In ‘Drill,’ Hito Steyerl Adds Polish to Images of a World Gone Mad

Visitors to the Park Avenue Armory, the crenelated citadel that takes up an entire city block on the Upper East Side, are accustomed to seeing its cavernous Drill Hall retrofitted with bleachers and sales booths, dance floors, even tennis courts. But Hito Steyerl, the German artist and philosopher of our present technological debasement, has left the space largely empty, illuminated only by some lighting underfoot and three massive screens. In this inky vastness, you can remember that what’s now a palatial arts center was once meant for something else. The building we’re in is “quite literally a fortress,” an onscreen guide tells us, and beneath our feet is “a shooting gallery.”

We’ve come to see “Drill,” a video installation that anchors a mini-retrospective of the same name here, on view through July 21. It’s a blaring, impassioned denunciation of American gun violence and the latent aggression of high culture; and 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.

Ms. Steyerl, born in Munich in 1966, has become an icon to younger artists for her video installations, as well as her sparky, digressive essays on art and the internet. She’s been working hard lately, producing two new works for this year’s Venice Biennale; another for an exhibition at the Castello di Rivoli museum in Turin, Italy; and yet another in London for the Serpentine Galleries, whose sponsorship from the Sackler family, linked to the drug OxyContin, she described as being “married to a serial killer.”

Many of Ms. Steyerl’s works have zeroed in on the violent pasts and presents of cultural institutions, as well as the residual militarism of digital technology. In her lecture performance “Is the Museum a Battlefield?,” on loop in one of the Armory’s smaller rooms, she unearths the centuries-long relationship between war and contemporary art, reminding us that two of the world’s greatest museums, the Louvre in Paris and the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, were sites of actual revolutions.

Source: The New York Times

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