Drill

Drill, a three-channel, twenty-one-minute video, is the centerpiece of German artist Hito Steyerl’s site-specific, wide-ranging multimedia installation of the same name at Park Ave. Armory, where it continues through July 21. Projected on both sides of three large screens in the fifty-five-thousand-square-foot Wade Thompson Drill Hall, Steyerl’s film delves into the history of the armory, from its time as the headquarters of the Seventh Regiment of the National Guard, known as a silk-stocking regiment, to its exclusive use by the wealthy and its direct relationship to the founding of the National Rifle Association.

Mark Rifkin, This Week in New York, 2019-07-08 · read the full text

The physical setup of Drill is composed of a central screen buttressed by two angled, anterior screens, which together form a slight concavity. Walking into the drill hall, a massive hangar-like space, you’re overcome, at first, by the dense, velutinous darkness, and the attendant feeling of sensory deprivation. A daunting amount of space seems to open up invisibly around you in the cathedral-like stillness. The film’s soundtrack — largely atonal, indeterminate music à la John Cage — is pumped ambiently through the space by black speakers plunked down like boulders in the dark, and in the center of the hall a Blade Runner-esque hieroglyphic of glowing white lines sprawls across the floor, gradually resolving into the form of a floor plan.

Bailey Trela, Los Angeles Review of Books, 29 August 2019 · read the full text

In the video’s final moments, Ms. Steyerl pans over the ornate walls of the Armory’s front hallway, and replaces the framed portraits of 19th-century soldiers with footage of young anti-gun activists such as Emma González, a survivor of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida. The activists appear within gold frames — but they’ve been inserted sloppily, imprecisely, with little attempt at a persuasive deception. What saves “Drill” from preaching-to-the-choirism are these intentionally janky edits, which Ms. Steyerl uses to inscribe America’s gun-violence epidemic into a larger social and epistemological breakdown.

Jason Farago, The New York Times, 5 July 2019 · read the full text