Anne Imhof, Dance in the Ruins
The German provocateur's Los Angeles opening showcases her choreographic talents and her obsession with youthful nihilism. But when the performers leave, the void remains.
LOS ANGELES — As expected, the opening night of Anne Imhof's "Emo" at Sprüth Magers, the most the German artist's major exhibition to date in the United States, has been a disaster.
A charcoal gray pickup truck had apparently collapsed off Wilshire Boulevard - in front of the 10 pieces of the Berlin Wall on permanent display outside 5900 Wilshire Tower, up a flight of stairs and in the pillars of the gallery. Unfazed, a pair of lanky, lethargic Goths performed on the wreckage. One shaved his abs, the other drained the water from the jugs, then sang the Meat Puppets' "Lake of Fire" at the top of his voice. Puffs of a smoke machine billowed from the crushed hood of the truck.
The scene was incongruous, compelling and a bit funny - it wasn't meant to be convincing. It was meant to flaunt its freshness, where you would expect gore. The truck, huddled against the building without touching it, an accident with no fluids or debris, was staged (and an actual scene) for the angst outperformance. Theatrical, dramatic - emotionally inappropriate: "emo", in a word. Imhof presents adolescent nihilism - convicts even in blooming youth - as relief from a tortured world.
Now taking advantage of his mid-career, touted in promotional materials as the voice of a new generation, Imhof has developed his demanding style of choreographing everyday actions while studying fine arts at the Städelschule and housing in Frankfurt's counterculture. Her painfully slow and deceptively well-rehearsed ensemble performances resemble the deconstructed modern dance of Simone Forti or Yvonne Rainer cut with the flinty boredom of youth subcultures. Imhof's "Faust," a slacker opera staged in the Nazi-era German pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, with screaming mannequins under glass floors and barking Dobermans behind chain-link fences, won the Golden Lion and secured his notoriety as a cryptic anti-fascist. /p>
At the Sprüth Magers outpost in Los Angeles, Imhof's relatively brief taste of Imhof's oeuvre will not be repeated. Instead, the exhibition presents recent examples of the artist's visual vocabulary: degraded glossy surfaces; photorealistic paintings of clouds or club kids in red and blue 3D; videos and architectural arrangements of mass-produced storage units; bangs and jagged fonts. Without the performers, in the clarity of the next day, Imhof's "Emo" has the unsatisfying smell of sequels found in empty nightclubs.
In a cover of A work of the last year “Youth” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the first floor of the gallery is divided into rooms built with caged IBCs, a standardized and forklift-friendly container for bulk liquids. Paintings on shiny aluminum panels appear through grid-like openings in the walls. Turn a corner and...
The German provocateur's Los Angeles opening showcases her choreographic talents and her obsession with youthful nihilism. But when the performers leave, the void remains.
LOS ANGELES — As expected, the opening night of Anne Imhof's "Emo" at Sprüth Magers, the most the German artist's major exhibition to date in the United States, has been a disaster.
A charcoal gray pickup truck had apparently collapsed off Wilshire Boulevard - in front of the 10 pieces of the Berlin Wall on permanent display outside 5900 Wilshire Tower, up a flight of stairs and in the pillars of the gallery. Unfazed, a pair of lanky, lethargic Goths performed on the wreckage. One shaved his abs, the other drained the water from the jugs, then sang the Meat Puppets' "Lake of Fire" at the top of his voice. Puffs of a smoke machine billowed from the crushed hood of the truck.
The scene was incongruous, compelling and a bit funny - it wasn't meant to be convincing. It was meant to flaunt its freshness, where you would expect gore. The truck, huddled against the building without touching it, an accident with no fluids or debris, was staged (and an actual scene) for the angst outperformance. Theatrical, dramatic - emotionally inappropriate: "emo", in a word. Imhof presents adolescent nihilism - convicts even in blooming youth - as relief from a tortured world.
Now taking advantage of his mid-career, touted in promotional materials as the voice of a new generation, Imhof has developed his demanding style of choreographing everyday actions while studying fine arts at the Städelschule and housing in Frankfurt's counterculture. Her painfully slow and deceptively well-rehearsed ensemble performances resemble the deconstructed modern dance of Simone Forti or Yvonne Rainer cut with the flinty boredom of youth subcultures. Imhof's "Faust," a slacker opera staged in the Nazi-era German pavilion for the 2017 Venice Biennale, with screaming mannequins under glass floors and barking Dobermans behind chain-link fences, won the Golden Lion and secured his notoriety as a cryptic anti-fascist. /p>
At the Sprüth Magers outpost in Los Angeles, Imhof's relatively brief taste of Imhof's oeuvre will not be repeated. Instead, the exhibition presents recent examples of the artist's visual vocabulary: degraded glossy surfaces; photorealistic paintings of clouds or club kids in red and blue 3D; videos and architectural arrangements of mass-produced storage units; bangs and jagged fonts. Without the performers, in the clarity of the next day, Imhof's "Emo" has the unsatisfying smell of sequels found in empty nightclubs.
In a cover of A work of the last year “Youth” at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the first floor of the gallery is divided into rooms built with caged IBCs, a standardized and forklift-friendly container for bulk liquids. Paintings on shiny aluminum panels appear through grid-like openings in the walls. Turn a corner and...
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