Sex, Angst & Collaboration
Nihilistic but never alone (feat. Anne Imhof).
One of the famous Anne Imhof pieces took place in a bar.
Two boxers were instructed to fight, so long as the music was playing.
And a band was instructed to play, so long as the boxers were fighting.
For Imhof, collaboration is a dance.
Some people hate the nihilism of her work. I love the nihilism.
It’s a mille-feuille of media, freely taking inspiration from ads, fashion, religion and depression. Layers of performance — dance, installation, music, opera, painting — that span the course of spiralling hours. Millions of fragile little moments that will never be repeated.
Performers are prowled around by Dobermans, or trapped under perspex.
A clown t-shirt is pulled up to make it a mask, turning a performer into a jester.
Sometimes what you look at is a living photo; a searing image that’s softly breathing.
You wander through a painting exhibition, the soundtrack guiding you gradually through to a concrete performance space that feels ritualistic and ancient.
The generative act, Imhof says, is a lot of time on my back staring at a wall. But the process is completed by iteration.
The first night isn’t the final piece.
Imhof prepares the work by collaborating in small groups, creating the way a band does. It’s her vision, but the details are collaborative.
I don't really believe in great ideas… I always try to look at what comes my way, which are the accidents waiting to happen, and I build in chance as a point of departure in my practice.
Imhof’s muse Eliza Douglas is at the heart of it. A creative partner who’ll architect a soundtrack but whose superpower lies in images created in the moment.
None of us create alone.
Imhof still thinks in drawings, but exploits the unique temporality of performance: unlike a painting, moments can be absorbed but never truly preserved.
And then there’s you.
When live pieces like ANGST or FAUST were performed in museums, I realized how much the audience was participating in making those shows happen. In a sense, in those moments, you hand the piece over to somebody else, and then it's not yours anymore; it belongs to everybody, in terms of how they think about it; the audience becomes a part of the decision-making process, and that's I think quite important both for the people who are performing it, but also for the people who look at the piece.
After FAUST, she released the soundtrack as an album.
No images, just music. No images, but the ones you bring.
.
.
.
Artist’s quotes compiled from excellent interviews:
https://the-talks.com/interview/anne-imhof/
https://spruethmagers.com/artists/anne-imhof/
https://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/anne-imhof-is-creating-hard-core-performance-pieces-that-speak-to-the-anxieties-of-a-new-generation
I attended her first LA opening a few months and that was my introduction to her work! I was really hypnotized by her horses video (let loose in a Russian city neighborhood) ❄️