The Park Avenue Armory has housed some incredible pieces of art, and one of them is Euphoria, a feature-length film by artist Julian Rosefeldt. The film opened in November 2022 and is a cinematic feat that confronts global consumerism, class, privilege, and the failures of contemporary society.
The five pieces of theater in this show explore different aspects of New York City. The first scene features Giancarlo Esposito as a cabdriver who talks to a passenger on their way to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. While the following scenes feel very “New York,” they also show a world where parts of the city merge with the imaginary in the vein of Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
The installation features a feature film, a 360-degree perspective of the Brooklyn Youth Chorus shown to scale, and five additional screens, each containing a drummer. The drummers accompany the Brooklyn Youth Chorus whose voices fill the hall in harmony with music composed by Samy Moussa. The result is jarring and soothing at the same time.
Looping throughout the duration of the exhibition, Euphoria is a commentary on the institution and neighborhood where it is housed, not stated but implied as the topic of wealth and class run throughout. The film is an enigma of sorts, a high-budget tour de force utilizing Shakespearean-style soliloquies and didactics. At one point, as Esposito’s passenger (also played by Esposito himself) walks away from the cab, he murmurs, “Remember: We are but dust and shadow,” quoting Roman poet Horace.
Rosefeldt is the writer of the screenplay, but is quick to not take credit. He has a lot of input and is very involved in the project.
The credit for the writing of Euphoria goes to more than 100 contributing writers. Creating a project on a topic as general as greed or capitalism is obviously ambitious, if not presumptuous, and the sheer amount of sources to be considered and books to be read was a bottomless pit.
The chosen texts come from some of the most eminent figures in philosophy, literature, and politics. All of them are expertly woven together in correlation with cinematography to create something new and unique.
The result is eerie, as certain words are recognizable but completely removed from any familiar context. Rosefeldt creates a world detached from time or self-consciousness.
To help organize the selected text fragments, the team tried to make them as speakable and performable as possible following a stream-of-thought. This made the viewer forget that these texts come from different periods within 2,000 years of cultural history.
Euphoria echoes the desperation and hopelessness felt by Willy Loman from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, as well as the seamless visual weaving of The
Clock (2010) by Christian Marclay. These examples also demonstrate the power of live performance, as seen several years ago at Matthew Barney’s studio.
Rosefeldt made a splash in 2015 when his video installation, Manifesto, starring Cate Blanchett, was screened at Park Avenue Armory (it has since been adapted into a feature film). In the two works, he added, “Comparable to the characters in Manifesto, the actors in Euphoria are more like vessels for universal ideas than real-shaped characters.”