Conclusions About Performance Art I Made During Anne Imhof's DOOM
Yes, I still think about it all the time.
Tomorrow, Art21 is dropping a new documentary on Anne Imhof’s DOOM, the performance art piece that New Yorkers either loved or hated. Negative reviewers called it boring for its three-hour runtime, and shallow because all the performers were beautiful. I myself wrote an 800-word review for [magazine redacted] on how much I enjoyed it, and unfortunately they killed the because I took too long to write it. (After one round of edits, I submitted my final draft two weeks after watching it. I’m slow, what can I say. )
Anyway, I actually fucking loved it, and believe it or not, I still think of it often. The experience filled my brain with new questions about the nature of performance art versus entertainment; the origins of art in ritual; participation versus viewership; etc, all of which I find myself asking whenever I encounter art of all kinds. Basically I came to the conclusion that there are no set rules for criticism when it comes to performance art, so I made some myself.
You can read the full piece here. For the more brain rotted among us, I pre-chewed the main ideas to feed you like a little baby bird:
Art is explicitly different from entertainment; the expectation for performance art to entertain us forgets its history of deliberate transgression, often being illegible, uncomfortable and/or boring. Recall Vito Acconci’s masturbating under the floorboards, for example, or Marina Abramovic sitting in a chair. Imhof’s playbill also references Bruce Nauman’s 1968 Slow Angle Walk, hour-long footage of the artist pacing in his studio, the most literal expression of boredom there is.
I increasingly do not care what work is “about.” In Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation, she extolls criticism that “dissolves considerations of content into those of form.” From the beginning of history, content has simply been a question of which allegorical figure or existential question the artist has adopted from a list that will repeat for all eternity. How many sculptures of Saint Sebastian have you seen? How many times has the Egyptian god Osiris been depicted before Matthew Barney’s River of Fundament? Ultimately content simply boils down to the aesthetic or narrative foundation that fills out the work, now matter how many times we’ve seen them before.
The question of form is essentially execution. What I care about is what the artist did. Anne Carson once asked of poetry: “Given whatever material we’re going to talk about [...] how can we move within it in a way we’ve never moved before?” Similarly I ask how did the artist take ownership of this otherwise familiar subject—how much did she fuck it up? DOOM reads to me as a deep investigation of the defining features of disparate performance forms, a body of research Imhof deconstructed and stitched back together into her own genre of theater.
Audience expectation and behavior is a huge part of how we experience and evaluate performance’s many forms and genres: in a playhouse you sit facing forward and applaud when it’s over; at a sporting event you cheer and stand throughout; a gallery is where you go to not react at all, offering at best a silent, appreciative nod. Often audiences hate when this order is disrupted, which was a huge part of DOOM. Despite offering total free rein, its lack of clear-cut behavioral cues left the audience feeling notable awkward and confused. “Why the fuck is no one dancing?” one viewer asked during one of the live concerts. Well, they were probably paralyzed by the embarrassing uncertainty of what the fuck to do with themselves.
Fun fact about making new rules for audience expectations and behavior: Bruce Nauman never meant for his hour-long recordings of absolutely uneventful performances to be viewed straight through, like a movie, but frequently revisited, like a sculpture.
Performance art eliminates any buffers between the performer and viewer. A critic or two wrote that they had felt alienated by the beauty and cool of the performers. If this level of confrontation or vulnerability makes you feel uncomfortable, for the love of god just have a drink or two. Herman Nitsch provided his audiences unlimited wine from his own vineyard. Imhof let you walk in and walk out whenever you wanted to go to the bar.
Beauty is also not immediately anti-intellectual. I would argue that beauty is a) the essential pursuit of art-making (which is obviously relative and available to a wide range of expressions) and b) a difficult and increasingly rare feat.
Also am I crazy to think that this experience was meant to be fun, cute and romantic??
What does it mean to like a work of art? I think it’s the connections you make through points of recognition. Imhof’s setlist was wildly referential across a variety of genres, touching on the history of conceptual art, popular culture, film scores, classical music, etc… But maybe you do not listen to this particular genre of music, or never saw Baz Luhrman’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet. In that case, the unfamiliar reference becomes meaningless. This is okay; for the vast majority of art history, I was not the target audience the artist had in mind. But to connect with the immediately unfamiliar takes a degree of receptiveness and vulnerability. A willingness to sit in discomfort to see where it goes. Once again, I highly recommend having a drink to take the edge off.
It’s kind of incredible how she was live-orchestrating the whole thing with the use of smartphones?
On that huge clock: Time is the common language of all performance forms, and the thing that separates it from other forms of art.
Nice.