Superstar Anne Imhof in the Stedelijk: over-styled, larmoyant and pathetic

A young woman, dressed in jeans and bare-chested, strides across the courtyard of a dilapidated building. There is a pile of snow on the ground, the walls are covered with graffiti. Seen from behind, with her bony shoulders and also because of her way of moving, the woman looks more like a man. She walks to an exit whose door is closed, she turns and walks to another exit that also remains closed, there are six locked doors that keep her captive in this gloomy place.

Film character Eliza Douglas has been working with the German artist Anne Imhof (Giessen, 1978, lives in Berlin and New York) since 2015. Imhof makes large-scale installations and performances in which architecture, visual art, music and choreography are combined. Her star has risen at lightning speed, with exhibitions at the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern in London, Palais de Tokyo in Paris and now with the solo exhibition Youth at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Her work embodies a sense of life that appeals to a generation of hyper-individualistic twenty and thirty-somethings in the western, affluent part of the planet. These young people suffer, also as a result of the pandemic, from loneliness, listlessness and fear for the future. Imhof expresses gender fluidity and a paralyzing disorientation resulting from the overriding role of technology in everyday life.

The film was shot in Moscow, at a location next to the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, where Imhof’s exhibition was supposed to take place, but was canceled after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. The exhibition has been taken over by the Stedelijk, where Imhof built up the 1,100 square meters in the basement of the bathtub with a maze of clothes lockers, water containers and stacked car tires. The interior of Rem Koolhaas, with the very heavy, very expensive metal walls and the lookout tower from which you can overlook the exhibition, has largely been maintained.

Bach’s ‘Verbarme dich’

In Imhof’s labyrinth it is dark, with a reddish lighting, an electronic boom sings through speakers attached to a sound rail. Isolated graffiti fragments and other objects, such as a motorcycle, helmets and drawings by Imhof, are exhibited in small spaces. Throughout all of this, the figure of Eliza Douglas looms over and over, in several videos. The exhibition looks like a three-dimensional video game, in which Douglas plays the leading role as an avatar. But with the important difference that Imhof’s game is not interactive, the visitor has no choice but to wander passively through the course.

It seems that Imhof is already being mangled by the interests of some powerful, commercial players in the art world

Earlier this was different. Until 2021, Imhof staged impressive live performances in her installations, in which dozens of dancers, musicians and actors mixed with the audience like living sculptures. In the Stedelijk, live performance has been replaced by film. However, this doesn’t work at all: it’s all over-styled, too contrived. This is exacerbated by Bach’s incessantly repeated, echoing ‘Erbarme Dich’ in a film of horses slow motion and run through the snow, mane billowing, doomed in an apocalyptic world. The camera zooms in on moist horse eyes. It’s larmoyant and pathetic.

In no way does this installation come close to the level of Imhof’s earlier work. Perhaps the time pressure was too great and making the exhibition turned into production work.

Commercial players

It is also remarkable that the exhibition was made possible by the Dutch Hartwig Foundation, with Beatrix Ruf as board member. Ruf, who resigned as director of the Stedelijk a few years ago after being asked about conflicts of interest, is now again active as a curator at the Stedelijk through the Hartwig Foundation. The collaboration with influential galleries Buchholz and Sprüth Magers is also prominently mentioned throughout the exhibition. It seems that Imhof, whose career has only started about seven years ago, is already being squeezed by the interests of some powerful, commercial players in the art world.

Imhof maintains a painting and drawing practice in the protected environment of her studio. Her fine pencil drawings are special, they are reminiscent of the early twentieth-century work of Käthe Kollwitz and Ernst Barlach, artists who depicted human suffering in the First World War. The drawings show that Imhof does have something to say. In an interview with exhibition maker Hans Ulrich Obrist, to be found on the internet, Imhof describes her great wish at the moment. She is captivated by the classical theme of the Dance of Death (Medieval dance full of ecstasy, in which people often lost their senses) and would like to draw a life-size, contemporary Dance of the Dead.

With this she would like to make a tour, outside the art circuit and outside all art places, without art transports and all “those heavy art world stuff”. Imhof would like to leave the art world to allow the artwork to move freely in ‘a real space’, ‘a space without doors’, as a kind of festival where the work can make contact with another audience. It is hoped that Imhof will get the chance to make her wish come true.

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