'Drill' (Park Avenue Armory)

On Saturday evening, 29 June, my friend Diana, the woman I often go to theater with, called me to ask if I was interested in seeing Drill, a video installation by German artist Hito Steyerl at the Park Avenue Armory.  She wanted to go on Monday, 1 July, so I told her I’d look it up on line and see what it was and what the considerations about visiting it were in terms of viewing hours and how much time would be required, and so on—and I’d see what I could learn about the exhibit to decide if it interested me or not.

Well, I first discovered that even putting together the information regarding when and how long and such was frustratingly hard—something I’ve learned is true about many event sites like theater and art exhibits (I had a hell of a time gathering the same sort of information about Frieze Sculpture at Rockefeller Center, which I reported on Rick On Theater on 30 June)—and then, trying to find out what Drill is about—or even exactly what it is—was next to impossible. 

In the end, I agreed to accompany Diana because she seemed to want to go, even though I had misgivings about its appeal for me.  I couldn’t pin down a description of the event, even though I looked for other sources than the Armory website such as reviews or other write-ups that might have reported on the exhibit.  I was left with the impression of an amorphous blob of an experience . . . but maybe I was misjudging it.

Diana called me, however, on Sunday and said her Monday schedule was getting crowded and she was going to forego going to see Drill the next afternoon.  Based on my initial misgivings, I decided I wasn’t interested in going for myself.  Then Diana called again on the morning of 4 July and asked if I’d like to try again to get to Drill that afternoon—if the Armory would be open on the Independence Day holiday.  I looked on line and it was open, and Diana called and learned that the Armory box office recommends an hour-and-a-half to see Drill, which consists of the main 21-minute video in the Wade Thompson Drill Hall and then several smaller installations in other historic rooms on the Armory’s first floor.  We Arranged to meet at the Armory, located on Park Avenue between 66th and 67th Streets, at 5 p.m.; the building is open on Thursdays from noon until 8 p.m.

I won’t try to describe Drill myself, at least not at this point.  (I’ll try in a bit, a few ‘graphs down, but I don’t promise to be any more successful than anyone already on line or in the press.)  Steyerl, born in Munich in 1966, is a filmmaker, visual artist, and writer known for taking strong political stances, including regarding the politics of the art world.  Based in Berlin, she’s perhaps best known for her video essays, in which the artist examines contemporary issues she finds urgent such as globalization, feminism, and militarization. 

Arguably, most central to her work, is the mass proliferation and dissemination of images and knowledge through digital technology.  Her work is primarily documentary in form—some call her videos “essay documentaries”—featuring extensive research, composite imagery, interviews, montage, and first-person narration.  As in most essays, whether written or filmed, Steyerl’s videos comprise a personal argument rather than objective reporting.

Steyerl, who has Japanese roots, studied film at Tokyo’s Academy of Visual Arts and at the Hochschule für Fernsehen und Film München (University of Television and Film Munich); she holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).  She currently teaches new media art at Berlin’s Akademie der Künste (Academy of Arts).  The artist’s work has been exhibited at documenta in Kassel, Germany; Manifesta, the roving European Biennial of Contemporary Art; the Taipei Biennial; and the Shanghai Biennial, among other international and U.S. institutions.

Built between 1877 and 1881, the Seventh Regiment Armory, operated by the Park Avenue Armory Conservancy, a non-profit cultural institution, is considered home to “the single most important collection of nineteenth century interiors to survive intact in one building” by the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission.  The 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, often used today for large-scale exhibitions and expansive performances (see my ROT reports on Lincoln Center Festival's Les Éphémères, 15 July 2009, and The Hairy Ape, 18 April 2017), with an 80-foot-high, barrel-vaulted ceiling, is one of the largest unobstructed spaces in New York City, constructed without columns.  

The Armory’s reception rooms, maintained in their original late-19th-century appearance, were designed by leaders of the American Aesthetic Movement, among them Louis Comfort Tiffany, Stanford White, Candace Wheeler, and Herter Brothers. (The Aesthetic Movement was an intellectual and art movement in Europe focusing on aesthetic values over socio-political themes in literature, fine art, music and other arts, including decorative arts, during the second half of the 19th century.  Emphasizing beauty over deeper meaning, the movement flourished in the United States from about 1876 to 1880, the very period during which the Armory was built.)

Created by Steyerl in 2019 on commission from the Armory, Drill opened on 20 June and is scheduled to close on 21 July and occupies almost all of the Armory’s ground floor.  (The rest of the building is cordoned off except for one staircase that leads to a mezzanine level.  There visitors may look out over a small interior balcony and see the Drill Hall from above.  Considering that the Hall is darkened except for the video screens at the far end and some floor lighting, I don’t see the value in this.)  Drill is the title of both the exhibit as a whole and the focal video showing in the Drill Hall.  The rest of the event comprises nine additional installations, dating between 2013 and 2019, in the rooms along the front corridor of the Armory’s ground floor.  The 10 installations are almost all videos, some more than one, or center on a video; there are a couple that are kinds of sculptures or assemblages that don’t involve a video. 

I said that I wasn’t all that avid about going to Drill .  Well, I was right not to have been.  It’s an incomprehensible mess as far as I’m concerned—and self-indulgent and opportunistic in the bargain.  

I was frustrated when I tried to look Drill up on line that I couldn’t find a cogent description of what it is.  Neither the armory site nor any other one I looked at explained what the installation is or what the artist intended to say—at least not in terms I could follow or decipher.  (That’s pretty much why I wasn’t compelled to see it.)  I actually got a little angry that no one was telling me what the hell Drill was all about.  

Well, I found out why no one described the exhibit in simple, direct language.  It can’t be done!  Drill has no cohesiveness as an exhibit—it’s a collection of impulses (elaborate, to be sure, but impulses nonetheless) that Steyerl indulged to express all her social and cultural frustrations and peeves.  The Armory’s own press release demonstrates this: “Drill has been conceived as a response to current socio-political issues, including gun violence, food sovereignty, the international art market and the impact of artificial intelligence and other technologies on everyday realities.”  

The main video, also called Drill, is an essay on anti-gun violence and in opposition to our gun and militarized culture.  It’s directly linked to the Armory, its history, the history of the 7th New York Militia Regiment, and its coincidental connection to the National Rifle Association.  Among my objections to this is that Steyerl cherry-picks the history she cites and edits the narrative so that it sounds like the Armory and the 7th Regiment were a proto-fascist enclave. 

For instance, the video never mentions that when the NRA was founded in 1871 by people associated with the Armory, it wasn’t a pro-gun lobby and right-wing political-activist organization—it was apolitical and promoted firearm safety, marksmanship, and riflery as a sport.  That was true right up through the 1960s.  (Historically, it was the Gun Control Act of 1968 that galvanized the NRA to focus on gun-rights legislation in the mid-1970s and establish its lobbying arm in 1975.)

Furthermore, Drill (I’m addressing the video specifically here, not the whole exhibit of the same title) uses the 7th Regiment’s basement firing range—directly beneath the Drill Hall where the video is shown—as an image of the gun-oriented, violence-prone nature of our culture.  While there may even be some validity to Steyerl’s conclusion, the Armory’s basement is a false and misleading manifestation of that trait.  After all, the Regiment was a military organization, part of the New York State militia and now the National Guard—weaponry and firearms are part of their mission.  If Steyerl wants to make an anti-military point, that’s fine, but she only does this implicitly, not directly—the overt theme of Drill is gun violence among U.S. civilians.  To point out that, hey, there’s a firing range (disused for decades, incidentally, and not accessible to the public)—which the video often calls a “shooting gallery,” a loaded term if there ever was one—in the basement of their home base is a little like Claude Rains’s character in Casablanca, gendarme Captain Renault, saying, “I’m shocked!  Shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.”  It’s disingenuous at the very least.

In one sequence in the basement, self-identified sportswoman Judith Pearson, a gun-owner and hunter who’s a member of the #BoycottNRA movement, points out that there are bullet holes all over the former range, interpreting this as evidence that the 7th Regiment’s soldiers were lousy shots.  Considering that the 8,000-square-foot basement range was in use for years and almost certainly took on scores of various configurations over that time, I contend that Pearson has no idea where the shooter of any given bullet was standing and where his target was located.  There were no remaining firing positions or target stands on which to make such judgments.  (Furthermore, in the cramped space and shadowy lighting, it was nearly impossible, at least for me, to get any idea of the relative layout of the walls and alcoves Pearson was using as reference points.)  In point of fact, I’d be much more concerned about the safety of using a stone-walled cellar as a rifle or pistol range with the likelihood of frequent ricochets!

In general, the first video—partly filmed in various parts of the Armory, including the Drill Hall itself— seems to say that Steyerl is chagrined that the 19th-century military men represented by the 7th Regiment lived in such elaborate, even elegant (they’re a little seedy now) surroundings.  (It’s worth pointing out here that the 7th was nicknamed the “Silk Stocking Regiment” because so many of its members were part of New York City’s social and financial elite.)  She apparently resents that the U.S. military doesn’t live in spartan deprivation.  It’s part of her contention that we glamorize militarism and war, making it seem pretty and romantic.  (I’m sorry—doesn’t anyone remember the television coverage of the Vietnam war?  Because I do, and it wasn’t even remotely prettified or romantic—and it turned increasing numbers of the U.S. citizenry against the war and the military.  That prevented President Lyndon Johnson from running for reelection in 1968.)

I was in the active army for five years about a century after the Park Avenue Armory was built, and I can attest that our facilities, while far from spartan, were hardly luxurious—and some in which I had to live were positively sub-standard.  My dad fought in Europe in World War II and I have a photo of him taking a bath in front of his pup tent, standing naked in a bucket.  It’s also worth noting that in the Victorian era, even factories, warehouses, and machinery were endowed with fairly elaborate decoration and design flourishes.

The only piece in Drill, the exhibit, specifically commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory (Rebecca Robertson, President and Executive Producer; Pierre Audi, Artistic Director; Tom Eccles, Drill curator), Drill, the video installation, is also the only component that was conceived specifically to take place in the Armory.  When Public Historian (that’s what the video’s credits call her) Anna Duensing, a Yale doctoral candidate in history, introduces the topic of the Armory’s gun range, for instance, she stomps on the floor to emphasize that it’s right under her feel—and ours. 

Duensing relates the history and design of the Armory to Steyerl’s vision of our gun-obsessed culture (hence the connection to the NRA and, of course, the presence of “the Park Avenue Armory’s bullet-riddled basements”) while we see and hear testimony of survivors of gun violence and relatives of victims, interspersed with recurring glimpses of the Yale University Precision Marching Band parading in patterns around the Drill Hall floor.  I presume the inclusion of the Yale band, in uniforms resembling Civil War soldiers (with the iconic kepi rather than the taller, more common shako), is intended to illustrate the issue of the militarization of civil society. 

Drill is shown on three large monitors which each shows sometimes different scenes and sometimes the same one, while the sound is coordinated with the central screen.  The Hall is essentially dark—when Diana and I watched the video, we were the only viewers in the room, but I assume other spectators would be no more than shadows—the only lighting coming from LED strip lights laid out in what looked like a floor plan of some large building (not the Armory, however).  (If the diagram-like layout is an actual building somewhere, I couldn’t discover what it is.)  The strips pulsated in rhythm with the musical score of the video (composed by Jules Laplace and Thomas C. Duffy).  Entering the Hall from the first-floor corridor on the building’s west side (that is, the Park Avenue end of the Armory), the seats, which are all laminated blocks, unpadded and without backs, are all scattered around the center of the drill floor; the monitors are toward the east end of the room (the Lexington Avenue side.) 

After Drill, the nine ancillary exhibits that Steyerl dusted off and repurposed were expressions of disapproval over other, not-necessarily-connected social and cultural issues, some of which I couldn’t even interpret and none of which could I relate thematically to some kind of overall point.  The New York Times dubbed Steyerl the “philosopher of our present technological debasement,” and that may be her unifying impulse, but she just seems an anti-establishment protester to me.   These installations are set up in seven rooms along the front corridor, plus at both ends of the corridor itself.  (The program contains a diagram of the Armory’s first floor and the placement of the exhibits, identified by number and keyed to a brief description.  Drill, the video, is number 1.)  It was like a string-of-beads structure—except there wasn’t a string, just a collection of (random, mismatched) beads.

The second video (with respect to the program listing), in the Mary Divver Room (originally a ladies’ reception room, dedicated to Mary Divver, 1841-81, an orphan adopted by the Regiment in the 1850s) on the west side of the corridor at the south end, is The Tower (2016), an eight-minute, computer-generated portrait of a Ukrainian 3D company, Program-Ace of Kharkiv, that used to make shooter computer games but is now caught in the actual violence of the Ukrainian civil war and Russian invasion.  The dual monitors are on a small, round, scarlet-carpeted platform which viewers mount to sit in two high-backed, red swivel chairs.

With narration in Ukrainian (with English subtitles), company CEO Oleg Fonaryov speaks about how the virtual buildings and environments the company creates for online casinos, emergency simulations, and real estate, as well as the video games, are actually becoming floor plans in luxury condos in the United Arab Emirates.  The Tower seemed more appropriate for a conference of game and CAD-environment designers than an art exhibit—even a video-art exhibit—and while the video images were interesting in themselves, they distracted from the text, which seems to be what Steyerl wants us to attend to. 

Next door, in the Board of Officers Room (originally used for Regimental business meetings, social occasions and official receptions and greetings), is the 12-minute-50-second ExtraSpaceCraft (2017), a video about the Autonomous Space Agency filmed at the site of the ruins of the Erbil Observatory, Iraq’s national observatory on Mount Korek in Iraqi Kurdistan.  (The unfinished observatory, established by Saddam Hussein’s predecessor in 1973, was heavily damaged, as can be seen in Steyerl’s video, by Iranian rockets during the Iran–Iraq War of 1980-88.)

ASA, according to its website (http://autonomousspaceagency.org), promotes “intra-terrestrial space travel”—but the “space” to which this phrase refers isn’t so-called outer space but space right here on Earth where artists can work.  “They hope to assist artistic practitioners of all kinds who are forced to learn new languages, ways, and strategies to sustain their practices during current transitions,” asserts their mission statement.  ASA also explains that it isn’t “an exhibiting art institution, but a temporary organisational [sic] structure based on thinking together, learning from each other and sharing commons” that serves “as a scaffolding device that supports the creation of autonomous spaces for common use everywhere, especially in areas affected by accelerated capital, military gentrification, environmental degradation, and reactionary proxy warfare.” 

(None of this, by the way, is articulated in ExtraSpaceCraft.  Note that there are at least two other organizations with similar names that are unrelated to ASA: the Autonomous Space Agency Network, whose logo is ASAN—NASA in reverse—and is an actual space-exploration organization that endorses non-governmental, non–corporate space flight; and the Nonhuman Autonomous Space Agency, or NASA—yes, that’s correct—that promotes space exploration using robots and animals.  I have no idea how serious either of these groups is.) 

Having looked up the ASA, I now know it’s a real organization (if not a little fanciful), but watching ExtraSpaceCraft, I couldn’t be sure if this was fact, fiction, or some combination of both.  (Reading up a bit in Steyerl, I also now know that she tends to work in the third mode.)  Steyerl’s video is shot from a drone so that we view Earth “from a different angle.”  It’s also the only Drill video that’s projected onto a large screen rather than being shown on a video monitor.  The screen is almost a 360-degree wrap-around configuration so viewers are surrounded by near-kaleidoscopically changing images. 

There are many shots of the damaged observatory site and the buildings, especially the dome of the telescope structure with a huge, jagged hole in its rust-colored, spherical metal roof.  Also on view are the ASA members dancing, wearing NASA-like coveralls (complete with a little breast patch that looked a lot like the one on the U.S. space agency’s outfits—which is one reason I wondered if this was a joke when I first walked into the room.)  I’m still not sure what Steyerl wanted to say with this installation—perhaps her motive was no more than to provoke thought. 

Installation number 4, Broken Windows (2018-19), is set up in the North and South Corridor itself, one monitor at each end of the hallway.  Its title is a reference to the broken windows theory of criminology, introduced as an idea in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article entitled “Broken Windows” which posits that visible manifestations of even minor crimes, anti-social behavior, and civil disorder create an environment that encourages greater and more serious crime and disorder.  The theory states that targeting minor crimes like vandalism, graffiti-tagging, public drinking, and fare evasion contributes to an atmosphere of order and lawfulness, preventing more serious crimes.  (The most prominent application of the broken window theory, coincidentally, was in New York City under the administration of Mayor Rudi Giuliani, in office from 1994 to 2001, and his police commissioner, William Bratton, 1994-96.  It was a controversial practice in the city.)

At Drill, each monitor screened a different video.  The one at the south end of the hallway, made in Camden, New Jersey, showed artist  and founder of the Neighborhood Foundation, and a group of community activists replace the broken windows of abandoned buildings with brightly-colored, hand-painted panels.  In the other video, screening at the north end, filmed in a London hangar, researchers teach artificial intelligence how to recognize the sound of breaking windows.  According to the exhibit’s curator, “the work symbolizes social disruption and technology’s role in it.” 

In the Colonel’s Reception Room (intended Regimental commander’s use for official receptions and formal ceremonies) in the southeast corner of the hallway is one of the few installations that has no video.  Freeplots (2019) is a site-specific creation in collaboration with East Harlem’s El Catano Community Garden that “references both tax-free ‘freeports’ and the possibility for crop production that does not require land ownership."  (Freeports, in the words of one writer who interviewed Steyerl, are “art storage facilities waived from tax.”  Freeports have some relation to free economic zones, areas in which companies are taxed very lightly or not at all to encourage economic activity, also known as free ports.)

The installation artist gives physical shape to the tax havens by building wooden planters in the shapes of some of the world’s most infamous freeports, those in Panama and Geneva.  (Steyerl was surprised to learn that after selling one her artworks, she had some cash in a freeport.  She used it to fund the creation of the planters.)  She filled the boxes with manure and the community garden then used them to grow “a flower which is very popular in Puerto Rico, flamboyán, which is a kind of hibiscus.” 

While most of Steyerl’s installations in Drill seem to be critical of the subjects of the videos—I say this even as I acknowledge that I don’t know the full range of the artist’s work—this exhibit demonstrates that she can also present ideas and projects that she admires.  But had I not read up afterwards on the installations in Drill, I wouldn’t have any idea what Freeplots was meant to say.  After we walked through the planters and looked at the plantings, Diana asked me what I made of it.  I had to say I had no inkling.  (Freeplots is the only exhibit in Drill at which there’s an additional information sheet, stacked on a shelf in the Colonel’s Room.  I didn’t see it until we were leaving the display and I didn’t get to look at it until I got home.  It wouldn’t have mattered, however; it was an essay by Rosa Reyes, the daughter of the founder of the community garden, about El Catano.  She didn’t say anything about Freeplots, Drill, or Steyerl.)

In the Parlor (initially an informal room for relaxation, conversation, or leisure time), just south of the entranceway to the Drill Hall, are Duty Free Art (2015; 38:21 minutes) and Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013; 38:48 minutes)—the two oldest exhibits in Drill.  Both videos run consecutively on a pair of screens in the small room set before a (hard) sofa (of sorts) made of sand bags bonded together.  (It seems that physical discomfort is part of Steyerl’s and/or Eccles’s rationale for Drill.  She wants us to come see her work and listen to her messages—I assume—but she punishes us for doing so.  Indeed, the artist says, “I have to say, in terms of comfort, I’m now making it less comfortable.”)  On the floor between the monitors and the sand-bag sofa is a box of white sand.

Both videos are illustrated lectures which Steyerl herself delivers.  She’s said she calls these presentations lectures, not performances, because she doesn’t “want them to be judged within the history of performance art.”  She appears on the left-hand monitor and her illustrative pictures are on the right in a coordinated display.  In Duty Free Art, based on her 2017 book Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (Verso Books), Steyerl explores income disparity in art, business, and war via freeports, those depositories where collectors store their art holdings without having to pay taxes, impacting the global economy.  The art works are used as currency among the superrich, dictators and strongmen, and arms dealers, Steyerl complains, and are shifted around among these freeports, never to be seen by anyone, let alone the public.

Duty Free Art is followed on the same screens by Is the Museum a Battlefield?, another lecture video.  It purports to draw a link between the museum and the battlefield by tracing “a diabolical military-cultural network.”  Steyerl’s friend Andrea Wolf, a PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) fighter, was killed in 1998.  When the artist sought to find the origin of the machine-gun bullet that shot her friend, she found that it was made by the Lockheed Martin Corporation, a U.S. defense contractor, which is both a sponsor of the Istanbul Biennial, where she’s given this lecture, and a patron of the Art Institute of Chicago, where her film on Wolf’s death’s been exhibited.

(In a different kind of battlefield, Steyerl finds herself at odds again with another art benefactor of dubious reputation.  She’s preparing an exhibition for the Serpentine Galleries in London, funded by the Sackler family, which has been linked to the manufacture and distribution of the drug OxyContin, the pain medication that initiated the opioid drug emergency across the U.S.  She’s described this connection as being “married to a serial killer.”)

However true Steyerl’s point is for both of these video lectures, however disturbing and awakening her information is, neither Duty Free Art nor Is the Museum a Battlefield? are especially artistic in concept or execution.  They are, in fact, lectures—as she affirms.  Possibly delivered live and with an audience larger than two, they are more compelling; but viewed in a small room, with only two of us, sitting alone in some discomfort, it was unengaging. 

In the Library, near the southwest corner of the corridor, is exhibited Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016).  The four-minute piece’s title, says Steyerl, is taken from “the five most frequently used English words on Billboard magazine’s music charts for the past decade.”  The installation’s title is displayed in the Library in huge lighted letters encased in concrete blocks, spelling out “HELL YEAH,” “WE,” and “FUCK DIE.” 

The videos in this exhibit are taken from various Internet sources and show high-tech companies testing robots for balance and endurance as we watch them being pushed, punched, tripped, and otherwise violently knocked off balance to see if they can survive and recover.  The tests are both CGI and real machines and it all seemed more like the kind of demo video you might see if you toured a robotics lab than an art installation. 

The ominous undercurrent is that any of the robots being tested might be headed for military use since one of the obstacles in developing a robot soldier is that while a human can resist or recover from falling or tripping, machines are so far unable to be programmed to do so.  (Think of the AT-AT Walkers, the huge all-terrain armored transport robots defeated by toppling them over during the Star Wars attack on the rebel base on the ice planet of Hoth in The Empire Strikes Back.  One of the robots being tested, which makes a return appearance in another installation, even resembled the AT-AT Walkers.)

Next door, in the Veterans Room (another reception room “where retired soldiers could lounge with a brandy in one hand, a cigar in the other, and a spittoon by their sides”), visitors will find the eight-minute Robots Today (2016).  This is probably the oddest of Steyerl’s videos in Drill because it starts with an invocation of the Kurdish scholar Ismail al-Jazar­ī (1136–1206), who wrote an extensive reference book on mechanical devices and instruction on constructing them, Automata (formally known in English as The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices), in 1205 or 1206.  Al-Jazarī was a polymath, a person who knows a lot about many subjects (think a medieval, Middle-Eastern Leonardo da Vinci). 

Al-Jazarī worked in Diyarbakır, in what is now southeastern Turkey but was part of Kurdistan in the 12th and 13th centuries, a virtual ghost town today after having been largely destroyed in 2015 and 2016 by the Turkish army.  Diyarbakır is the setting of Robots Today, which combines coverage of Al-Jazarī through narration, illustrated by photos of pages from his book, including highly colored drawings, with footage of the damaged modern city.  Steyerl’s video asks, “Who destroyed the city?  Who expelled the people?  What role does computer technology play in war?” 

The final exhibit of Drill, displayed in the Field and Staff Room (formerly a lounge where Regimental officers could relax with a drink), was Prototype 1.0 and 1.1 (2017) with two blue foam-and-aluminum sculptural renderings of giraffe-like robots from the Hell Yeah We Fuck Die video.  This was the other installation (with Freeplots) without a video component. 

Prototype had one large figure, lying on the floor on its front as if it had just toppled over in one of Hell Yeah’s balance tests, and a smaller one, like a younger creature standing over its fallen elder looking down at it.  It might also have been a young dinosaur looking down at its parent, killed by the concussion of the giant meteor that wiped them out eons ago or brought down by starvation when the ice age covered over its food supply.  What Steyerl is saying with Prototype, however, I can’t guess.

We were at the Armory from about 5 to almost 8 p.m.  It was physically tiring and intellectually numbing.  (I think that’s the definition of ‘enervating.’)  I said to Diana that my final analysis of Drill is that . . . the emperor has no clothes on!  The reason no one could describe the exhibit is that Steyerl has no concrete point; she blows from pillar to post on whatever whim struck her, reviving some old pieces she contrived to dovetail with her latest impulse, and no one called her on the emptiness of the whole concept.  Everyone struggled to find something to say that sounds cogent, but since there’s no actual substance, there isn’t anything cogent to say—but no one dared to admit that.  See?  No clothes!

Curator Eccles quotes New York Times art critic Holland Cotter on Steyerl’s approach: “Ms. Steyerl refuses to nail down a single idea, or insist on a point of view.”  For Eccles, this “wide-ranging practice”” is an asset, but I find it a detriment.  It’s like talking to someone who’s speaking double-talk: I can’t figure out what they saying.  As Cotter goes on to say, “the logic of that thinking is fractured,” and that doesn’t make me think about what she’s saying; it makes me angry that she won’t come out and say what she thinks.  We get enough of that from politicians.  I don’t want it from artists, too.

In the reviews and press coverage of Drill, much of it was focused mostly—and in many cases exclusively—on the new video, Drill, with either passing mention or no mention at all of the other nine installations in the exhibit.  I think that speaks to the lack of connectivity among the selections—though the outlets that commented on the smaller displays either explicitly or implicitly treated Drill, the umbrella exhibition, as a retrospective of Steyerl’s work over the last six years.  (The Armory administrative team of artistic director Audi and president/producer Robertson asserted that Drill is “the most extensive survey of her work to-date in the United States,” a statement with which Eccles concurred.)  

Reviews and features on the other components of the exhibition exist on line from earlier showings—though, of course, the venues, configurations, and even sometimes the elements of the piece will have been different.  Here’s a sampling of the critical coverage of Drill:

Alex Greenberger called Steyerl’s main video “one of her most exceptional works to date” in ARTnews.  “Drill,” asserted Greenberger, “expertly weaves between the history of its setting and gun violence at Columbine, Parkland, and Newtown.”  He caviled, however, that “the work doesn’t quite stick the landing in a corny finale with edits of footage of anti-gun activists superimposed into the frames of old portraits in the Armory, [but] Drill is nonetheless a master class in how to draw links between seemingly unlike ideas.”  The ARTnews reviewer labeled the video “a must-see,” along with the other installations in the Armory exhibit. 

“Steyerl’s work can be wonderfully funny too,” affirmed Greenberger, “and fortunately the Armory is also showing some of her more lighthearted work,” such as Hell Yeah We Fuck Die.  Nonetheless, he acknowledged that “watching Steyerl’s videos can feel like swimming through a sea of interrelated ideas and structures that inform 21st-century life.”  In spite of this, the reviewer observed, “Steyerl’s Armory show remains curiously hopeful,” citing Freeplots, the community-garden installation, reporting, “When I visited the show, a few purplish flowers had begun blooming. One can only assume more will follow.”

In Garage, a semiannual publication dedicated to contemporary art and fashion, Scott Indrisek cautioned, “Hito Steyerl’s new commission at the Park Avenue Armory, ‘Drill,’ might cause some mild friction in many parts of the country.  In New York City, it’s something else entirely: toothless, and breathlessly aware of its own benevolent mission.”   He explained that the installation “struggles, like much programming at the Armory, to compete with the epic grandeur of the space itself.”  

Of the title video, Indrisek reported, “Over the course of 21 minutes, Steyerl attempts to weave together school shootings, urban violence, the architecture of the Park Avenue Armory itself, and the NRA.  There’s nothing for an enlightened, liberal audience to object to, but there’s also nothing to engage with.”  The Garage review-writer concluded, “‘Drill’ means well, but that doesn’t save it from being essentially pointless.”  He posited that

perhaps, with “Drill,” Steyerl was aiming for something less straightforward and clunky than what we find at the Armory.  “Drill” has potential, in a vague way; it could have been an essay-film that teased out the stories of disparate places and people and presented them in some new, and strange, light. 

Indrisek lamented, however: “Unfortunately, Steyerl’s film plays as if she’d simply made several semi-related documentaries and then inelegantly spliced them together.”  Affirming that Drill is about several aspects of the United States’ entanglement with gun violence, the reviewer observed, “To be fair, any artist looking to tackle the issue of gun violence runs the risk of being pedantic.” Naming several recent treatments of related subjects that succeeded for various reasons, he ended by asserting: “Steyerl’s ‘Drill,’ on the other hand, is uncomplicated and almost aggressively earnest—and yet oddly flat, and even boring.  She may have marshalled important voices for a good cause, but that seems less like art than a public-service announcement.”

Emily Watlington of Art in America, recounting the anti-gun themes for the video Drill, observed: “Because Steyerl’s arguments are unsurprising and easy to agree with, I’m left with questions about what the art is doing that journalism and criticism don’t or can’t.”  Answering her own queries, Watlington affirmed, “One important difference between art and journalism is that art doesn’t get fact-checked.”  She stated, “Steyerl’s lack of evidence is more easily obscured in her artworks,” and gave an example from Is the Museum a Battlefield?  (She pointed out that the Berlin building Steyerl identifies as the headquarters for Lockheed Martin was, in fact, commissioned by DZ Bank and serves as its corporate offices.  Watlington also noted some discrepancies regarding the source and inspiration for architect Frank Gehry’s design for the building.) 

“Steyerl performs as an authority figure, providing seductive and convincingly connected visuals,” the Art in America writer asserted, and reported that some in her audience “were engrossed and convinced.”  By way of a warning, Watlington acknowledged:

I came to the show already in agreement with her conclusions: that art is complicit in structures of violence and abuses of power, which are utterly propelled by corporate greed.  But in an era of dangerously proliferating fake news, employing didactic forms to proffer untruths is irresponsible, and we should diligently discern whether expertise is merely performed. 

“Drill’s greatest merit,” emphasized the reviewer, “is its site-specificity, which offers a counterweight to the ‘duty-free art’ she critiques,” noting particularly that “at context of the Armory, the work asks viewers to look around their surroundings for hidden stories of violence and power: not over there, but right here.”  Watlington ends by stating:

I understand the fanfare around Steyerl.  But the tendency to uncritically accept her claims [does a] disservice to artists and viewers alike.  Steyerl’s work and its reception should remind us of the dangerous seductiveness of authority, which we’re especially susceptible to when it confirms our beliefs.

On the art website Hyperallergic, Zachary Small speculated, “If somebody were to write a new Book of Revelation for the 21st century, it would read a lot like the multimedia miseries of Hito Steyerl.”  After cataloguing some of the artist’s thematic peeves, though, Small noted, “Light traces of sarcasm help viewers swallow the bitter pills that Steyerl is serving.”  He wondered, “How can you not love an artist whose idea of gallery benches are glowing block letters that spell out ‘Hell yeah’ and ‘Fuck die’ in all caps?”  But the art reviewer demurred strongly that “despite my admiration for Steyerl, there’s something holding me back from fully embracing Drill.” 

After praising Steyerl’s exhibits like The Tower and ExtraSpaceCraft and explaining that the artist, whom Small calls an “oracle of our end times” and “a crucial voice in a chorus of critics seeking to untangle the problems of contemporary culture,” is “unifying our vision of real and digital spaces, transforming the architectures of these two realms into information,” he posited that in obtaining that knowledge and becoming “more enlightened about contemporary culture and its attendant politics,” we discover “there is also a cruelty to knowing; even in her own work, Steyerl is quick to demonstrate how violent the acquisition of progress can be.” 

“What falls short of excellence,” complained Small, “is Drill’s supposed showstopper,” the central video in the Drill Hall.  Steyerl having connected the Armory’s “Silk Stocking Regiment” to the NRA and the Park Avenue Armory to lavish entertainments and soirées in Drill, Small channeled Captain Renault from Casablanca and gasped: “Clutch your pearls: the Upper East Side has connections to malfeasants and money?  Are we supposed to be shocked by this?”  The Hyperallegic writer noted that Judith Pearson, the gun-totin’ NRA opponent, criticizes the Regiment’s soldiers’ marksmanship as careless and added,”I’d characterize ‘Drill’ the same way.”

Small was critical of the Armory in this instance as well, and added:

“Drill” is an unusual misstep for the artist; it suffers because its main protagonist—the Armory—is also its antagonist.  The activists become side characters in this story, asked to relate their personal traumas to an institution none of them have likely ever attended before; they aren’t even identified by name until the documentary’s closing credits, which, in my opinion, speaks volumes about the film’s priorities.

The art writer backed off somewhat, however: “That’s not to say that ‘Drill’ is a complete failure; it’s just lackluster.  It’s quasi-propaganda that paradoxically redeems the institution it indicts when nobody asked for an investigation in the first place.”  In closing his notice, Small expressed regret:

Toward the end of the film, there is a scene focused on a gun control rally where teenagers and young adults speak out against violence.  I wish the film devoted itself more to this image.  We should celebrate the leaders of a new generation advancing gun control measures instead of the wealthy ghosts who proliferated and profited from the problem.

The New York Times’ Jason Farago pronounced Drill, the video, “a blaring, impassioned denunciation of American gun violence and the latent aggression of high culture” and declared that “while it lacks the zany brilliance of her best work, the installation offers further proof of the force of Ms. Steyerl’s gaze on technology, politics and war.”  After praising Steyerl for “her customarily brilliant editing” of the video of Drill, Farago remarked, “There’s an uncommon heavy-handedness to much of ‘Drill,’ and an uncommon glossiness to the cinematography.” 

The Timesman added, however, “Despite higher-than-usual production value, ‘Drill’ continues Ms. Steyerl’s investigation into a world mediated by poor images.”  (“The poor image,” Farago offered in an explanation of this theory espoused by Steyerl, “—it can be a political speech, a sex tape, a hostage video, a cat GIF, a bootleg video of ‘Avatar’—‘mocks the promises of digital technology,’ she argued in an essay a decade ago.”  It lends authenticity and innocence or disingenuousness to the video which a slick presentation lacks.)  “In the video’s final moments,” reported the Times reviewer, “Ms. Steyerl pans over the ornate walls of the Armory’s front hallway, and replaces the framed portraits of 19th-century soldiers with footage of young anti-gun activists . . . .  The activists appear within gold frames—but they’ve been inserted sloppily, imprecisely, with little attempt at a persuasive deception.” 

“What saves ‘Drill’ from preaching-to-the-choirism are these intentionally janky edits,” felt Farago.  The review-writer went on to examine some of the exhibition’s ancillary installations.  “Unlike in ‘Drill,’ whose condemnation of American violence land with a bland power-to-the-people thud,” the Times journalist found, “the revelations of culture and violence in Ms. Steyerl’s earlier works have a bitter, flabbergasted humor—as if she can hardly believe how weird, scary and dumb things can get when the digital seeps beyond the screen.”