'Greenwood Pond: Double Site'

 

Supplement to “Conserving Modern Art”

[On 11 December 2018, I published "Conserving Modern Art" on Rick On Theater (Rick On Theater: Conserving Modern Art).  It was a post about the conservation and preservation of modern artworks made of experimental and non-traditional materials and in innovative styles that don’t age well or lend themselves easily to cleaning.

[Last month, the New York Times published an article about Mary Miss’s environmental installation in Iowa, Greenwood Pond: Double Site (1989-96), that's going to be dismantled because it’s deteriorating and the museum that owns it doesn’t have the money to repair it.  The culprit is “Iowa’s extreme climate,” says the Times, exacerbated by climate change.

[I'm reposting the Times report as a kind of follow-up to "Conserving Modern Art," but I’m going to supplement it with some thoughts of my own, with reference to that 2018 post, as well as several others on related topics that overlap with the circumstances in Iowa.  Those previous posts are: “Books in Print,” 14 July 2010 (Rick On Theater: Books in Print); “We Get Letters,” 7 April 2015 (Rick On Theater: We Get Letters); and “‘The Future of the Past’” by Evan Moffitt (T: The New York Times Style Magazine), 26 October 2023 (Rick On Theater: "The Future of the Past").

[Each of those reports touches on some aspect of preserving and retrieving precarious but precious work of human hands and minds, largely because they were made of or relied on either materials that were innately ephemeral, such as computer-based or video art and electronic and digital documents, or materials that just didn’t stand up to the contemporary environment.]

“HARSH WEATHER AND ECONOMICS IMPERIL LAND ART”
by Julia Halperin 

[Halpern’s report on the potential loss of Mary Miss’s site-specific environmental sculptural installation ran in the “Arts” section (sec. C) of the New York Times on 23 January 2024.  It was posted on the paper’s website on 22 January as “A Leading Land Art Installation Is Imperiled. By Its Patron” (Leading Land Art Work by Mary Miss Is Imperiled by Its Patron - The New York Times (nytimes.com)).

[Biography of Mary Miss, excerpted from Wikipedia, updated on 24 January 2024:

Mary Miss (born May 27, 1944) is an American artist and designer. Her work has crossed boundaries between architecture, landscape architecture, engineering and urban design. Her installations are collaborative in nature: she has worked with scientists, historians, designers, and public administrators. She is primarily interested in how to engage the public in decoding their surrounding environment.

Early life and education

Miss was born May 27, 1944, in New York City, but she spent her youth moving every year while living primarily in the western United States.

Miss studied art and received a B.A. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1966. Miss later received an M.F.A. from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture of Maryland Institute College of Art in 1968.

Influence in public art

As a public artist, Miss is considered a pioneer in environmental art and site-specific art, as well a leading sculptor during the feminist movement of the 1970s. She was a founding member of the journal Heresies. From her earliest work, she has been interested in bringing the specific attributes of a site into focus along with and audience engagement within public space. Miss’ work crosses boundaries between landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, and graphic communication. Her work creates situations that emphasize a site's history, ecology, or aspects of the environment that have gone unnoticed. She has been particularly interested in redefining the role of the artist in the public domain.

In her influential 1979 essay, Sculpture in the Expanded Field, art critic Rosalind Krauss opens with a description of Mary Miss's, Perimeters/Pavilions/Decoys. Krauss uses Miss's work to support her examination of sculpture's interdisciplinary nature between architecture and landscape. South Cove (1988), a permanent public project in Battery Park, is a seminal project in Miss' career as it signified new possibilities for artists working in the public realm. The project, located on a three-acre site at the base of the riverfront Esplande, was made in collaboration with architect Stanton Eckstut and landscape designer Susan Child. "South Cove brings the public more intimately in contact with the water than any other component of Battery park City or, indeed, any other Manhattan riverside park."

Miss has worked on the development of the project City as Living Laboratory, which, according to the project's description, collaborates with artists, environmental designers and scientists to focus on and explore sustainability in cities.

Exhibitions

Miss was included in the exhibition Twenty-Six Contemporary Women Artists at the Aldrich Museum in 1971. Lucy Lippard was the curator, and other artists included Alice Aycock and Jackie Winsor. She was also included in the exhibition Four Young Americans alongside the artists Ann McCoy, Ree Morton, and Jackie Winsor, curated by Ellen H. Johnson and Athena Tacha at the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Along with others, Miss's work has been included in the exhibitions Decoys, Complexes and Triggers at the Sculpture Center in New York, Weather Report: Art and Climate Change organized by Lucy Lippard at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, More Than Minimal: Feminism and Abstraction in the 1970s at the Rose Art Museum, and Century City: Art and Culture in the Modern Metropolis at the Tate Modern.

Miss has also been the subject of exhibitions at the Harvard University Art Museum, Brown University Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Art in London, the Architectural Association in London, Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, and the Des Moines Art Center.

Awards and honors

Miss received the New York City American Society of Landscape Architects President's Award in 2010, the American Academy in Rome's Centennial Medal in 2001, and a Medal of Honor from the American Institute of Architects in 1990. She received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1986. She was awarded grants by the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984, 1975, and 1974. She was named as a distinguished alumni of UC Santa Barbara in 1985.

Personal life

Miss married sculptor Bruce Colvin in 1967, but later divorced in 1986. She is currently married to George Peck, a New York-based artist. They live together in Tribeca where Miss also has her studio.

[Here’s Miss’s own description of Greenwood Pond: Double Site, from her website (GREENWOOD POND: DOUBLE SITE | Mary Miss):

Initiated by the Des Moines Art Center as one of a series of artist¹s installations in the Museum park, the project was developed over a seven year period. Given the number of organizations interested in the park, I decided to collaborate with various local groups to make a place which would operate on several levels: a site which could be layered onto another site and which would have multiple readings. The importance of the park to the immediate neighborhood is made apparent by invoking and building upon layers of associations and memories which have collected over time. Walking around the pond, shifting between overviews and cut-outs within the water surface, the individual visitor is able to trace an intimate view of the place while putting together a new understanding of how it operates visually and physically. Additionally, the makeup and processes of a Midwestern wetlands become clearer as one understands their role in the immediate environment.

Paths lead the viewer to multiple ways of seeing this place. A walkway overhanging the edge of the pond makes it possible to move out over the water. Proceeding around the water’s edge a ramp disappears into the water after getting the visitor down to the level of the pond. The line of this ramp extends in a long arc across the pond marked first by wood pilings and then by a concrete-lined trough cut into the water. Adjacent to this arc, on the land the walkway continues around the edge of the pond past a series of structures, including a pavilion, a mound and a curving wood trellis to form the other side of the ellipse. A large leaf shaped space is outlined by these structures affirming and making palpable the connection between the land and water. The covered pavilion with a seating area inside is built up against the curving mound, which rises almost to the height of the pavilion and seems to wrap it into the landscape.  Continuing around the edge of the pond a small bridge pavilion allows the viewer to descend to the water once again in an area filled with water lilies.  Proceeding further there is an entrance down into a concrete trough where one is able to sit at eye level with the surface of the water; having been kept to the edge, at a distance, the visitor is able to actually enter the pond.  One feels the protection of the concrete walls holding back the pressure of the surrounding water.   Above the trough, on the other side of the path, is a series of stone terraces, on a hillside filled with prairie grass. Movement is key to the experience of the project; the visitor constructs an understanding of the site through the experience the multiple elements and the relationship created between them.

[Let me define some pertinent terms for readers who aren’t up on art jargon.  Site-specific art, for instance, is artwork created for an explicit place.  Habitually, the artist plans and creates the artwork with the exact location in mind.  Site-specific art can include sculpture, graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms, as well as combinations of forms and materials.  Installations can be in cities, remote natural settings (like Miss’s Greenwood Pond), or even underwater. 

[Site-specific installations can be intended for permanent installation or temporary display, like the wrapping projects of Christo (1935-2020) and Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009).  The setting of a site-specific artwork is so vital that, as sculptor Richard Serra (b. 1938) said of it: “To move the work is to destroy the work.”

[Environmental art is work that’s planned to surround or involve the participation of spectators in a three-dimensional space to enclose them and involve them in a whole range of sensory experiences—visual, auditory, kinetic, tactile, and sometimes even olfactory.  In other words, the artist creates an environment into which the viewer enters.

[Environmental art often evokes ecological concerns—especially in the era of climate change—but isn’t always so.  The artists are inspired by nature and often use natural materials such as leaves, flowers, branches, ice, soil, sand, stone, and water as the basis of their artwork.  Furthermore, by situating their work in particular places—that is to say, making it site-specific—environmental art often seeks to both transform the way that the site is viewed, while also revealing what was already there.

[Closely allied to environmental art, land art, also known as earth art, means artworks created within the natural environment—but more than that, they’re created from the environment.  It’s art that’s made directly in the landscape, sculpting the land itself into earthworks or making structures in the landscape using natural materials such as sand, earth, rocks, twigs, and water found on site.

[Greenwood Pond isn’t so much land art as environmental art because Miss brought in construction materials, principally lumber, that wasn’t earthen or indigenous to the location.  A more precise example of land art is Spiral Jetty (1970) by Robert Smithson (1938-73) on the shore of the Great Salt Lake near Rozel Point, Utah, or City (1970-2022) by Michael Heizer (b. 1944) in rural Lincoln County, Nevada.  The sites of land art are often distant from populated areas and therefore fairly inaccessible.  Photo documentation is commonly displayed in urban art galleries and often sold to support the work itself.]

An Iowa museum says it will dismantle a celebrated work because it lacks the money to repair it.

The American land artist and designer Mary Miss was traveling in Europe in October when she received the kind of news that no one in her line of work wants to hear. One of her most significant artworks, owned by an Iowa museum, would need to be closed to the public because it had fallen into disrepair and parts of it were at risk of collapsing.

Six weeks later, Miss heard from the Des Moines Art Center that her environmental installation would be dismantled entirely. The word came from the art center’s new director, Kelly Baum, who said it would cost $2.7 million to repair the project, leaving the museum no choice.

Created between 1989 and 1996, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is one of the very few environmental installations in the collection of any American museum and is considered to be the first urban wetland project in the country. Its imminent demolition has angered landscape architecture advocates and upset Miss, who is part of a generation of pioneering female land artists receiving renewed scholarly attention.

“The things that have become so important in my later work — engagement of communities, collaboration with scientists, being able to take on something like climate change as an artist and have a seat at the table with politicians and educators — it started there,” Miss, 79, said by phone from her home in Manhattan. With its wooden boardwalk and concrete walkways that curve along the edge of the water and its cantilevered bridges, “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” invites passers-by to explore the landscape; viewers can climb up a tower to see the water from above or descend into a sunken structure to experience it at eye level.

The debate over the work’s fate has highlighted the difficulty of preserving public artworks, especially in environments with increasingly extreme weather. A wave of ambitious outdoor projects commissioned in the 1980s and ’90s have, over the past 15 years, required extensive maintenance or repair, according to Leigh Arnold, curator of the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, who included Miss in the celebrated recent exhibition “Groundswell: Women of Land Art” [Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas, 23 September 2023-7 January 2024]. The case of “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” is “symptomatic of this greater problem around site-specific installations in that there is this kind of ‘set it and forget it’ attitude,” Arnold said.

In the late ’80s when artists were rethinking what sculpture could look like outside the white-cube gallery space, the Des Moines Art Center invited Miss, along with the sculptors Richard Serra and Bruce Nauman, to develop site-specific works for the city-owned park where the museum is situated. Miss chose a derelict pond. Over the course of seven years, she worked with Indigenous communities, a botanist from Iowa State University, and other groups to restore the area to its original wetland state. In its contract with Miss, in 1994, under the former director Michael Danoff, the museum pledged to “reasonably protect and maintain the project against the ravages of time, vandalism, and the elements.”

The museum says that “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” has been “consistently maintained” since its opening. In consultation with the artist, the museum completed extensive repairs in 2014 and 2015, according to Amy Day, its director of external affairs. But the use of residential deck wood, which has a life span of around a decade, was no match for Iowa’s extreme climate.

“We understand very well the desire to re-engineer and rebuild the work,” Day said. “However, Art Center does not have these resources.”

Miss noted that an outdoor project she made with the same materials in St. Louis has been incrementally upgraded over time, just as one might replace floorboards on a porch, and remains in good shape. She led the effort to repair another one of her installations, in South Cove, a public park in Battery Park City [Lower Manhattan, New York City], in 2019.

Much of Miss’s work focuses on making city residents more aware of their surroundings and their connection to the natural world. For South Cove, Miss, along with the landscape architect Susan Child and the architect Stanton Eckstut, transformed a concrete platform above a landfill into a wild seacoast framed by subtle architectural interventions. Writing in The New York Times in 1990, Tony Hiss likened South Cove to New York fixtures like Central Park and Carnegie Hall for its ability to “stretch our understanding of our connections to one another and to the world the city serves.” In 2008, Miss founded City as Living Laboratory, a nonprofit that brings together artists, scientists and urban residents to tackle sustainability issues.

“It is ironic that other examples of Mary’s really ambitious public art projects aren’t in collections of art museums, yet they are cared for in a way that ensures they will continue to be a part of the public landscape,” Arnold, the Nasher curator, said.

The museum said that its agreement with the city of Des Moines to “remedy and/or remove any unsafe conditions related to artwork in Greenwood Park” takes precedence over its agreement with the artist. Ben Page, Des Moines’s director of parks and recreation, said that the city did not demand the work’s removal but supports the museum’s decision.

The treatment of Miss’s installation is symbolic of the art world’s tendency to undervalue environmental art, said Charles Birnbaum, the director of the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an education and advocacy group. The organization helped rally support for “Greenwood Pond: Double Site” in 2014 and is leading the opposition to its destruction. “Landscape architecture is treated as a second- or third-class citizen,” Birnbaum said. “Sometimes it comes from a lack of institutional memory — cultural amnesia for what they had.”

Miss said she was “shocked” by the museum’s estimate that it would cost $2.7 million to salvage “Greenwood Pond: Double Site.” She wondered if the work could be repaired in stages, rather than all at once, using a less expensive wood that could, in the future, be replaced at more regular intervals.

Birnbaum suggested that the museum consult the Des Moines Founders Garden Club or other patrons who might have an interest in funding the work’s preservation. (Baum, the director, told Miss she had had “numerous conversations” with the trustees, the city and individuals who helped fund the work’s rehabilitation in 2014.) In a letter sent to Miss on Jan. 17, the museum’s board wrote that any avenue that called for replacing the materials “is not financially feasible and does not comprise reasonable maintenance.” The museum’s operating budget in 2023 was $7.7 million.

For Miss, the decision feels especially ironic given her prominent position in recent exhibitions revisiting women whose contributions had been minimized by mainstream art history. Her work was included in “52 Artists: A Feminist Milestone,” a restaging of a 1971 exhibition organized by the critic Lucy Lippard at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut [6 June 2022-8 January 2023], as well as “Groundswell” at the Nasher. “Having this acknowledgment begin to surface a bit again and then again be erased — again? Really?” Miss said. “It’s just really hard.”

[In November 2007, I went to an exhibit of the work of painter Morris Louis (1912-62) at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (see my report on ROT on 15 February 2010).  Tacked on to the Louis show was an exhibit intended to offer “insights into the Hirshhorn’s groundbreaking conservation techniques developed to preserve and restore poured-paint canvases by various artists.”  This was the origin of my report “Conserving Modern Art.”

[In that post, I recounted this occurrence in my own small art collection:

I had a serious problem . . . with a painting from 1958 that began to deteriorate because of the innovative technique the artist used to create it.  The fate of my little Abstract Expressionist painting, Intermezzo (1958) by Norman Carton (1908-80), is a simple, but perfect example of what the issue here is.  The 18-inch-by-16-inch, heavily impastoed, multi-colored work in oil on canvas, . . . is one of the most cherished pieces I have—because I love the painting for itself, because it’s the first piece of art I ever owned, and because it was a specially selected present from my parents . . . . 

In the 1980s, the painting began to deteriorate.  The oil paint—Carton made the painting before new pigments like acrylics were invented—had just begun to dry on the inside of the thick gobs the artist had applied to the canvas with a palette knife.  Who knew it would take three decades for oil paint to dry inside large clumps?  As the paint dried, the globs shrank and pulled away from the canvas, not only threatening to come off, but causing cracks and flakes (called “cleavage,” “flaking,” “blistering,” or “scaling”) in the primer (known as “ground”) and flatter areas of paint on the canvas.  I knew that if I didn’t do something, I’d lose the painting.  I was frantic.  I even went so far as to write to the administration of New York’s New School for Social Research (now known simply as The New School), where Carton had exhibited and taught, because on the third floor of the old main building . . ., the school displayed a larger Carton canvas in the same style as my small one.  I asked if they had encountered the same problem and, if so, what they did about it, but I never received an answer.

At the time, my father was a docent at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in downtown D.C.  I asked him to use his contacts at the museum to find a conservator who might be able to save Intermezzo and he did . . . .  In 1987, I ended up paying five times the painting’s purchase price—but a quarter of its estimated value at the time—to stabilize it to prevent further deterioration. . . .   To this day, I don’t regret the expenditure for a New York second.

[I’m currently working on a collection of letters exchanged between my future parents during World War II.  Today, as I suggest in “We Get Letters,” all their correspondence would be by e-mail or text, and none of it would have survived. 

[Both my parents-to-be saved the letters they received, however, and shortly after they were married, my dad mounted and bound them.  Now, 79 years after they were written, 29 years after my father died and nine years after my mother’s death, I can simply read them! 

[Now, though, I’m confronted with another, related dilemma.  My transcription of the letters and my commentary, all 180-plus pages of it, exists only on my hard disk and, eventually, on my blog.  Both of those are innately evanescent media and require specific technology to retrieve. 

[I’ve been working on the letters project since 2016—that’s eight years of work on and off at a very personally meaningful venture and I would like to preserve it.  I read, appraised, paraphrased or transcribed, interpreted, fact-checked, and commented on 182 pieces of correspondence, and I’m already 77 years old, so I won’t be around a lot longer to pass along this effort unless I can put into some form that’ll last.

[I’ve been considering ways of preserving the eventual post, with my commentary and notes, permanently.  One possibility is a self-published book—though I haven't made any definite decisions yet.  Ironically, that method reverts to an old “technology” that electronic publication is supposed to have supplanted.  (In “Books in Print,” I write about the pleasures of printed books, confessing that “there’s something about a book . . . that makes me resist the idea of e-versions.”)

[How does this all relate to Mary Miss and her Greenwood Pond?  Her environmental installation, my Carton, and the discussion of my parents’ 79-year-old correspondence are all points on a continuum of perishable human artistic and intellectual accomplishment that could—or will—soon be lost forever.

[My letters project is dependent on technology not just for its creation, but for its preservation and retrievability.  I’m only in minimal control of that.  I pointed out in “We Get Letters”: “E-mail”—as well as other forms of electronic writing—"is basically ephemeral . . . .  What’s more, they can’t easily be passed along later to repositories like libraries” or later family members and friends after we’re gone. 

[As investor, public speaker, and writer John Coleman (b. 1981) expressed it in a 2004 Harvard Business Report, “Email is ‘permanent’ in its own way; our electronic messages are easy to keep and search in huge volumes.  But they aren’t tangible and enduring in the same way those old notes are.”

[(In 2015, I came across a cache of letters my father sent to my mother while they were apart for a month in 1962, when my dad was in Germany before my mother joined him.  I transcribed them and posted them as “Home Alone” on 12. 15, and 18 June 2015.  If e-mail or texting had existed 62 years ago, would I have even found those messages?)

[As for the Carton and Greenwood Pond, they are both vulnerable because of the materials from which they’re made.  Norman Carton’s painting wasn’t made with experimental pigments; the oil paint he used was the same as that used by artists for decades.  What was new was the way he applied it to the canvas: thickly, just as it came out of the tube.  Artists had only just begun to use that technique, so no one knew how it would perform over time.

[I doubt it was something anyone—artists, collectors, gallerists, curators—was concerned about when Carton and his contemporaries starting experimenting with impasto.  How could they know that 30 years after Intermezzo was painted, 25 years after my parents gave it to me for my 14th birthday, and 5 years after the artist died, trouble would start to appear.

[Mary Miss didn’t use particularly new-fangled materials or innovative techniques to build Greenwood Pond: Second Site.  In fact, she used basic materials—treated lumber, metal mesh, steel, stone, and concrete, all easily repaired or replaced.  What she and the curators and directors of the Des Moines Art Center didn’t reckon on was the effects on an outdoor installation of Iowa’s harsh winter climate, particularly with the added battering of climate change.  On an annual budget of $7.7 million, the museum says it can’t afford the $2.7 million to repair Greenwood Pond.

[The DMAC announced last October that “public access” to the work has been “temporarily suspended” while it undergoes a “complete structural review.”  Soon after that, however, with no substantial consultation with Miss, the museum notified the artist of the decision to demolish Greenwood Pond.  Miss said she’s “shocked that this decision has been reached so quickly on the future of Greenwood Pond: Double Site.”

[The Cultural Landscape Foundation, a non-profit that “educates and engages the public to make our shared landscape heritage more visible, identify its value, and empower its stewards,” suggests the DMAC has not fulfilled its contractual obligation to “reasonably protect and maintain” the work.

[TCLF is calling for the DMAC to reverse its demolition decision and, instead, to engage in meaningful consultations with Miss and others to find a solution that restores the artwork and develops a long-term, ongoing maintenance plan.  The organization has raised many questions regarding the DMAC’s decision, laid out on its website at Acclaimed Artist Mary Miss’ Renowned Land Art Installation "Greenwood Pond: Double Site" to be Torn Down by Des Moines Art Center | TCLF.  Among these are: what are the DMAC’s maintenance conservation protocols concerning permanent works in its collection and how were they applied to this artwork? and how and why did the DMAC permit Greenwood Pond: Double Site to deteriorate to the point where demolition was thought to be the only option?

[Julia Halperin is a freelance arts and culture journalist, writing monthly column for the Art Newspaper, the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Financial Times.  After working her way up through the ranks at the Art Newspaper to museums editor, Halperin was appointed executive editor of Artnet News in 2017.  She co-founded the Burns Halperin Report in 2020, which has become an influential indicator of inclusivity in the art world.]

 

'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.”