'Judgment Day'

Performances at the Park Avenue Armory, also known since 2015 as the Thompson Arts Center, are more than just play productions, as you may see from my report on Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape from two seasons ago (18 April 2017) and before that, Théâtre du Soleil’s Les Éphémères (15 July 2009).  Productions at the Armory are either conceived for that huge, open space (the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall) or specially adapted to it.  And when the director is someone like Richard Jones, who mounted The Hairy Ape and clearly knows how to use the space, it can be extraordinary.  (I included a very brief historical description of the Park Avenue Armory in my report on the art installation Drill, posted on Rick On Theater on 15 July 2019.)

So when I read that Jones, a British theater and opera director, was returning to the Armory for another production, my ears pricked up.  I wanted to know more.

On offer was the world première of a new adaptation (by 44-year-old Obie Award-winning American playwright Christopher Shinn, a Pulitzer Prize finalist) of Austro-Hungarian playwright and novelist Ödön von Horváth’s (1901-38) 1937 play Judgment Day (Der jüngste Tag), I was interested.  The whole package was intriguing.

I’d had a taste of Jones’s work and was interested in seeing more.  I’d been hearing about Shinn a lot lately, a theater artist who falls into that group called “emerging”—not quite famous yet, but on the verge.  All I knew about Horváth was his name, but there’s something fascinating about him.  He had the air of a ground-breaker, an iconoclast.  He was vaguely like Georg Büchner (1813-37) or Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), theater innovators who were poised to make a splash and then died young, leaving a handful of remarkable plays and unfulfilled promise.  (Büchner died of typhus at 23, but Mayakovsky died an apparent suicide at 36.  Horváth died in a freak accident at 37.)

So, I brought the production to the attention of Diana, the friend with whom I usually go to theater—I’m supposed to be touting her onto unusual productions—and we booked it for 8 p.m. on Friday, 3 January—our first show of the new year.  It was an excellent decision—Judgment Day was a fascinating experience. 

As you might guess, Horváth’s plays—he left about 18, maybe half of them available in English translation—are not frequently produced in this country.  Aside from the Armory’s Judgment Day, in New York City, I found only two productions of Don Juan Comes Back from the War (1936) Off-Broadway in 1979 and 1986.  I didn’t do a thorough search—he might be popular in regional rep companies, though I doubt it, or college and university theaters (more likely), but I can say that his name hasn’t otherwise arisen on the pro or semi-pro theater (Off-Off-Broadway) scene here in the 46 years I’ve been in New York.

Abroad, however, there has been something of a resurgence of interest in Horváth’s work.  In 2009, for instance, the Almeida Theatre in London staged Judgment Day in a translation by playwright Christopher Hampton (Total Eclipse, 1967; Les Liaisons Dangereuses, 1985) directed by James Macdonald.  Richard Jones himself previously directed Tales from the Vienna Woods, Horváth’s best known play, at London’s National Theatre in 2003, and in 2013, Berlin’s Deutsches Theater staged Tales. 

Last April in Berlin, the Maxim Gorki Theater presented an adaptation by Swiss writer Tina Müller of Horváth’s novel, 1937’s Youth Without God staged by Turkish director Nurkan Erpulat.  Last Summer, another staging of the novel by Thomas Ostermeier was seen at the Salzburg Festival in Austria and in 2018, an earlier production was mounted in Stuttgart.  That same year, Faith, Hope and Charity was presented in Vienna.

A three-act German opera adapted from Der jüngste Tag composed by Giselher Klebe (1925-2009) premièred in 1980 in Mannheim, Germany; the composer’s wife, Lore Klebe (1924-2001), wrote the libretto based on Horváth’s play.  English translations of Horváth’s text of Judgment Day are published in Judgment Day (Faber & Faber, 2009), translated by Christopher Hampton (b. 1946); and Ödon von Horváth: Plays (PAJ Publications, 1986); Judgment Day is translated by Martin and Renate Esslin.  Christopher Shinn’s adaptation of Judgment Day was released by Methuen Drama in 2019

Richard Jones’s Judgment Day was commissioned by the Park Avenue Armory—that is to say, the Armory commissioned Jones’s next project following the success of The Hairy Ape and he selected Judgment Day and got Shinn (Dying City, Where Do We Live?, and Now or Later) to make the adaptation.  It’s the Armory’s first foray into producing from the get-go; future commissioned projects will include work from two-time Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage (Ruined, 2009; Sweat, 2017) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (twice Pulitzer-Prize finalist for Gloria, 2016, and Everybody, 2018).  The world première of the new Judgment Day started previews on 5 December 2019 at the Armory and opened on 11 December; the production closed on 10 January 2020.

Born Edmund Josef von Horváth on 9 December 1901 in what is now Croatia (then part of Austria-Hungary) into an aristocratic Hungarian family, the playwright and novelist, who wrote in German, lived in Berlin and Vienna during the 1920s and ’30s.  He preferred the Hungarian version of his first name and published as Ödön von Horváth.  In 1931, he was awarded the Kleist Prize for Tales from the Vienna Wood, Horváth’s most successful and best known play.  The Kleist Prize was the most prestigious literary honor in Weimar Germany, discontinued after 1933.

Horváth witnessed at first hand the rise of Nazism and his plays often explore popular culture, politics, and history, with a particular focus on fascism and its dangers.  Written on the eve of World War II, Der jüngste Tag (sometimes translated as The Last Day) is set in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.  That year, Horváth left Berlin and returned to Austria.  A prolific writer of plays and novels, Horváth’s works were banned when the Nazis came to power.  

Horváth’s last play (some sources say his next-to-last, but I can’t find one later), Judgment Day has been seen as an allegory for the indoctrination of Nazi ideology; it was published in 1937, a year before Austria’s Anschluss (annexation) with Germany.  The writer lived in a fraught part of the world at a particularly fraught time, and I suspect his plays, especially Judgment Day, manifest that. 

Of course, I am working through a filter—Shinn’s adaptation—so I may be misperceiving the evidence.  Indeed, the adaptor remarked that, though Horváth died at just 36, “As I adapted Judgment Day, he felt older to me—his dark, wry vision is startlingly mature.”  Shinn added that this play “still feels ahead of us in revealing who we are and where we might be headed.”

Horváth fled Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and moved to Paris.  On 1 June 1938, he was struck by a falling tree limb and killed on the Champs-Élysées during a thunderstorm.  He was buried in Paris, but in 1988, on the 50th anniversary of his death, his remains were transferred to Vienna and reinterred. 

Christopher Shinn was born in 1975 in Hartford, Connecticut, and raised in Wethersfield; he currently lives in New York City.  He’s the author of Dying City (2007, Lincoln Center; 2008 Pulitzer Prize finalist), Where Do We Live? (2004, Vineyard Theatre; 2005 Obie Award for Playwriting), and Now or Later (2008, Royal Court, London; Evening Standard Theatre Award for Best Play shortlist), among other plays.  The Royal Court Theatre in London produced his first play, Four, in 1998, garnering rave reviews. 

His most recent play, Against, had its world première at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2017, starring Ben Whishaw.  A revival of Dying City at Second Stage in New York City, directed by the playwright, ran from 4 to 30 June 2019. 

His plays have also been premièred by the Royal Court Theatre, Lincoln Center Theater, Donmar Warehouse, Goodman Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club, Roundabout Theatre Company, Playwrights Horizons, Vineyard Theatre, South Coast Repertory, Soho Theatre (London), and Hartford Stage. 

Shinn graduated from New York University with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Dramatic Writing in 1997.  A Guggenheim Fellow, he teaches playwriting at the New School.  His work is published in the U.S. by the Theatre Communications Group and in the U.K. by Methuen.

In a 2013 Los Angeles Times article about Shinn, Rob Weinert-Kendt, editor-in-chief of American Theatre and a theater writer for numerous national publications, explained, “If playwright Christopher Shinn has a signature character, it is the manipulative victim—the half-sympathetic, half-deplorable sort of person whose suffering is real but who uses it as rationale for bad behavior.”  

This description fits the playwright’s depiction of Stationmaster Thomas Hudetz, the central character of Judgment Day.  Whether the Hudetz on view at the Park Avenue Armory is Shinn’s creation or whether the adaptor adopted him from Horváth’s original is irrelevant: Shinn is working in familiar territory.

In the same article, Shinn was very explicit about his dramatic focus:

We’re living in a time where people think of themselves as victims, whether they’re oppressed or the oppressor, whether they’re doing violence or violence is being done to them.  This is what compels me and keeps me going: I’m so sympathetic to the way trauma shapes people, but as a dramatist I’m also interested in questions of agency and responsibility.

This is precisely what Jones’s production of Judgment Day explores.  It sounds to me as if Jones found his perfect collaborator in Shinn—and perhaps, at least for Judgment Day, Horváth’s doppelgänger.

Shinn’s version of Judgment Day, rendered from a literal translation (by Tessa Keimes-Kin and Susan Salms-Moss), is performed in one 90-minute act divided into seven scenes.  The year of the setting isn’t specified in the program, but the clothing worn by the characters and the use of Frakturschrift (sometimes called the “German alphabet,” the official typeset of the German-speaking world until 1941, when it was abandoned by the Nazi government) for all signs and banners on the set put the period in the mid-to-late ’30s. 

Other aspects of the clothing—dirndls for some of the young women, shorts with long socks and short, sturdy boots for some men—suggest southern Germany or Austria (the costume design was by Antony McDonald); the mix of German (Frau Liemgruber, Herr Koller) and Hungarian (Thomas Hudetz, Pokorny) names pinpoints the locale as most likely Austria.  (Late in the play, a wanted poster offers a reward of 1,000 schillings, the former currency of Austria—except for the World War II period—before the euro was introduced.  Germany’s currency in the 1930s was the Reichsmark)

At the train station in a small Austrian town (Scene I), several prospective passengers are waiting for the delayed train. Frau Liemgruber (Harriet Harris), the town gossip, and a local lumberjack (Andy Murray) are sharing rumors about their fellow townsfolk with a traveling salesman (Jason O’Connell).  

The station manager, Thomas Hudetz (Emmy Award-winner Luke Kirby of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), a dutiful civil servant, is on duty.  Frau Hudetz (Alyssa Bresnahan) says goodbye to her brother, Alfons (Henry Stram), the town pharmacist, who was visiting her.  She complains about her husband.  

The waiting passengers gossip and Frau Liemgruber is pleased to tell everyone that Frau Hudetz is 13 years older than her husband and that he no longer goes anywhere in town, but stays in the station, where the couple have a comfortable apartment overlooking the tracks with a view of the surrounding forest.  

A couple of express trains hurtle through the station (portrayed by flashing lights and the loud sound of a speeding train, courtesy of lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin and sound designer Drew Levy) and the stationmaster throws the lever that sends the all-clear signal down the track.  Fearing they might be late, a young man, Ferdinand (Alex Breaux), a butcher from a nearby town, arrives in a rush with his coquettish fiancée, Anna (Susannah Perkins), whom he’s been visiting. 

When the local arrives and all the passengers board and the train leaves, Anna, who’s the innkeeper’s daughter, starts flirting with Hudetz and finally kisses him.  Frau Hudetz watches the scene from their apartment window. Another express train passes and the station manager, distracted by Anna’s advances, forgets to give the caution signal.  There’s a horrendous collision with a freight train down the track.  Eighteen people, including the train driver, Pokorny, are killed; several more are injured, like the stoker (George Merrick).

At the scene of the accident (Scene II), people are gawking and the police start the investigation.  A drumhead tribunal is set up at the base of a viaduct and the injured stoker swears to the prosecutor (Maurice Jones) that his train driver has never run through a signal.  Hudetz repeats that he’s “always been a diligent official” and that he’s not to blame.  Anna testifies in his favor, but Frau Hudetz charges her husband with lying.  Hudetz is arrested.

Four months later (Scene III), a reception is being prepared in The Wild Man inn to celebrate Hudetz’s acquittal and release from jail.  (In German, the inn’s name is Der Wilde Mann, which can also be translated as The Savage Man or The Crazy Man.)  The waitress, Leni (Jeena Yi), is hanging a banner saying “Willkommen Herr Stationsvorstand” (Welcome Mr. Station Manager) as the innkeeper (Tom McGowan) makes the preparations for the party.  

Hudetz is wheeled into the inn in triumph, standing in a railroad luggage cart—like a Roman hero in a chariot—with banners on the sides reading “Herzlich Willkommen” (Hearty Welcome).  At Anna’s urging, Hudetz agrees to meet her at the viaduct the next evening.  

Alfons, Frau Hudetz’s brother, comes to the inn to talk to his brother-in-law.  He’s become a pariah in town because of his sister’s betrayal of Hudetz and is almost attacked by the gathered party-goers who’ve turned into a vengeful mob, but Hudetz stands up for him.

The next evening, Hudetz waits for Anna at the base of the viaduct (Scene IV).  A policeman (Charles Brice) atop the overpass calls down to him in a challenge.  When he recognizes Hudetz, the guard warns the stationmaster of roaming Gypsies.  Anna appears and expresses remorse over her perjury and because of the train accident for which she feels partly responsible.  As the two cast huge silhouettes against the monumental viaduct, she tells Hudetz that she loves him.

In the inn (Scene V), Hudetz drinks a glass of wine, contrary to his habit.  Anna has gone missing; Leni, the waitress, is worried.  The policeman brings the news that Anna was found dead at the viaduct.  Hudetz, now suspected of murdering Anna, hastily sets off to hide from the search parties.  

Frau Liemgruber, shopping at Alfons’s pharmacy, talks about Anna’s funeral (Scene VI).  She’s brought along a photo of her dead body.  She also reports that Hudetz is the suspect.  But Alfons doesn’t want to take part in the gossip.

Frau Hudetz now lives with her brother in his apartment above the pharmacy.  While the two are eating, Hudetz shows up.  He’s being hounded and wants to flee, but he can’t hide in his railroad uniform.  He asks Alfons for a suit.  When he discovers the picture that Frau Liemgruber left behind of Anna lying dead, he runs out without the suit.

The entire town—both men and women, many carrying rifles—is out hunting down Hudetz  The innkeeper and Ferdinand, Anna’s fiancée, are with the police looking for Hudetz near the site of the train accident (Scene VII).  Alfons reports that his brother-in-law had been at his apartment.  The search of the viaduct is shifted to the accident site.  

Pokorny (Jones), the locomotive driver, and a trackworker (O’Connell), two fatalities of the accident, appear to  Hudetz.  They encourage him to kill himself, but the spirit of Anna appears and tries to persuade him to live.  When the police come back, Hudetz faces his arrest. 

We never learn how Anna died, whether she committed suicide over her false support for Hudetz in the accident inquiry or whether the station manager killed her to keep her from recanting her testimony or whether someone else, like Frau Hudetz, who was jealous of her youth and her attraction for Hudetz, killed her.  The play never reveals the truth.

I haven’t entirely come to grips with Horváth’s play—or Shinn’s rendering of it.  The adaptor himself finds that it’s “very hard to know what the play was saying. There’s no character that you can look at as a stabilising point.”  Shinn continued: “It feels like our society is without a centre. Nobody quite knows where to look for how it will get better.”

But Jones’s production is astonishing.  It’s stunning.  (Talk about the opposite of “simple setting,” as my friend Kirk Woodward writes about in “Gospel of John in Stage,” posted on ROT on 11 January.)  There’s not a lot of scenery, but what there is hardly “simple.”  Wait and see (assuming I can describe it accurately!  That’ll be a challenge.)

The play is peculiar—at least in the adaptation—but deceptively so.  It looks at first encounter like a typical translation from German of a pre-World War II script—a little stilted, tinged with German Expressionism, but fundamentally Realistic.  (The production picked up a number of little “Germanisms” that rang especially true—like what I saw in the film The Big Lift about which I blogged on 13 August 2017: little formal bows people made when greeting or departing from one another, for instance, or the small leather pouch the waitress at the inn had at her waist for collecting payment or making change—such identifiably German cultural things.)   It turns out that it’s not so simple—at least not in Christopher Shinn’s version.  

Judgment Day’s physical production is more than just a performing environment.  I don’t want to give the impression that the set is more important somehow than the acting or the writing, but I will venture that it’s an equal partner.  Theater and opera scenic designer Paul Steinberg created a monumental set, towering at over 25 feet high. 

When we enter the Drill Hall, we’re confronted with a huge, wooden structure facing the seats.  Diana and I were on the far left of the first row, so the wall, which stretched all the way across the front of the bleachers, was only a few feet in front of us.  This is the train station and platform; the tracks would have been under us and there’s a door to the office in the wall on our left, a ticket window (“Fahrkarten”) just to the door’s right and a window, which turns out to be the Hudetzes’ apartment, high up on the far right.  The fateful levers for the train signals are on the platform at the left end, almost in front of where Diana and I were sitting.

We were so close that I felt a little uncomfortable, thinking that if any scenes took place at the right end of the set, we’d have to strain to see them.  The wall’s already extreme height was greatly exaggerated by our closeness to it.  Diana asked if I thought the set was going to move, and I figured it was—little did I know—because it appeared to be flat—that is, two-dimensional—looked as if it were sitting on wheels, and was encircled on the sides and back by trees which would only be truly visible if the wall weren’t there.

As I observed, the Drill Hall is lined on three sides by a forest of trees—some flat, cut-out silhouettes and others look like unsold Christmas trees—shrouded in ground-hugging fog.  A huge, ominous clock hangs above it all in the rear of the space, lit like the moon.  The floor of the Drill Hall, as big as a quarter of a Manhattan city block, is covered in a glossy, black material, making the set seem to be gliding on black ice.  This gave the performance an air of a dream—perhaps a nightmare.

After Scene I, the wall moves around the space by means of a hydraulic cart driven by a stagehand.  Another architectural set piece, the arch of a viaduct, also moves into place.  The company of 17 also moves onto the stage at the same time, moving in large groups, sort of marching (but not quite like soldiers) between the sliding wooden behemoths. 

My thought was that the technical rehearsals for Judgment Day must have been something to see—and that the production must have begun rehearsing the scene changes—there are six of them—from the very first day.  Not just the actors, but the set pieces, described by Helen Shaw of Vulture and New York magazine as “like a giant’s building blocks,” really had to be choreographed by movement director Anjali Mehra (for the actors), and production stage manager Lisa Iacucci and stage manager Janet Takami (for the set pieces).

Angled obliquely for Scenes III and V, the long wall, with the addition of a blond wooden bar, becomes the back of The Wild Man inn, with the viaduct in place perpendicular to it as a sort of tunnel leading to the inn.  In Scene VI, the wall opens like a pop-up book to reveal the two-story interior of Alfons’s pharmacy downstairs and apartment above.  The set pieces, in a way, are two giant characters in the play.  (I can see how this might get in the way of the performance, and some reviewers felt it did, but I didn’t.  On the other hand, as I’ve confessed before, I’m a sucker for theatricality.)

Mimi Jordan Sherin’s lighting does more than create the illusion of speeding trains with the help of strobe lights—an excellent conceit, incidentally: effective in a practical sense and, at the same time, artistically and theatrically satisfying.  (And, since Diana and I were seated right where the “train” was traveling, it was also a teeny bit scary—especially the first time.)  Since Jones’s production leans toward Expressionism—I’ll address how I think this applies to the acting shortly—Sherin’s lighting adds to this stylistic choice.  Some scenes, like the train depot, The Wild Man inn, and Alfons’s pharmacy, are bright, almost blazing, and mostly white. 

These contrast with scenes like the viaduct, the crash site, streets, which are shadowy and gloomy, somewhat menacing.  The background of the forest, where occasionally spooky figures lurk, are always in semi-darkness so that, with the shiny black ground, it creates the impression that the town is isolated from the rest of the world, like a sinister Brigadoon.

Sound designer Drew Levy, like Sherin, contributes to the passing-train effect, a significant contribution to the production considering how the railroad, the trains, the viaduct, and the crash loom over the town and its citizens.  (If the set is another character in Jones’s Judgment Day, then so is the invisible train.) 

The Armory’s Judgment Day has two sound designers; the other one, Daniel Kluger, is also responsible for the music.  Though, like a movie sound track, the production’s musicscape uses various period-evoking types of music, the most prominent is the oompah sound of German traditional music.  It’s so identified with Germany and Austria that it inevitably establishes a cultural milieu. 

(When oompah music is played in The Wild Man, I was immediately transported back to the early-1960s in Koblenz, Germany, when my teenaged friends and I used to hang out sometimes at a restaurant/Weinstube called the Weindorf—literally ‘wine village’—where that kind of music was the regular accompaniment.  It was positively Proustian!  I wrote about this eatery in “An American Teen in Germany, Part 2,” 12 March 2013)

I’ve delayed writing about the Horváth/Shinn play as long as I can now.  As I said earlier, it’s deceptively straightforward, for all intents and purposes the story of a horrific train accident near a small town for which the local stationmaster is blamed.  He’s exonerated on the perjured testimony of a young woman who’s later tortured over her lie.  When she’s found dead, the stationmaster is accused of her murder.  It’s almost Hitchcockian—a sort of The 39 Steps with psychological overtones and a film noir dynamic.

But the twist, dramatically speaking, is that the townspeople develop a mob mentality that’s flexible: they fit up anyone who threatens their collective sense of moral responsibility, irrespective of its validity.  At first, the town backs Hudetz in his claim of innocence, supported by Anna’s testimony that he pulled the signal lever on time as always. 

They never liked Frau Hudetz (“a really hateful woman,” says Frau Liemgruber) whom they consider an older woman who seduced a young man (“the most wonderful man”) and then kept him tied to her out of jealousy, so when she testifies against her husband, the townsfolk believe Anna and Hudetz, who’re lying, and ostracize Frau Hudetz, who tells the truth, and her brother, Alfons.  Alfons’s mere appearance at The Wild Man is enough to generate the people’s anger and a mob almost attacks him but for Hudetz’s intercession.

Later, when Anna is found dead, the town turns on Hudetz, suspecting him of murdering her because she was about to recant her testimony from the accident investigation.  Now the townspeople stalk the town carrying rifles and axes, searching for Hudetz like a lynch mob (or the villagers in Frankenstein hunting for the monster).

This is all supposed to represent a fascist mentality, but it doesn’t come across to me.  It’s mob justice, a kind of mass paranoia and hysteria—sort of like what Arthur Miller exposed in 1953’s The Crucible.  But Miller (1915-2005) was writing specifically about Joe McCarthy (1908-57) and commie witch-hunts of the 1950s and the analogy he’s drawing is clear.  Fascism doesn’t say “mob mentality” to me, so the connection is weak.  Fascism to me means a regimented society, required to follow orders blindly.  There’s no Duce or Führer in Judgment Day telling the townsfolk whom to believe or what to do.

What is clear from the play is that the train wreck represents the National Socialist take-over of Germany’s government; Horváth wrote Judgment Day after fleeing Germany when the Nazis took power.  Hudetz, as an official of the state, symbolizes the Weimar government that was unable to stop Hitler and his party before they seized power because it was, as it were, asleep at the switch.  Note how the waiting passengers on the platform flatten themselves against the station wall as the rushing train barrels unstoppably through town. 

The townspeople are the citizens of Germany who run from one power base to another, believing whatever dogmas promise them what they want at the moment and putting the blame for the country’s woes on whichever suspect is convenient.  (This is the consequence of a small-town version of Hitler’s technique of the Big Lie, which advocates telling a lie so immense that no one will believe that someone would be so audacious as to think he could get away with it.) 

Meanwhile, Hudetz’s conflict over his responsibility for the accident and even Anna’s death is a reflection of the conflict the German people felt collectively over their complicity in the Nazi horrors.  Isn’t that the plot of Judgment Day, reduced to a skeletal outline?

I know what Horváth and Shinn want to say in this production; if it’s not clear from Horváth’s rep as a writer—though he was never affiliated with any political movement, he was sympathetic to the left and his writing often exposed the dangers of fascism—the Armory production’s publicity made it explicit.  But it isn’t in the play as far as I can tell.  The thing I don’t know, though, is whether it’s in Horváth’s original but lost in Shinn’s adaptation, or if it’s missing from both.  (Max McGuinness, theater reviewer for the U.S. edition of the Financial Times, says that Shinn “sticks closely to the original text while adding occasional Americanisms.”)

If Judgment Day  had been set in 1950s Poland or Czechoslovakia (or Horváth’s ancestral Hungary, where an anti-Soviet uprising took place in 1956), it could be read as an anti-communist play.  In Iran in the 1980s or ’90s, it could be in opposition to the Ayatollah’s theocracy.  Hell, you could put it in Louisiana in 1928-32 and say it’s an exposé of Huey Long’s (1893-1935) reign as governor.  This Judgment Day is only anti-fascist because someone says it is!

Movement director Mehra does her bit, with the coordinated movement of the cast in groups as if they were some sort of paramilitary cohort; in a couple of sequences, they come awfully close to goose-stepping (which, of course, is indelibly associated with Nazis—but which many totalitarian armies use, including the Soviets and their satellite states, Iran, and North Korea).  Mehra and Jones have Luke Kirby’s Stationmaster Hudetz moving around the depot performing his duties in a walk that’s stiff and march-like (he even squares his corners); I could almost hear a snare drum marking the cadence.  (In the New York Times, Jesse Green likens Kirby’s movements to “a figure that got loose from a Swiss clock.”)

It’s not really fair—or even accurate—to speak of individual performances in Jones’s Judgment Day.  Kirby and Susannah Perkins as Anna set a tone, under Jones’s guidance, but the whole cast works as a unit stylistically to establish and maintain the world of this play.  In fact, there are moments when the entire cast is the world of this play—say, when they are about to gang up on Alfons in The Wild Man or, more pointedly, when they are prowling the streets like a demented posse.  (That latter bit was clearly set up by movement director Mehra.)

Together, the company works to sustain the atmosphere of the little town under the thrall of groupthink.  I’ve spoken of the way they move, but their speech, though subtly, follows a similar pattern.  Jones has not guided his cast into eccentric performances, but there is a sort of automaton-like quality to their speech—not so much like robots but living Stepford people.  There’s a kind of soullessness in their voices.  It works rather well for the most part, though occasional jolts occur when an actor encounters one of Shinn’s anachronisms.  (I’m pretty sure that no one in 1930s Austria ever said anything about “downsizing.”)

My survey of the published criticism of Richard Jones’s Judgment Day at the Armory will include 14 reviews from various outlets.  Unlike the review round-up for my last report, for One November Yankee on 6 January, this one includes several print notices, along with numerous on-line reviews and one radio review. 

In the Financial Times, McGuinness remarked that this Judgment Day “seems particularly timely.”  McGuinness reported that scenic designer Steinberg “aims to give the set ‘a dreamlike quality’ using the reflective floor, while the forest is intended to supply ‘a fairytale aspect’ reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm.”  This “otherworldly vision suggests a counterpoint to the language of the play, which is deliberately flat and clichéd,” found the FT reviewer. 

McGuinness observed that “there is no mention of the Nazis, nor any political discussion in Judgment Day, which helps give Horváth’s play its lasting allegorical resonance.”  He also felt that all the characters “seem rudderless and lacking in self-awareness,” which “supplies a parallel with the contemporary US.”  The FT journalist ended by warning that this “guilt trip into the twisted psyche of 1930s Europe promises to illuminate the corrosiveness of our own time.”

“With ‘Judgment Day’ . . . [Richard] Jones seems eager to top his previous achievement,” asserted Green of the New York Times.  “The Armory production . . . feels even more monumental than ‘The Hairy Ape,’ both larger and grimmer.”  Green described Steimberg’s set as “a giant’s playthings,” which, “[l]it gorgeously by Mimi Jordan Sherin . . . slide and twirl about the huge space in various combinations that fascinate and appall the eye, like de Chirico paintings come to life.” 

Then the Timesman lamented, “If only the play would come to life too.”  Green found that “Horvath’s brand of social critique and political allegory . . . feels overwhelmed here by the physical production.”  He reported that “Jones makes exciting stage pictures out of that group chaos” and that “[a]urally, too, the production tells a coherent and emphatic story of people too easily manipulated by their drive for excitement.”  Green continued, however: “But with a few exceptions, the characters’ interior lives are invisible and inaudible to us.” 

“Clearly,” added Green, “this is Jones’s way of dealing with the strangeness of the play, which isn’t amenable to naturalism.”  The Times review-writer affirmed that Jones’s Judgment Day is “not the kind of drama that expresses itself best in subtle acting, even aside from the monumental staging with which the actors must fend.”  He felt that the leads didn’t present the kind of “great-face bigness—the kind you see in silent movies” needed to convey Horváth’s point, several of the supporting characters did, naming Alyssa Bresnahan’s Frau Hudetz; Jeena Yi’s Leni, the barmaid; and Harriet Harris’s gossip, Frau Liemgruber. 

Asserting that in a vast venue like the Park Avenue Armory, “[y]our patrons expect epic art that exploits the scale of the building (not to mention its history of wealth and militarism) to comment on a meaty issue,” David Cote extolled Judgment Day as “a fairly obscure German drama about guilt and mob mentality, , , , staged with smart, handsome efficiency by veteran English director Richard Jones” in the New York Observer. 

Cote put Horváth, had he lived, in a category with interwar German and Swiss dramatists like Frank Wedekind (1864-1918), Carl Sternheim (1878-1942), Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956), and Max Frisch (1911-91), whom he labeled “unsentimental social critics who mingled gimlet-eyed satire with surreal or grotesque effects.”  Cote also compared Horváth with visual artists of the Weimar era Otto Dix (1891-1969) and Georg Grosz (1893-1959), “who saw decaying flesh, venality, and creeping fascism everywhere they looked.”  (I don’t know Dix’s art, but I’m well acquainted with Grosz’s grotesque caricatures of German life, and the connection to Horváth, at least as exemplified by Judgment Day, is spot on, I think.)

Of the visual effect of Steinberg’s set design, the Observer writer affirmed: “The imagery is stark, monumental, and very German.”  He added: “Lighting designer Mimi Jordan Sherin’s chilly shadows and Daniel Kluger’s ghostly sound designs contribute to the overall morbid, tense atmosphere of repression and dread.”  The reviewer’s final assessment of the production, which he tarred with “pretentious gigantism that is the unfortunate byproduct of Armory presentations,” is:

The cast is solid; Jones’s direction is clean and forceful; the design is impressive and engaging; and Horváth’s cautionary message comes through clearly in Shinn’s lean script.  But Judgment Day is, finally, a small play in an oversize production that dilutes any ripple effect the fable might have in 2019. 

“The human element feels like an afterthought in Richard Jones’s staging of Ödön von Horváth’s dark morality tale,” wrote Elisabeth Vincentelli in the New Yorker.”  The set is “pharaonic,” the lighting is “stunning,” and “[t]he over-all effect is breathtaking, with the actors often looking like figurines in a giant model.”  With the exception of Harriet Harris’s “vicious gossip,” however, “the performances are haphazard, which defangs the story.”  Vincentelli concluded, therefore: “The extravagant design is never less than entrancing, but we are far from Jones’s 2017 masterstroke, ‘The Hairy Ape.’”

In Vulture/New York magazine, Helen Shaw declared, “On the bright side (or maybe the dark and primeval side), Judgment Day at the Park Avenue Armory is a visual feast.”  After describing in detail the visual and aural production (“It’s entrancing”) and naming the accomplished artists in the creative team, however, Shaw continued:

And . . . yet . . . the big names and the big set don’t quite come together to make a big production.  The dancing architecture works, but the human components seem unchoreographed; any time there’s more than four people onstage, the mise-en-scène looks sloppy and astray.  More importantly, the expressionist environment asks for stylization from the actors, but Jones seems to have left them confused about what that should look and sound like.

The review-writer was also displeased with the adaptation, reporting that “Shinn, perhaps with his mind on Brecht, deliberately leaves the stilted tenor of translated text in place:  Speakers can sound as though they’re shouting subtitles at each other.”  With the exception of Harris (“as exaggerated as a George Grosz painting”), “everyone else, even strikingly fine actors, seems stranded.”  Shaw found that “Jones seems to be moving his cast from image to image rather than moment to moment.”  Her conclusion?  That “the show seems to have been made from the perspective of the huge, beautiful monoliths: It’s vast and slow and cold, and not, ultimately, all that concerned with the people on the ground.”

Zachary Stewart labeled the Armory’s Judgment Day “a jaw-dropping production” on TheaterMania.  “Even if you are turned off by the icy chill of the script,” Stewart promised, “Jones’s production draws you toward its bewitching flame.”  Shinn’s adaptation into modern English is “a surprisingly excellent job” that still “maintain[s] the prewar tone of the piece.”  Stewart found, “There's a lot to chew on in Judgment Day,” including instances of “contemporary resonance.”  In Stewart’s eyes, “Judgment Day is a withering take on the tribal instinct, and the centrality of myth in reinforcing that instinct.  When everyone in the room believes one thing, it is almost certainly not the truth.”

On Broadway World, Michael Dale felt that “Judgment Day, may seem on paper to be an introspective drama about guilt and punishment,” but he asserted that “such intimacy doesn’t fly on the massive stage of the Park Avenue Armory’s Drill Hall.”  The BWW reviewer posited, therefore, that director Jones, adaptor Shinn, and set designer Steinberg “have created a huge, cold, emotionally stark production that is chilling in its inhumanity.”  Dale reported that “Steinberg’s imposing set pieces, harshly lit by Sheri[n], emphasizes an attitude of individual insignificance deferring to the greater good as enormous structures appear choreographed along with the movement of actors.”  The review-writer concluded his notice by pointing out:

As with any political piece or social commentary, there's the temptation to compare the era of the play with contemporary times.  Certainly, themes of technological advancements diminishing opportunities for workers, the dangers of mob mentality and society's leanings towards gender-based sympathies are still with us.

David Finkle credited Jones with “[e]stablishing his own fearlessness” on New York Stage Review, finding that the director’s “staging [of Judgment Day in the Armory] gives it an enormous size and scope.”  The production’s “locomotive pace holds Judgment Day to a parable’s effectiveness.”  The NYSR writer found that “the drama is as efficient, yet as narrow, as an arrow hitting a target’s center.”  In conclusion, Finkle judged:

There’s no denying that in his momentous Judgment Day production, director Jones knocks patrons over the heads.  It’s an alert from a sober decade in which a fascist leader was blowing heavy clouds over the Continent and the globe.   When ostensible autocratic leaders appear to be emerging in growing numbers today, it seems as if von Horváth’s work has a potent relevance to a swelling contemporary plight.

In NYSR’s second review of Judgment Day,  Elysa Gardner exclaimed:

Let us now praise melodrama, at least conditionally.  Coarser examples—say, soap operas, or mega-musicals involving bloody wars or misunderstood creatures besotted with nubile women—may not offer much to recommend the form.  But approached with imagination, skill and a clear sense of purpose—and a few dashes of knowing irony, where appropriate—it can provide riveting and even thought-provoking entertainment.

“A case in point is on ravishing display at Park Avenue Armory,” Gardner wrote, calling Judgment Day a “socially, morally and psychologically charged thriller [that] has become a triumph of overstatement in service of plain but difficult truths.”  She specifically praised the design team, “who have turned the vast space at the Armory’s Wade Thompson Drill Hall into a glorious (and essentially minimalist) landscape” and said that the actors all “deliver memorable individual performances.”  The overall production, which the NYSR reviewer labeled “breathtaking,” “leav[es] us jarred and mesmerized throughout.” 

“Once in a while, a powerful play blows in from the past to hit you with the force of a gale wind,” wrote Carol Rocamora on Theater Pizzazz, referring to Horváth’s “chilling . . . moral fable.”  Judgment Day is “a thrilling production directed by Richard Jones,” Rocamora continued; “it’s a dark play for dark times—both then and now.”  The TP reviewer asserted, “The astonishment of this production is its jaw-dropping scale,” with a “dazzling design . . . by Paul Steinberg.”  “Jones’s sweeping directorial style,” she declared, “combined with an exquisite attention to detail and precise timing of so many moving parts, is incomparable.”  Additionally, Rocamora praised all the designers:

Enhanced by Mimi Jordan Sherin’s dramatic lighting design, Antony McDonald’s colorful costumes, Daniel Kluger and Drew Levy’s powerful sound design (including bells, whistles, screeching brakes, and crashing train sounds), and Daniel Kruger’s haunting music design, the cumulative, larger-than-life results are overpowering—more impactful than anything you’ll see on a New York stage this season.

“Shinn’s timely adaptation of Judgment Day leaves you with haunting questions about truth, conscience, and responsibility to society despite the personal cost,” concluded Rocamora.  “These are the very questions that resonate sharply and urgently in today’s turbulent times.”

On TheaterScene.com, Arney Rosenblat characterized the play as a “cautionary parable's over-arching themes of the complicit nature of guilt and destructive nature of mob mentality,” which “has been cleanly and effectively adapted by Christopher Shinn.”  Rosenblat reported that director Jones “choreographs, with the aid of Movement Director Anjali Mehra, a character ballet across the shifting stage to establish an unrivaled visual experience.”  The reviewer explained, “To fill both the enormous space of the Armory and the larger than life goals of the parable, Jones encourages his actors, for the most part,  to give larger than life performances.”  Rosenblat gave extra praise in this regard to Harriet Harris for her portrayal of Frau Liemgruber, but he generally complemental all the cast. 

Elyse Sommer of CurtainUp proclaimed, “Christopher Shinn . . . and director Richard Jones . . . have given von Horváth’s work a slick production that feels remarkably of the moment.”  It’s staged with the “operatic grandeur the Armory’s vast stage calls for,” she affirmed, but added, “For all its pertinent issues and stylistic diversity, Judgment Day doesn’t quite make the grade as a memorably great play,” in part because “the spectacular staging does tend to upstage the actors.”  Nevertheless, “the entire cast meets the challenge of playing to the top row of the Drill Hall’s raked seating area.” 

Victor Gluck, reviewing for TheaterScene.net (not associated with the similarly-titled TheaterScene.com, quoted above), dubbed the Armory’s Judgment Day “a superb production” that “seems as powerful and relevant as if it had been written in this decade, not 80 years ago.”  Gluck added, “The production makes this expressionistic drama as contemporary as if this style were newly born.”  Interestingly, Gluck, like a number of his colleagues in criticism, noted, “The monumental set pieces . . . dwarf the characters,” but found method in this set-up, “suggesting that people are pawns in some cosmic pattern bigger than themselves.”  His ultimate assessment of the Armory staging of Judgment Day was: “Richard Jones’s huge production gives the play the breadth that it needs to tell its story with stunning visual effects.”

“Ödön von Horváth is in fashion these days, because he wrote about how the threat of fascism affected ordinary people,” noted WNYC’s Jennifer Vanasco in a radio review, continuing, “But this production of his 1937 play ‘Judgment Day’ . . . fails to make that threat feel real, or important.”  Vanasco explained that Judgment Day “should be an interesting morality play about the fickleness of crowds, yet the story doesn’t wrestle with guilt or complicity in an interesting way.” 

“Horváth’s point is that everything is connected, that every wrong action sets off a chain of additional bad actions.”  But the reviewer on the New York City outlet for National Public Radio felt:

This doesn’t really make sense.  But then, a lot of the play doesn’t.  It’s never clear why Anna kisses the stationmaster to begin with.  More importantly, some of the villagers are survivors of the crash, but they don’t seem upset about the incident.  No one is mourning those whose lives were lost.  Instead, they just gossip about why the train barreled through the signal.

Vanasco reported that “the Armory stage is enormous and the actors are dwarfed by the impressive set,” a sentiment shared by several other review-writers.  “The structures are a wonder,” she affirmed, observing that “[a]t the close of the first act, one of them smoothly recedes into the distance—and Anna gets smaller and smaller.”  Vanasco added, “Unfortunately, so do our hopes for a meaningful performance.”

The WNYC reviewer thought, “It could be that in a more intimate space, the audience would more easily connect with the characters.  Perhaps the play would feel relevant and hot-blooded, instead of the chilly work we have here.”

'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.”