Daddy couldn’t do it, mommy couldn’t do it, teacher couldn’t do it, preacher couldn’t do it… We can, we can, we can, we can.” The performers trudged off stage into a high beam, their silhouettes receding through crepuscular rays.
Anne Imhof’s “DOOM: House of Hope” at Park Avenue Armory. Nadine Fraczkowski. Courtesy the artist, Galerie Buchholz, Sprüth Magers, and Park Avenue Armory.
