Adam Curtis and Robert Del Naja perform “Massive Attack V Adam Curtis” at the Park Avenue Armory (photograph by Stephanie Berger) (all images courtesy the Park Avenue Armory)
Staging a rock-driven video spectacle criticizing wealth and politics might seem like a confrontational thing to do on Park Avenue in Manhattan, where money clusters like stars orbiting a black hole. However, the elite need not fear the masses they view from their windowed perches filing out from Massive Attack V Adam Curtis currently at the Park Avenue Armory; the experience here is as controlled as the one it attempts to lunge at with its collision of video and music.
Camera phones gleaming in the crowd (photograph by Stephanie Berger)
If the experience was staged as a rock spectacle with the trip-hop masters Massive Attack pulsing out from behind the 11 screens fogged with churning smoke machines, it would be a visually stunning show. Yet it’s obviously aiming for much more, as the 90 minutes watched standing in a crowd looking up at the towering screens in the Armory’s equally towering Drill Hall is one of broad messages and a narrative of resisting the shackles of control by media and political manipulation.
Adam Curtis has made some brilliant documentaries and is an expert at archives scouring and splicing, but while the juxtapositions he sets up here in his broad chronological examination of the past few decades of capitalism focused on the United States and communism focused on Russia can be unsettling (think the execution footage of Nicolae Ceaușescu against Jane Fonda workout videos), it’s the all-caps messages that take away the media’s authenticity. You don’t need to make your own connections — the sarcophagus that contained the Chernobyl disaster is handily turned into a “SARCOPHAGUS OF DATA” metaphor for how recycling the recent past has trapped us in a loop (I’m not sure if Curtis acknowledges the irony of doing this with recycled footage himself). And if you have trouble following along, there are chapter headings like “Tragic Lives” and “The Shape of Things to Come” to keep you on task.
Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack behind the screen (photograph by Stephanie Berger)
Perhaps what’s most frustrating about Massive Attack V Adam Curtis is the potential for something great. The band is obviously game for anything, powering through covers of everything from the Archies’ “Sugar, Sugar” to the Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” to Bauhaus’ “Bela Lugosi is Dead” with appearances from singers Liz Fraser and Horace Andy. They even throw in one of their own songs — “Karmacoma” with vocals from Grant “Daddy G” Marshall. And although they are meticulous with each of them from the shrouded space behind the screens, their power seems tempered. When the production opened earlier this year at the Manchester International Festival ear plugs were offered at the door, yet in the New York iteration the band never gets near anything intolerable.
Confetti drop with Donald Trump smiling on the screens (photograph by Stephanie Berger)
The crowd itself seemed unsure how to act. The closest thing to transgression were the girls dancing contentedly to videos of their city being destroyed in pre-2001 NYC disaster films, the Chrysler Building exploding over and over again as they pulsed with its destructive rhythm, although this was probably more obliviousness than anything subversive. One guy talked for the whole duration without pause about pretty much nothing and gave wild applause to the most depressing confetti drop in the world in honor of the bankers who made billions off the financial crisis. Others spent the whole concert filming it through their iPhones, despite the whole thing being about the limiting nature of our “two-dimensional ghosts.” To be fair, most people watched attentively and seemed open to a different sort of video and music experiential challenge.
Massive Attack covering one of Yegor Letov’s songs (photograph by Stephanie Berger)
Sure, Curtis totally has a point in how these recordings and our obsession with the past has kept us from moving forwards in some ways. And yes, our worlds are managed, by ourselves through our personal array of social media and documentation devices. Some of the people included in Curtis’ film are fascinating, such as artist Pauline Boty who refused cancer treatment so her baby could be born, and Serbian punk singer Yegor Letov who was a radical, and complicated, political dissident.
Yet the final, blaring message is the flat: “You Can Change the World” typed across the screens, and then you walk out into a smoky darkness where a searchlight blinds you and hired German Shepherds bark from the rafters. It’s all about as nuanced as the machine gun silhouette that was on the stage for almost the whole spectacle. In a piece that’s all about breaking control, it is nothing but controlled from the corralled filing in and out of the space to the response it’s attempting to evoke, and while the visuals are captivating and the music strong, it all could have benefited from a bit more mayhem rather than management.
Massive Attack V Adam Curtis is at the Park Avenue Armory (643 Park Avenue, Upper East Side, Manhattan) through October 4.
Hi Allison. I agree with some of your observations. I didn’t want to dance to clips of the Ceaușescu’s execution, or to footage of the brave volunteers at Chernobyl. But, if the proceedings felt overly managed, I suspect it was only because the format was so unusual and untested. I enjoyed the theatrics. With the screens and curtains combined, the audience was effectively in the ‘sarcophagus’ that Curtis describes. The onscreen titles might have felt severe, but they clearly had fun with it, and there was a great deal of humor in the show too. The conclusion about changing the world may have felt clumsy, but part of Curtis’ argument is that we’re bound to react this way. He argues that because we feel politically disenfranchised, we tend to be hostile to optimistic visions of the future. We no longer feel that we have the power to positively change the world. The show hinges on whether or not you accept Curtis’ assessment.