Radiohead Spectacle in Brooklyn Teems with World-Building Paintings, Sculpture, and Film

Even after the recent addition of a Wegmans and Wells Fargo gave the entrance the sanitized shine of a suburban shopping center, it would be hard to overstate the strangeness and surreality of the inner parts of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The post-industrial buildings at eye-popping scale hiss and wheeze, and everything in the expansive grounds covered with toppled cobblestones and disused train tracks has the air of a haunted sanctum. (Think of “The Zone” in Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker.)

All of that makes it perfect for Radiohead, which is presenting a multimedia installation, exhibition, and screening experience called Motion Picture House KID A MNESIA at the Navy Yard through the end of May. It’s a seven-minute walk from the gated entrance to the building that serves as its site, past mysterious alleyways and a network of giant silver pipes that are the city’s most mesmerizing source of drone aside from La Monte Young. Once inside, the site itself is large, comparable to the Park Avenue Armory but far less fancy.

For multiple timed showings per day through May 31, with tickets priced at $72, the experience begins in an exhibition of artwork related to the albums Kid A and Amnesiac, which in 2000 and 2001 marked Radiohead’s transformation from a very good moody rock band to singular future-shock envoys for an anxious new millennium. In a darkened space with no labels or wall text for orientation, you’re left free to roam and make of it what you will. At one of the opening showings on Wednesday, fans peered at large wall works (what seemed to be screenprints on fabric, in the form of paintings) and a video array with dozens of old TVs and VCRs flickering images related to Radiohead’s extensive iconography, including the “Modified Bear” and the “Crying Minotaur.” Sculptures, most notably one the band’s recurring “Stickman” figure that measures 25 feet tall, are scattered about, lurking in the darkness.

In the center of the space is a large walled-in room with a 30-minute countdown transpiring on four enormous screens—the site of the hour-plus film/video work that is the star of the show. Messages on the screen reading “slow down” and “sit, lean or lay anywhere” are the only directives offered.

The film begins with a 3-D-seeming walk through meticulously drawn black-and-white woods, soundtracked by Kid A’s “Everything in Its Right Place” played loud on a formidable sound system. The minotaur and other creatures wander through various abstract realms and digitally rendered locations, with sounds provided solely through the music—no dialogue or scene-setting of any kind. It’s entrancing and trippy, hypnotic and at times hokey in an endearing way, with elements of video-game aesthetics and spectacle-inclined cinema à la recent work by Harmony Korine. Appraisal will rely on the extent of your Radiohead fandom and your identification with creature-characters, often crying or cowering with their head in their hands, who are unremittingly sad and ashamed and embarrassed by the barbarism of simple existence.

The credits for the film—which will be presented in a similar way in the months to come in Chicago, Mexico City, and San Francisco—say it’s “based on art by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke,” and a merch store near the exit of the show offers lots of books, clothing, and other ephemera related to their work. After that, bags in hand, it’s back out into the Brooklyn Navy Yard to contend with the rest of the bleak and beautiful world.