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.