People Are Getting Anne Imhof's ‘DOOM’ All Wrong | Artnet News (2025)

I liked DOOM: House of Hope, German artist Anne Imhof’s hotly anticipated but now widely panned immersive-performance spectacular at the Park Avenue Armory. I know that judgement is either going to sound like hot-take contrarianism or just bad taste. So let me explain.

Imhof is an important and very cool artist, known for live-art spectacles, often employing performers who have a certain kind of clubby, androgynous, fashion-model look—most famously, Faust at the Venice Biennale in 2017, which was a sensation. I knew her only by reputation; this was my first Imhof.

DOOM stars a large and characteristically telegenic cast of dancers, and fills the Park Avenue Armory vast drill hall with hulking black Cadillac Escalades. These become stages atop which sullen, spotlit performers glower over your head. Much of the three-hour show involves disjointed tableaux that channel the imagery of American high school (tailgate party, school dance, big game, etc.)

There is a lot of recited text—some unintelligible unless you’re up close in the echoey hall. The most recognizable comes from Romeo and Juliet. There is also a lot of ballet; hip-hop dance; a German-French rap performance; some boppy post-grunge; and a lovely and melancholy piano performance.

Different areas of the Armory’s Drill Hall are always activating, the crowd of spectators forming and re-forming to get a view. A giant red countdown clock ticks down the minutes until the end, as if the end of the world were coming.

It’s punishing. It’s sometimes off-putting. It’s maybe a little overwhelmed by its own scale. Whatever story Imhof has in mind was not really clear to me. It’s not to all tastes.

And yet I got a lot out of it, and I think a lot of the DOOM hate I’ve heard gets it wrong—in the following ways.

1. It knows what it’s doing

The angst-ridden and self-serious atmosphere of DOOM seems to put its critics off, even ones who liked previous incarnations of Imhof’s style.

DOOM begins with a soundtrack of glitchy wolf howls, dramatic synths, and static. You hear someone chanting portentously, into the dark, over and over, “We’re fucked, we’re doomed, we’re dead. I think I made you up inside my head!” Throughout the play, performers will point to their eye and slowly draw a line down their cheek as if suggesting a tear, or point their fingers at their head like a gun to pantomime blowing their brains out.

This is all very po-faced. And if you think, “Is this… kind of cheesy?” that is also fine. Right from those wolf howls, there’s a knowingness to all this.

DOOM is not making fun of itself, exactly, but it’s clearly self-aware. Indeed, I immediately just assumed it was obvious that it was about numbing self-awareness.

All of DOOM’s shape-shifting imagery seems about putting you in a place where you are not sure where you stand, emotionally. It’s about a hunger for visceral experience, but in the context of a deep uncertainty about what having an experience even means when you’ve seen raw and immediate emotions like dread or ecstasy so often performed.

This sense of reality-confusion is, incidentally, what the immersive-theater side quests in the show are about. Once things get rolling, you can wander into the dressing rooms, styled as high school locker rooms. The performers come in and out, changing. You’re going backstage, and it’s still part of the performance.

2. It’s not about “American Youth”

Imhof styles her players as jocks and cheerleaders, mopey schoolgirls and edgy skaters. Some observers seem to be reading this as a German artist approaching U.S. culture in an artificial way, but the costumery reads to me as about its artificiality. These are archetypes. This feels like dress-up.

DOOM does not feel to me like an attempt at some kind of direct reflection on the condition of Gen Z life—except insofar as actual contemporary American teenagers are also aware of the bottomless commercial mythology of youth rebellion and sex appeal being sold back to them.

The star-crossed lovers of Romeo and Juliet are themselves stock symbols of “tragic young love,” so the play’s presence in DOOM flags that the piece is more about the mythology of youth rather than real youth. Rather than absorbing you into Shakespeare’s tale, Imhof has shattered the play into free-floating chunks of famous dialogue (the balcony scene, the suicide) that the performers form and re-form around.

She also drops in fragments of Jerome Robbins’s choreography from West Side Story (1961), a fabled remixing of Romeo and Juliet by way of American youth culture. There’s also that melancholy piano rendition of Radiohead’s “Talk Show Host,” from Baz Luhrmann’s frenetic Leonardo DiCaprio/Claire Danes Romeo + Juliet (1996), which was set in Venice Beach instead of Venice.

As with the high-school imagery, Shakespeare’s text itself is so freighted that it is hard to experience without thinking about all the baggage. Most of DOOM is like that, a ghost theater of self-conscious citations.

3. It knows what’s going on with social media

Saying that an artwork plays well on social media or noting that other visitors are posting a lot from an event has become a kind of critical code for “this is not serious.”

Like it or not, smartphones are part of the infrastructure of experience, so any theater artist has to make a conscious choice about the relation to them. They can tell the audience to turn them off, as at any normal theater or dance performance. (In fact, this was also long the approach of artist Tino Sehgal, whose 2003 This Kiss performance, re-enacting great art-history kisses, is itself restaged as a set piece in DOOM—more citations of citations.)

The other route is to permit phones, and cope with all the resulting irritating behavior. DOOM is permissive, and the results are indeed irritating as you have to fight for sightlines with people filming random moments. Imhof herself told my colleague William van Meter that she thinks viewers come to try to recreate the exact images they already saw were popular online.

But the alienation of filtering visceral feeling through pre-digested imagery is very much a central preoccupation of DOOM overall. And the fact that it is asking you to think about how your live experience of her work relates to your temptation to turn it into a picture, moment to moment, is not subtle.

There is an entire set piece where the performers stomp furiously about the stage and rant about the invention of photography as a crime against the soul. At another moment, obits of dance critics are read as monologues. You hear dance extolled as an “art of memory,” about the pleasures and challenges of writing about a fleeting experience that goes undocumented in the moment.

Most importantly, throughout DOOM, Imhof’s performers are almost always themselves filming each other on smartphones, even as they act out their vignettes about desire and death. The resulting feed is projected huge above. You are often choosing between fighting to get up close with the action or watching it at a distance, remotely, on the big screen.

4. There IS a political dimension to it

One criticism I am somewhat sympathetic to—it feels as if it lurks behind a lot of the irritation Imhof’s opus has inspired—is that a performance-art work called DOOM about the U.S. right now should really have more to say about the political events in the U.S. that are filling the media with feelings of actual doom.

When Imhof speaks about it, the politics she ascribes to the piece seem to be fairly gestural—mainly that a spectacle with so much queer and femme energy in it is itself a show of strength at this moment of macho reaction. Scattered on the floor of the Drill Hall, you will find there are banners and protest signs that say “Trans Rights” and “You Can’t Control My Body,” alongside other signs that say, “I Love You” and “Save the Dolls.” (I missed what exactly these signs refer to in whatever story underlies the piece.)

What I might venture to add, though, is that DOOM arrives at the end of a period when political protest, via both social media and corporate pop culture, became very spectacularized and commodified (as an image and a posture, at least). Since the middle of the Biden years, when Imhof began working on DOOM, calling outrage “performative” became an effective way to dismiss it, because such an industry of hollow symbolic gestures developed. Now, even people who believe in causes that need defending don’t know how to act in order to be read as sincere or to reach an audience that matters.

It’s not clear what will reawaken the needed level of healthy protest, but the earnest days of the 2017 Women’s March don’t seem to be returning.

Given DOOM’s central theme of intense feeling being reduced to postures, I think you can read Imhof’s splintered fantasy theater as processing the emotional aftermath of this confusing cultural moment. The impulse since last year’s election has been to retreat into the supportive micro-communities and dream worlds, but those comforts are haunted by awareness that they are so fragile and potentially self-deluding.

Granted, DOOM reflects all this more as inchoate emotional background than explicit theme—but it’s definitely part of why DOOM feels so doom-y.

5. It’s Not Nihilistic

A century ago, German playwright Bertolt Brecht theorized the “alienation effect” in theater. His idea was that the realist theater of his day made the audience passive, accepting that there were certain natural ways humans behaved or society worked. Brecht thought you could cultivate a more active audience by creating breaks in the theatrical logic that snapped the spectator to attention, making them aware of the artifice of it all. Maybe, he thought, they might even take that epiphany out into the world, and question how things were done at their workplace or in their neighborhoods.

An unexamined realism is clearly not the cultural problem we are dealing with today, as every detail of DOOM’s immersive theater reflects. The spectator is very active, always on the wander; it is all alienation effect, constantly shifting logics that you have to piece together; you’re never fully absorbed, always aware of what you are seeing are citations. The social reality it plugs into is not naiveté about the media but an ever-expanding cynicism about anything claiming to be sincere or sacred or of more than fleeting significance.

Yet what I ended up liking about DOOM was that its message is not that “it’s impossible to feel anything today.” That is its own stock contemporary art theme, and not that interesting!

Yes, DOOM reads, in the first place, as a halftime show-scaled spectacle of angst and anhedonia. Yet improbably, Imhof has spoken of the work as actually a sincere love story (suggested by its oddly contradictory full title, DOOM: House of Hope). And while the exact story she’s telling is hard to untangle on a single passthrough, I definitely picked up its tortured earnest side. It so exaggerates the mechanisms of self-consciousness that it makes you feel your own detachment—but the point is not to leave you there, but to pass through to a sincere emotional connection on the other side. A “reverse alienation effect,” basically.

A moment that stays with me came as Imhof’s giant countdown clock ticked down its final minutes. A duo of performers rose above the crowd and started singing a cover of “The End” by the Doors (“This is the end / my only friend…”) I’ve always found Jim Morrison’s lyrics lumbering and pretentious. Here, the song choice seemed on the nose, given both that The End is a cliché of dissociation thanks to Apocalypse Now, and that we were literally counting the seconds to the end of the show.

I think I rolled my eyes.

But then, in a flash, I saw myself seeing the moment through all those accumulated associations. I dialed back in. And another thought came into my head, “No, actually, they are killing it. This is working on me.” A moment so transcendently self-aware that it inverted values, like the multiplication of two negative numbers becoming a positive; a totally great bit of theater.