Under the Pier: Staging Anne Imhof’s Sex

Abstract

This article examines German artist Anne Imhof’s performance exhibition Sex (2019-20), specifically how the artist draws on a visual representation of hell through the live arts within a history of delegated performance against late capitalistic effects on music, the body, desire, physicality and representation. Sex is initially situated within the context of Imhof’s creative output of the last decade, particularly the role that the dramaturgy and music play in her live work. Beginning from a point of comparison of Sex as opera, the article compares the themes and structure of Imhof’s performance to that of the representation of hell within visual culture and opera. Finally, Coyne argues that Imhof, in Sex, astutely applies these artistic tropes against their grain, and within the experience-fetish society of twenty-first-century late capitalism, queering both historic and contemporary aesthetic norms.

Notes

1 The BMW Tate Live series has occupied various spaces within the former Bankside Power Station, not just the Tate Tanks.

2 Subsequently revised and re-presented at the Art Institute of Chicago, USA (2019) and Castello di Rivoli, Museo d’Arte Contem- poranea, Rivoli-Turin, Italy (2020-21).

3 This pier was also used at the Art Institute of Chicago presentation.

4 Although hell is often associated with extreme heat, Dante, as well as other sources, refer to its cold.