Never Tiring of Repeating Himself
By HILARIE M. SHEETS
Published: JAnuary 2, 2013
IN “The Visitors,” a nine-screen video installation by Ragnar Kjartansson that will have its first American showing next month, the artist lies in a pedestal bathtub almost in a trance, strumming a guitar as he repeatedly sings a refrain, “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” Over the course of an hour his voice falls and rises, on its own and in unison with performers on the other eight screens — each seen as if in a painting, playing an instrument in a different room of a beautiful, run-down mansion and singing the same enigmatic refrain at a dirgelike pace.
Last August the nine performers gathered in a room of the mansion, two hours north of New York City in the Hudson Valley, to rehearse. “The Visitors” would be shot later that week in a single take, with nine cameras distributed around the house, but that day they simulated being in separate rooms by avoiding eye contact.
To one onlooker what was most striking was the extraordinary emotional range and intensity of their performances. Limited to just a few simple lyrics, which they repeated dozens of times, the singers created an entirely absorbing ensemble piece that was alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swelled in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir.
It was not the first such work for Mr. Kjartansson (his name is pronounced RAG-ner kuh-YART-un-sun), an Icelandic artist who, at 36, has spent more than a decade exploring the potential of repetitive performance to yield unexpected meanings, and who has lately become one of the most celebrated performance artists anywhere. In 2009 he was the youngest artist ever to represent Iceland at the Venice Biennale, and two years later his piece “Bliss” won the Malcolm Award for the most innovative work at Performa, the three-week performance art biennial in New York. His traveling museum survey, “Song,” is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston through April 7, and his second solo show at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, featuring “The Visitors,” will open Feb. 1.
His wide appeal, many admirers say, lies in an ability not just to invoke the deep existential concerns of much endurance-based performance art — anxiety, ennui, other discomfort — but also to push beyond them, toward joy.
“He’s someone who understands theater, who understands drama, who understands pleasure and wants the viewer to have a great pleasure,” RoseLee Goldberg, the director of Performa, said in a telephone interview. “Most of us think of performance based on the 1970s — difficult, politically engaged.” But a work like “Bliss” — in which Mr. Kjartansson and a group of Icelandic opera singers repeated the final aria in Mozart’s “Marriage of Figaro” for 12 hours with full costumes, set and orchestra — represents “endurance at a level of sheer ecstasy,” she said.
Mr. Kjartansson’s understanding of theater runs deep: his mother, Guorun Asmundsdottir, is a well-known actress in Iceland and used to perform with his father, Kjartan Ragnarsson, now a director and playwright. He spent his childhood in the wings of theaters, watching actors rehearse the same scene over and over, and remains fascinated by the way the same words can be constantly made new.
“It’s so interesting when a man enters the room and says, ‘I don’t love you anymore,’ ” Mr. Kjartansson said, then giving voice to a second actor — “ ‘Why?’ ” — and then to a director: “Let’s do that one more time: ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ ‘Why?’ ”
Watching this process, he said: “You start imagining the story, but there’s no story. I was always disappointed when there was really a play.”
Which helps explain why he was drawn to performance art. “My works are all kind of anti-storytelling,” he said. “They’re always about a feeling, but there’s no story.”
Mr. Kjartansson made his first video performance piece, “Me and My Mother,” in 2000, while studying painting at the Iceland Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik. In it he and his mother stand side by side as she spits into his face, ferociously and with complete commitment, over several minutes. He accepts the abuse, occasionally starting to giggle. Mr. Kjartansson restaged the piece five years later, and then repeated it again in 2010 after deciding to continue the cycle every five years.
The series, in which he shifts from boy to man, undermines the idea of the doting mother while also showing Ms. Asmundsdottir’s love in acquiescing to her son’s unconventional vision. And it is a gift from a son to an aging mother who no longer gets offered parts regularly.
“You get this idea of the progression of them in their relationship and also of Ragnar as an artist,” said Anna Stothart, the curator who organized “Song” for the Institute of Contemporary Art and installed the three versions on flat screens there as part of “Song.” “There are these silly moments but also these really serious moments we have in our relationships with our families.”
Mr. Kjartansson’s first encounter with the Hudson Valley mansion of “The Visitors” came in 2007, when he was introduced to its owners by a friend. The setting of the 43-room, nearly 200-year-old house, Rokeby Farm, inspired a two-day piece, “Blossoming Trees Performance,” in which he assumed the role of plein-air painter in the mode of the Impressionists or Hudson River School artists. With a grand flair obvious in photographs documenting the work, he painted landscapes in a field overlooking the Hudson. The photographs were shown alongside his finished landscapes at the nearby CCS Bard Galleries that year.
Many artists, he said, “are really performing the artist.” Despite his painting degree, he added: “I consider myself a hobby painter. It’s such a bold, egomaniac act to be, like, ‘I’m doing this and it matters!’ ”
In defense of his arch approach, he said, “I look at irony as something real, as the most human way to express yourself — not making a mockery, but using playfulness.”
Mr. Kjartansson played the artist again in Venice in 2009, just after Iceland had fallen into financial ruin. In a 14th-century palazzo he locked himself into a continuous pas de deux between artist and model, making one painting of the same friend in a Speedo every day for the six months of the biennale, as cigarette butts and beer bottles piled up. In the face of his country’s crisis, the performance, called “The End,” spoke at once to his belief in the beauty of the artistic gesture and to the futility of it.
Mr. Kjartansson is dedicated to what he calls the “divine boredom” of such marathon performances. “I hope it will offer some kind of a religious moment in a humanistic way,” he said.
Key to achieving that moment has been his attention to beauty. A live, three-week performance in 2011, at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh when “Song” opened there, featured the artist’s three fair, young nieces continuously singing a fragment of Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Song” as misremembered by Mr. Kjartansson. A six-hour video of one day’s performance runs in a loop at the show in Boston.
“It’s sort of a siren call,” Ms. Stothart said of that work. “It’s shot really beautifully, and you get caught in the lyrics.”
In staging the last aria from “The Marriage of Figaro” for Performa he gave the audience much to take in visually — from the sumptuous costumes to a feast of suckling pig to sustain the performers in the 11th hour. While some singers showed strain over the 12 hours, Mr. Kjartansson never flagged as he sang of repentance and forgiveness at a delirious pitch.
“The word ‘endurance’ is a little bit too athletic for me,” he said. “It’s so much harder to be a waiter than to sing opera for 12 hours. Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic gave performance this Houdini status. I don’t feel that. It’s easier than real life.”
