{"id":1956,"date":"2013-03-16T04:11:42","date_gmt":"2013-03-16T04:11:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=1956"},"modified":"2013-03-16T04:13:43","modified_gmt":"2013-03-16T04:13:43","slug":"ragnar-kjartansson-nyt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.archive.raulmourao.com\/blog\/?p=1956","title":{"rendered":"Ragnar Kjartansson @ NYT"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"Captura<\/a><\/p>\n

Never Tiring of Repeating Himself<\/strong><\/p>\n

By\u00a0HILARIE M. SHEETS<\/p>\n

Published: JAnuary 2, 2013<\/p>\n

IN \u201cThe Visitors,\u201d 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, \u201cOnce again, I fall into my feminine ways.\u201d Over the course of an hour his voice falls and rises, on its own and in unison with performers on the other eight screens \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThe Visitors\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cBliss\u201d won the Malcolm Award for the most innovative work at Performa, the three-week performance art biennial in New York. His traveling museum survey, \u201cSong<\/a>,\u201d is at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston through April 7, and his second solo\u00a0show<\/a>\u00a0at the Luhring Augustine gallery in Chelsea, featuring \u201cThe Visitors,\u201d will open Feb. 1.<\/p>\n

His wide appeal, many admirers say, lies in an ability not just to invoke the deep existential concerns of much endurance-based performance art \u2014 anxiety, ennui, other discomfort \u2014 but also to push beyond them, toward joy.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe\u2019s someone who understands theater, who understands drama, who understands pleasure and wants the viewer to have a great pleasure,\u201d RoseLee Goldberg, the director of Performa, said in a telephone interview. \u201cMost of us think of performance based on the 1970s \u2014 difficult, politically engaged.\u201d But a work like \u201cBliss\u201d \u2014 in which Mr. Kjartansson and a group of Icelandic opera singers repeated the final aria in Mozart\u2019s \u201cMarriage of Figaro\u201d for 12 hours with full costumes, set and orchestra \u2014 represents \u201cendurance at a level of sheer ecstasy,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kjartansson\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s so interesting when a man enters the room and says, \u2018I don\u2019t love you anymore,\u2019\u00a0\u201d Mr. Kjartansson said, then giving voice to a second actor \u2014 \u201c\u00a0\u2018Why?\u2019\u00a0\u201d \u2014 and then to a director: \u201cLet\u2019s do that one more time: \u2018I don\u2019t love you anymore.\u2019 \u2018Why?\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching this process, he said: \u201cYou start imagining the story, but there\u2019s no story. I was always disappointed when there was really a play.\u201d<\/p>\n

Which helps explain why he was drawn to performance art. \u201cMy works are all kind of anti-storytelling,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019re always about a feeling, but there\u2019s no story.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Kjartansson made his first video performance piece, \u201cMe and My Mother,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

The series, in which he shifts from boy to man, undermines the idea of the doting mother while also showing Ms. Asmundsdottir\u2019s love in acquiescing to her son\u2019s unconventional vision. And it is a gift from a son to an aging mother who no longer gets offered parts regularly.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou get this idea of the progression of them in their relationship and also of Ragnar as an artist,\u201d said Anna Stothart, the curator who organized \u201cSong\u201d for the Institute of Contemporary Art and installed the three versions on flat screens there as part of \u201cSong.\u201d \u201cThere are these silly moments but also these really serious moments we have in our relationships with our families.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mr. Kjartansson\u2019s first encounter with the Hudson Valley mansion of \u201cThe Visitors\u201d came in 2007, when he was introduced to its owners by a friend. The setting of the 43-room, nearly 200-year-old house,\u00a0Rokeby Farm<\/a>, inspired a two-day piece, \u201cBlossoming Trees Performance,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Many artists, he said, \u201care really\u00a0performing\u00a0the artist.\u201d Despite his painting degree, he added: \u201cI consider myself a hobby painter. It\u2019s such a bold, egomaniac act to be, like, \u2018I\u2019m doing this and it matters!\u2019\u00a0\u201d<\/p>\n

In defense of his arch approach, he said, \u201cI look at irony as something real, as the most human way to express yourself \u2014 not making a mockery, but using playfulness.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s crisis, the performance, called \u201cThe End,\u201d spoke at once to his belief in the beauty of the artistic gesture and to the futility of it.<\/p>\n

Mr. Kjartansson is dedicated to what he calls the \u201cdivine boredom\u201d of such marathon performances. \u201cI hope it will offer some kind of a religious moment in a humanistic way,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cSong\u201d opened there, featured the artist\u2019s three fair, young nieces continuously singing a fragment of Allen Ginsberg\u2019s poem \u201cSong\u201d as misremembered by Mr. Kjartansson. A six-hour video of one day\u2019s performance runs in a loop at the show in Boston.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s sort of a siren call,\u201d Ms. Stothart said of that work. \u201cIt\u2019s shot really beautifully, and you get caught in the lyrics.\u201d<\/p>\n

In staging the last aria from \u201cThe Marriage of Figaro\u201d for Performa he gave the audience much to take in visually \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe word \u2018endurance\u2019 is a little bit too athletic for me,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s 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\u2019t feel that. It\u2019s easier than real life.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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A version of this article appeared in print on January 6, 2013, on page\u00a0AR19\u00a0of the\u00a0New York edition\u00a0with the headline: Never Tiring Of Repeating Himself.<\/h6>\n

no site do NYT<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n