Anne Imhof’s Vapid ‘DOOM’ Performance Has Nothing to Say

Before she became a Golden Lion–winning artist, Anne Imhof was a bouncer, working at a club in a Frankfurt suburb that she has described as a “headquarters” for herself and her friends. The club has always haunted her work—Aqua Leo, one of her early performances, derived its name from the code words that she and the other bouncers used to communicate during their shifts. In a less obvious way, it also seems to haunt her newest work, a three-hour piece called DOOM, for which attendees are kept from entering the stage until performers remove the barricades. From the performance’s onset, you may not feel cool enough to get in, even if you’ve paid the $50 fee to be there.

On Monday night, during DOOM’s premiere at New York’s Park Avenue Armory, a crowd amassed in front of those barricades inside the venue’s iconic Drill Hall, the rows of people becoming so thick that it was hard to move in the smoky darkness. This may have been meant as a way of building expectation about what lay beyond: a group of chicly dressed performers and a flotilla of black Cadillac Escalades, all arranged around a set recalling a gymnasium.

But for me, the experience felt like being penned in. It uncomfortably recalled a police tactic known as kettling, in which protestors’ movements are restricted, often so that it is easier for cops to arrest demonstrators.

It’s not completely clear if Imhof intended for this, but it’s unlikely that she did. She’s known for sprawling performances that have involved chained-up animals, writhing humans, and voyeuristic situations. These performances about social dynamics have earned her widespread acclaim—DOOM is her first in New York in a decade, hence all the excitement leading up to it—and widespread debate, with her detractors claiming that all these things make her work fascist. Responding to those allegations, Imhof once said, “That’s bullshit. My background is very much an anti-fascist one.” To drive home the point here, she’s included a sign in DOOM that reads: DEATH TO FASCISM FREEDOM TO THE PEOPLE.

Yet DOOM did not liberate me. I felt like just another prop in Imhof’s disaffected world, perhaps one that didn’t even belong there. Most of the time, as I watched Imhof’s zombified performers traipse around, recite quotations from dance criticism, and take selfies, I felt nothing at all.

It was odd to view DOOM so numbly, especially given how weird it all is. There was a sequence where Eliza Douglas, Imhof’s former partner and frequent collaborator, removed her shirt, lay on the floor, and ran a black marker across her nude back. There was a part in which one performer, the talented actress Talia Ryder, intoned the Jeremih song “Paradise” live, and another in which she and another cast member sprawled out together on a dirtied mattress strewn with shattered iPhones. There were many moments in which Douglas and others vaped, puffing strawberry-scented mist into the audience.

All the while, a jumbotron displayed a countdown, ticking away the seconds until the end of performance. But the clock did not create tension, because it mainly reinforced how slowly time passed, reminding me of how boring it all was.

Imhof based DOOM on Romeo and Juliet, a cornerstone of high-school English class curricula. Ryder played Juliet, Douglas was one of three performers acting as Mercutio, and a trio of Romeos were on hand. This was no average Shakespeare adaptation, however—its narrative was difficult to follow, and the Shakespearian English was interspersed with French-language rap and wolf-like howling. Without some soliloquies taken straight from the Bard himself, you’d hardly know DOOM was a remake of this classic tale of star-crossed lovers.

DOOM’s inscrutability seems purposeful, especially since Imhof provided no program notes explaining the plot. The work instead appears to unfold in segments that are vaguely linear, with the plot of the Shakespeare play abstracted into moving tableaux. That moves DOOM more fully into the realm of theatre, making it quite unlike Faust, her 2017 German Pavilion, which could be entered and exited at will. But the details surrounding the characters of DOOM, their motivations, and their actions are purposefully shorn away, creating the sense that this is a work guided by an inner logic knowable only to the performers themselves.

Occasionally, the performers pulled out their phones and texted each other using a WhatsApp channel, a strategy also used by Imhof and her cast during past performances. This method conceals the reasoning behind some pretty bizarre contortions, leaving audience members to their own devices—at times literally. Without a compass to explore a piece so strange as this one, most people seemed content to capture it all on their phones.

I, too, walked away with a photo library full of crappy videos of Imhof’s performers. But filming all this footage did not assuage the feeling that I’d failed to make it into an in-crowd composed of DOOM’s cast and creator, who, along with their respective circles, seem like the main target audience for this work. DOOM appears to be about this exact sensation: it takes a play about opposing factions and spins it into a Gesamtkunstwerk about sparring cliques. She sets part of the action in installations made to look like high-school locker rooms; viewers can look on as the performers strip down, apply deodorant, change outfits, and quietly gossip there. Other portions take place in front of tables decorated with centerpieces filled with star-shaped balloons—the kind often seen at prom.

Viewers are not so much invited into the drama, however, as they are walled out of it. Her performers are stony-faced misfits who somnambulantly drift around, occasionally enacting balletic choreographies along the way. The entire performance has the cooler-than-thou vibe of a Balenciaga runway show, replete with a range of rail-thin zillennials in baggy jeans; it has all the surface-level appeal of a Vogue slideshow devoted to one of those events, too.

Imhof does appear to have some ideas on her mind. In front of one Cadillac, she’s placed torn pieces of cardboard scrawled with protest slogans. One reads, “You can’t control my body!” Others demand rights for trans people, whose livelihood is under attack from conservative politicians, both here and elsewhere. It’s possible to read this performance as an oblique plea for the survival of queer people, a spotlight on a self-functioning community that exists beyond the mainstream and has been targeted by it.

But how best to explain the ways that Imhof’s performance sometimes obstructs the movements of its spectators, despite those signs calling for bodily autonomy? There’s almost nowhere to sit during this three-hour performance—viewing it requires enduring built-in physical brutality that will render this piece inaccessible to some. There are also times when the performers unexpectedly cut their way through the masses, forcing uncareful viewers to skitter away. I was nearly knocked over by a slow-moving line of dancers who paced back and forth, repeatedly putting their pointer fingers to their eyes, as if to express unseen tears.

And how best to explain the rest of it? Why does one performer receive a back tattoo—seemingly for real, with no makeup or special effects—on top of an SUV? Why are Radiohead and Frank Sinatra lyrics appropriated here and performed live? Why are there selections from Bach, Schubert, and Mahler to complement these songs? Why care at all?

DOOM meets a fraught moment with no answers. It’s glib, dull, and hopeless, and it expresses itself well within its first half hour, during a scene where the cast shouts in unison: “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead. I think I let you up inside my head.” The situation right now in the US is pretty apocalyptic: perhaps we really are fucked, and perhaps we really are doomed. But thankfully, we’re not dead yet. I left DOOM yearning for art with a pulse.