Haunting Entanglements of Art and Violence

Sarah Lucie

Drill, by Hito Steyerl, exhibition, Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY, June 20–July 21, 2019.

rtist, philosopher, and essayist Hito Steyerl’s most recent work takes the Park Avenue Armory’s prominent Drill Hall as its central object, A premiering within its very walls. Primarily a video installation, Drill continues Steyerl’s enduring interest in examining the complex entanglements of contemporary art and power in all its different forms. In this case, she turns her attention to the history of increasing gun violence and militarization within United States culture, in part by drawing connections between elements that the video suggests have been “hiding in plain sight.” As a site-specific installation, it invites audiences to consider their own implicated position within the murky networks of war and technology as it intersects directly with art. At the Armory, this new video installation takes center stage among a larger survey of Steyerl’s work, which deepens Drill’s intertwining themes of financial exchange, violence, and art.

The Drill Hall is a cavernous space measuring approximately two hundred by three hundred feet, and it remains one of the largest unobstructed interiors in all of New York City. This context is important since the three-channel video installation is projected onto three large screens positioned at the center of the space. Viewers walk deep into the depths of this space before reaching the concrete slabs arranged for audience seating. Lighting illuminates the floor in the pattern of an architectural footprint surrounding the screens, pulsing to rhythmically echo the film’s score. Aside from the slabs and screens, the surrounding environment is a dark and gap- ing empty space. The arresting setting provides more than a simple backdrop for Steyerl’s film; it supports the themes of her work by putting the audience into a position of vulnerability as we feel slightly at ease in the cavernous space.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00509 by guest on 29 September 2021 Installation view of Broken Windows (2018–2019), video installation and environment, single-channel HD video, 6 min. 40 sec., and Unbroken Windows (2018), single-channel HD video, 10 min. Environment: Painted plywood panels, wood easels. Photo © James Ewing.

Installation view of Drill (2019), 3-channel video installation, 21 min., HD video. Photo © James Ewing.

Installation view of HellYeahWeFuckDie (2016), 3-channel video installation and environment. 4 min., HD video, and Installation view of Duty Free Art (2015), 3-channel video installation and environment. 38 min. 21 sec., Robots Today (2016), 8 min., HD video. Photo © James Ewing. HD video, and Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013), Lecture and HD video. Photo © James Ewing.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00509 by guest on 29 September 2021 The film takes on a familiar documentary style, featuring glossy footage with talking heads of activists and historians, but resists the genre’s tendency toward clarity and soothing tones. For example, public historian Anna Duensing gives a walking tour of the Armory with flashlight in hand, and activists Nurah Abdul- haqq, Abbey Clements, Kareem Nelson, and Judith Pearson all remark upon their own experience with gun violence in their schools and neighborhoods during formal interviews. However, the film moves away from the traditional documentary as images and ideas are juxtaposed without a framing narrative as names and titles appear only much later in the film’s final credits. This lack of contextualizing information reinforces the prominence of the Armory itself, the only site that grounds the jumble of images on the screens. All interviews occur within the Drill Hall, with interviewees seated in the same position as audiences.

In the course of the film, audiences learn that the Armory was built by Manhattan elite to house the Seventh Regiment—the first to join the Union in fighting the Civil War. As we sit watching, a historian reveals that we are seated atop an old shooting gallery housed in the basement. The film’s multiple reveals about the space heighten a vague sense of unease. A tour stops to feel the holes in the walls, finding bullets still lodged in the cement. Another provocative anecdote from an interviewee tells of how the basement once flooded, and the water became so poisoned with the lead from the bullets that a HAZMAT team was required to clean it up. Just as the troubling history is shared that comment on the need for greater gun control, Duensing tells of how the Armory was built by one of the first Presidents of the NRA, beginning as a community organization to improve marksmanship after the war. A regal portrait of this NRA president still hangs ominously in another room of the Armory as a sign of this past.

The film’s score keeps an unsteady beat that booms through the imposing space. Under the leadership of music director Thomas C. Duffy, the score features original pieces along with three data sonifications, including “AR-15: 2016–2018” by Thomas C. Duffy, “Mass Shootings: 1999–2018” by Antonio Medina, and “Firearms Manufactured: 1986–2016” by James Brandfonbrener. Each of these translates the sonic data into melodic notes. For instance, in “Mass Shootings: 1999–2018,” each note of the melody represents a mass shooting, while the pedal tone charts the passing of time with each note representing one month. While these details are unknown when watching the film for the first time, its effect is overwhelming. Without a traditional time-signature or predictable melodic intervals, the tones startle and bombard. The Yale University Marching Band performs much of the score, and the film features footage of the band perform- ing drills within the empty Drill Hall. In this context, the snare drum’s capacity to mimic gunshots does not go unnoticed.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00509 by guest on 29 September 2021 The film site-specific resonance movingly blended the past with the present, the history of the Armory and its association with NRA calling forth the corruption and gun violence of today, particularly with the continuous mass shootings around the country that continue to pervade the media without any significant policy changes being made. While activists describe the horrors of gun violence in these mass shootings, their ongoing trauma is starkly apparent, as is the rela- tionship between violence and economic status. The ongoing material effects of the lead bullets on the environment carry forward. The musical score ingeniously undergirds the sense of the present time translating statistics from past events into the material present by sonically affecting the listener’s body. The impulse to aestheticize mass shootings feels objectionable at first, we soon realize how the violent roots of the marching band within the Armory space makes an historical connection that points to the temporal repetition of these issues. This is just one of the ways Steyerl reveals how violence and art are entangled; as is noted in the film, the Armory itself “spare[d] no expense to make war beautiful.”

Standing within Drill Hall, which has been in use as an artistic venue since 2007, the troubling revelations of the film concerning the building’s past take on a spooky aura, an unearthing of ghosts, particularly of my own past experiences attending work there that now seem uncritical interactions with the building. While the Armory appears to have commissioned its very own exposé, the nuanced outcome accomplishes a metatheatrical provocation that gestures toward the wider relations of art production and consumption expanding far beyond the building’s walls.

Steyerl’s other works included in the show both support and add to the complexity of these themes. Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013) draws out a military-cultural network that links the artist herself with a bullet manufacturer sponsoring the Istanbul Biennial. One of their bullets killed Steyerl’s friend in 1998. A different perspective on the linkage between violence and art is found in Broken Windows (2018–2019), in which Steyerl features a community activist in Camden, New Jersey, who paints wood to board up windows. This organization references the controversial broken windows theory, which suggests that societal breakdown is often brought on by smaller unaddressed issues like vandalism, which condi- tion the environment for more serious crimes. Steyerl pairs these boarded up windows with a video featuring researchers who train artificial intelligence to recognize the sound of breaking glass. Technology comes strongly into play in Hell Yeah We Fuck Die (2016), in which audiovisual footage shows robots being tortured in order to teach them how to become stronger. Here, we see robot forms stumbling or drooping from their attacks, suggesting the vulnerability of our technologies. A fallen figure appears in the next room, cheekily displayed as fine art in Prototype 1.0 and 1.1 (2017).

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj_a_00509 by guest on 29 September 2021 In many ways, the show, taken as a whole, functions well as an experiential ref- erence to Steyerl’s recent book, Duty Free Art: Art in the Age of Planetary Civil War (2017) (reviewed in PAJ 122). Similar to the book, which gathers fifteen essays that vary in style and theme, the Armory survey enriches the primary question of the role of art in the context of globalization, neoliberalism, and late-stage capitalism by insisting on a variety of genres, forms, and provocations. No genre is exempt; no problem unrelated. As with the book, each idea featured in one work or one essay becomes richer when put into relation with the surrounding works, its complexity magnified through its connections in the exhibition.

Neither Drill nor the greater survey of Steyerl’s works comes to any distinct con- clusion or highlights a single point of view. Rather, the entanglements between war, art, and technology seem to suggest that, in the end, money funds both war and art. While technology is used for violence, it can also be used for aesthetic and political provocation, and Steyerl’s work suggests that these means are not necessarily in constant opposition. Among the survey, Drill maintains the most sincere and somber tone, fitting the severity of its subject matter and the unset- tling history of its setting. Still, Steyerl’s well-developed hallmarks of speculative, wry humor are visible in the larger body of work on display. In this way, the installation remains playful, introducing difficult and contemplative subjects with a sense of humor that acknowledges the artist’s own position within this tangled web as she implicates the audience in this process. If heeded, perhaps Steyerl’s provocation may continue to haunt her audiences into the halls of other museums, performance spaces, and institutions. As she proves, nothing escapes the reaches of these dark entanglements.

SARAH LUCIE is a PhD candidate in theatre and performance at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Her research interests include objects in performance and the nonhuman environment, postdramatic theatre, and intercultural adaptation.

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