Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Abstract

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson's nine-channel video installation The Visitors, acclaimed by The Guardian as “the best artwork of the century so far,” was commissioned by the Migros Museum in Zürich in 2012 and has been traveling the world ever since.1 Kjartansson gathered a group of friends from the Reykjavik music scene and installed them for a week in the mansion at Rokeby, a nineteenth-century estate in upstate New York owned by descendants of the Astor family. At the end of the week, they filmed the videos that make up the installation simultaneously in a single take. Eight of the nine screens that make up the installation show a single room in the house containing, for most of the piece's sixty-four minute run time, a single musician, including three guitarists (two electric and one acoustic), two pianists (one of whom doubles on bass guitar), an accordionist, a cellist, and a drummer. Although these musicians are physically separate from one another, they wear headphones that enable them to hear each other playing. They are also guided by Kjartansson's graphic score, which breaks the music down into individual units and identifies the instrumentation of each segment as well as chord progressions and other sonic events.Some of the musicians switch instruments (one electric guitarist also plays banjo; the accordionist switches to an acoustic guitar), thus increasing the timbral and textural variety of the music. The ninth screen shows the porch on the outside of the house, where other occupants congregate. Above each screen is a speaker through which one can hear the sound being generated by the musician on that screen. As one moves among the screens in the installation, individual performers gain prominence then recede as one approaches a different screen, enabling viewers to construct their own mixes of the sound. Collectively, the musicians on the interior play a single song whose lyrics derive from the poem “Feminine Ways” written by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir, Kjartansson's ex-wife. At some points, the people on the porch engage in a sing-along led by a guitar player.The performance underlying The Visitors was site-specific, and Kjartansson's choice of site reflects a key aspect of his work: his engagement with Romanticism. This connection is manifest in Kjartansson's use of the music of such Romantic composers as Schubert and Schumann in some performance pieces as well as in the melancholy sentiments often expressed in his own songs and song fragments, but he also echoes the tropes of Romantic landscape painting. The five-channel video installation The End—Rocky Mountains (2008) is a precursor to The Visitors. In it, the same two musicians (one of whom is Kjartansson) appear on each screen playing various instruments against vistas of the Canadian Rockies. The five tracks coalesce into a single, country-flavored piece of music. The settings of the five videos recall the Rocky Mountain landscapes of the nineteenth-century painter Thomas Moran and echo the Romantic perception of the insignificance of the human figure when put up against the sublimity of nature. Moran was associated with the American Romanticism of the Hudson River School, an art-historical movement Kjartansson references explicitly. His first visit to Rokeby in 2008 yielded The Blossoming Trees Performance for which he spent two days painting plein air landscapes in direct emulation of the Hudson River painters.Kjartansson's appropriation of the trappings of Romanticism is both earnest and comic. It is seldom acknowledged that the second part of the expression “from the sublime to the ridiculous” is “there is but a single step” (this version of the expression is attributed to the eighteenth-century French thinker Fontenelle). Kjartansson seems well aware that there is only a small distance between the sublime and the ridiculous, and he walks the thin line between them in all of his work. The Romantic landscape, whether of the Rockies or the Hudson Valley, is surely sublime, yet two men playing musical instruments swathed in furs with instruments, amplifiers, and microphones set up outdoors in a wintry scene contains more than a hint of the ridiculous, as does the figure of Kjartansson, handkerchief on his head, re-enacting the plein air practices of the Hudson River painters, and Kjartansson's playing a plaintive and evocative song on his guitar while sitting naked and half-submerged in a bath tub and raising his arms in the gestures of a rock star in The Visitors. Kjartansson's self-portrait as an artist, from The End, a durational performance of painting at the 2009 Venice Biennale, encapsulates this delicate balance. In a photographic portrait associated with this work, he stands before us stoically, palette and brushes in his hands, gazing heavenward, the perfect image of the artist.Yet his outfit, especially the scarf around his neck and the blanket in which he is wrapped, seems makeshift, as if it were a costume scavenged from a thrift shop for a poorly funded theatrical production. He presents himself to us as both the artist and as someone playing at being the artist, just as he has played at being a hillbilly musician and a plein air painter. Perhaps ludicrous would be a better word to use than ridiculous when speaking of Kjartansson's various self-presentations. I am well aware of this word's perjorative connotations, but the etymology of ludicrous suggests origins in the ideas of play and theatricality, both of which are central to his work.Compared with others of Kjartansson's works, both the narrative of The Visitors and the musical composition at its heart are structured relatively conventionally. The narrative begins with the set-up before the musicians start performing, as a technician moves from room to room (and therefore from screen to screen) setting up the microphone and turning on the camera in each room, thus revealing the musician there. Once everything is in place, the musicians begin playing. The music ebbs and flows, rises and falls over the course of an hour. About three-quarters of the way through, following a delicate passage sung by sisters Gyða and Kristín Anna Valtýsdóttir, the cellist and the accordionist respectively, the music builds toward a crescendo largely through the increasingly intense pianism of Davíð Þór Jónsson, the Icelandic jazz musician who is Kjartansson's primary collaborator in his music-themed performances. Just after he stops playing, seemingly exhausted, a cannon is fired outside the house. This moment marks the start of the music's final section, its coda, and what in narrative terms would be called the falling action following the climax. As the music resumes softly, the musicians start to leave their individual rooms and congregate in various combinations on different screens before coming together, popping open a bottle of champagne, then leaving the house, cavorting arm-in-arm through an open field of green grass, receding into the distance, some still holding instruments and all still singing. At the very end, the action returns to the house where a technician, moving from room to room and switching off the cameras that were turned on at the start, brings about narrative closure as each screen goes to black.Whereas the narrative of The Visitors has a beginning, middle, and end, Kjartansson has often isolated one or another of these moments in his performances and repeated it. Bliss, originally commissioned for the Performa festival in 2011, consists of the final three-minute reconciliation scene of Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro, performed in full eighteenth-century costume on a theatrical set by professional singers joined by Kjartansson himself, and repeated for twelve hours. It is an ending that seemingly won't end—until it does. In The End, of which the Rocky Mountains video was a part, Kjartansson painted portraits of a mostly nude male model for the entire six months of the 2009 Venice Biennale, immediately starting a new painting each time he finished one. As Markus Thor Andresson and Dorothee Kirch suggest in their essay for the catalogue, “The title, The End, appears at odds with what seems like a never-ending story. … The End has no end. …”2 For God, a single-channel video work of 2007, Kjartansson, dressed in a tuxedo and fronting an orchestra against a backdrop of cheesy pink curtains, sings the line “Sorrow conquers happiness” repeatedly for thirty minutes. If Bliss is a repeated ending which is therefore no longer an ending, God can be understood as a repeated beginning that leads to nothing.All of these performances do not so much end as simply stop at a predetermined but essentially arbitrary point thirty minutes or twelve hours or six months after they begin. From another perspective, they do not necessarily end at all, since in 2019, Kjartansson restaged Bliss at REDCAT in Los Angeles and shot the performance for a single-channel video work in 2020. Bliss now has a history that spans a decade; the possibility of further iterations of these pieces as live performances and video installations leaves open the question of whether they can ever be said to be finished.The Visitors is different from Kjartansson's earlier works in that it offers musical resolution and is structured as a tidy, self-contained narrative, giving the work a satisfying feeling of completion and making the ending seem like a denouement more than just a stopping point. Nevertheless, The Visitors shares some features with these earlier works. The most obvious is the obsessive repetition of two lines from the lyrics: “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” and “The stars are exploding around you and there's nothing you can do,” sentences that echo the Romantic melancholia of “Sorrow conquers happiness.” This is a melancholia that is both reinforced and undermined by the commitment and enthusiasm with which the musicians sing and perform these lines. The other, perhaps more subtle, connection has to do with the absence of finality despite the appearance of narrative closure. Watching the merry band of musicians venturing out into nature at the end, their voices receding gradually into the distance, evokes Alan Cross's discussion of the fade-out across myriad genres of Western music: “fading the song out left the impression that the song never ended. Somewhere in the universe, the song played forever, never being subjected to the indignity of a conclusion.”3 The idea that the music goes on forever is also implicit in the opening and closing of The Visitors, the switching on and off of the camera in each room. The successive blackouts of the screens at the end seem to mark the end of the story pretty definitively, yet the narrative is actually cyclical—the ending mirrors the beginning in reverse (turning on becomes turning off), and one need only turn the cameras and microphones back on to start the whole thing up again. This is exactly what occurs in the gallery as the installation restarts for the next group of visitors.As an installation that takes a recorded musical performance as its primary material, The Visitors is in dialogue with Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller's celebrated installation The Forty Part Motet (2001), which also has traveled extensively. Cardiff and Miller separately recorded forty singers performing “Spem in alium nun quam,” a sacred choral composition for forty voices divided into eight choirs by Thomas Tallis, an important sixteenth-century English composer. It is believed that Tallis intended for the singers to be distributed in an oval with the audience at its center, which is the way the forty speakers that constitute Cardiff and Miller's installation are arranged. Standing at the center of the oval, you can hear the whole ensemble, but it is also possible to move among the speakers, singling out individual voices and creating one's own mix of the recorded sound, an idea Kjartansson embraces in The Visitors. Cardiff has said, “I am interested in how sound may physically construct a space in a sculptural way and how a viewer may choose a path through this physical yet virtual space.”4 The concept of defining space through sound, musical sound in particular, is also at work in The Visitors, as is the idea of this space as sculptural.As Kjartansson puts it, “I often look at my performances as sculptures and the videos as paintings.”5 In both his and Cardiff and Miller's respective works, the sculptural effect is achieved through the way the partakers’ perception of the piece changes as they move around in it—hearing how the different mixes of sounds as instruments or voices moving from foreground to background are overtaken by others (as one's proximity to individual musicians changes) is akin to walking around a sculpture and seeing it from different angles. Just as one cannot see all sides of a sculpture simultaneously, there is no single position from which one can either see or hear The Visitors in its entirety. You are always close enough to a particular screen to see and hear that particular musician's performance as dominant for that moment.Both works also create a sense of intimacy between the musicians and their audience, albeit intimacy mediated by technology. For Cardiff, this technological mediation allows the viewer to experience “the connection of the human voice” but also “the safety of not having to stand right next to that person.”6 The same is true of The Visitors, but to an even greater degree because of its visual dimension. Since the video images are close to life-size, you can have the feeling of standing right in front of a musician, in their own private space, while they are performing without being troubled by your presence. It is an opportunity to experience another person as an object of pure contemplation free of social obligations. This distinctive combination of personal intimacy and aesthetic distance relates to Kjartansson's non- confrontational stance as a performance artist. Unlike those artists who challenge their audiences or place them in uncomfortable or provocative situations, Kjartansson usually retains the traditional physical distance between performers and audience in the theatre. “I really like the fourth wall, the comfort zone” he has said. “I get embarrassed when it's broken. I like to do performance art where the viewer is in a safe zone.”7 In Kjartansson's live performances, the viewer's safe zone begins at the edge of the performers’ space, which is often a real or implied proscenium; in his video installations, the rim of the screen, a stand-in for the proscenium, demarcates the viewer's safe space.Although Cardiff and Miller isolate the voices that make up The Forty Part Motet, they are not disembodied since even in recorded music, in the words of musicologist Susan Fast, “the performer's body is very much present, in the particular sonoric gestures shaped and played, in the first instance by him or her (they are human gestures, after all) through his or her body in such a way that they connect with the bodies of those listening.”8 Additionally, the speakers and stands arrayed in the oval are distinctly anthropomorphic in appearance and scale; they are surrogates for human presence, each standing in for a specific singer. But the piece is austere; the voices may be individuated but the uniform black figures are not. Whereas the effect of Cardiff and Miller's installation is regularly described as “otherworldly,” this description does not fit Kjartansson's work. The Visitors is very much of this world in its assertion of the physical presence of each musician as a specific individual and of the Rokeby mansion, the distinctive place they are located.While Kjartansson regularly cites artists Chris Burden and Marina Abramovicć as the inspirations for his interest in durational performance, the earthiness and humor of his approach belie the asceticism and self-deprivation frequently associated with such work. In The House with the Ocean View (2002), Abramovicć lived in a spare, schematic representation of three rooms mounted high on the wall of the Sean Kelley Gallery in New York City continuously for twelve days, fasting and performing a limited set of repeated daily actions sometimes regulated by the ticking of a metronome. To put it bluntly: No one fasts in a Kjartansson performance! Quite the contrary: food and drink are ubiquitous. In An Die Musik (2012), a performance in which pairs of formally dressed singers and pianists perform Schubert's song of that name simultaneously and repeatedly, plates of snacks and flutes of champagne perch atop the pianos. The sole activity in Variation on Meat Joy, a performance Kjartansson made for the Tate Modern's Performance Room in 2013 in reference to Carolee Schneemann's famous work, is eating, as a group of people in eighteenth-century costumes, similar to those used in Bliss, consume steak with the sound of their chewing amplified. During the twelve-hour live performances of Bliss, food was delivered to both singers and musicians, who also took breaks as needed, though the performance continued in their absence. Although the activities that make up Kjartansson's performances are just as limited and repetitious in their own way as the ones in Abramovicć's work, they are performed not with ritual solemnity and mortification of the flesh but in ways that acknowledge rather than abnegate the performers’ physical needs and somewhat alleviate their discomfort. Michael H. Miller describes this aspect of the performance of Bliss at Performa: The actors were eating in shifts. Every few minutes an attendant, dressed in the rococo style of Mozart's opera, would enter the stage with a tray of food or a jug of water. … By 7 p.m., everyone was visibly more tired. The oboe player handed his instrument to the man playing the flugelhorn and ran backstage … probably to pee. One of the actors lied down on her back in exhaustion while another actor crouched down and tenderly cradled her head. They all looked excited and hopeful when an attendant brought out chocolate.9The same kinds of things happen in The Visitors, albeit on a less dramatic scale, and the same seemingly casual attitude toward the formal rigors of performance prevails. The musicians rest, relax, and smoke. At one point, the drummer pulls a cold bottle of beer across his sweaty forehead to cool down.Artists like Burden and Abramovicć are sometimes called “endurance artists.” Karen Gonzalez Rice defines endurance art as the “performance of suffering and survival.”10 While this definition clearly pertains to Abramovicć, it is only partially applicable to Kjartansson. Many of his pieces last long periods of time and require considerable endurance on the part of performers who suffer physically, as did the singers and musicians in Bliss. But the temperament Kjartansson expresses through his work does not dwell on suffering and survival. This is admittedly too glib a formulation, but whereas Abramovicć's performances are about pain, Kjartansson's ultimately are about pleasure: the pleasures of food, drink, music, fancy dress, play, art-making, and good company. Whereas Abramovicć's pieces end in exhaustion and catharsis, Kjartansson's end in celebration, like traditional comedies. When the musicians in The Visitors have finished playing and join together in a single room, they light up cigars and pop open a bottle of champagne. As Jerry Saltz observes in his review, the celebration that ended Bliss included the spectators: “A backstage party followed for anyone who wanted to come. Suckling pig was served; wine flowed.”11 Excess is a hallmark of both Abramovicć's and Kjartansson's work, but whereas Abramovicć dwells on excesses of discipline, privation, and duress, Kjartansson's brand of excess is too much of a good thing: too much Mozart, for example, or too much meat. Excess to the point of indulgence, as the MoMA catalogue description of the performers’ situation in his two-week performance The Schumann Machine (2008) demonstrates: “At their disposal was an unlimited amount of cigars and champagne.”12Patrick Nickleson uses the word conviviality to describe Kjartansson's sensibility, and I can think of no better term.13 Conviviality is manifest both in the way Kjartansson works and in the relationship of his work to audiences. While many (though not all) of the most famous endurance and durational performances were performed by solo artists like Burden and Abramovicć, individual sacrificial figures, Kjartansson frequently produces his work by establishing temporary artistic communities, such as himself and his model in The End, the opera company assembled for Bliss, or the group of musicians he gathered for The Visitors. Set apart from the concerns of everyday life, these communities are situations in which artists can devote themselves to making art collectively and enjoying each other's company, reflecting the Romantic value of artistic autonomy. These communities are built around a nineteenth-century conception of an artists’ bohemia that now reads as deeply nostalgic, a nostalgia for a pre-corporate art world that, once again, is perched precariously on the border between sublimity and ridiculousness.Nickleson links the conviviality of Kjartansson's work to his use of repetition, which can prompt participation on the audience's part.14 In The Visitors, we hear the line “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” sung so often to a simple but haunting melody that it is almost impossible not to want to sing it oneself, as does the group on the ninth screen gathered on the porch for a sing-along. During A Lot of Sorrow, for which Kjartansson persuaded the indie rock band The National to perform their song “Sorrow” repeatedly for six hours at MoMA PS1 in 2013, the audience applauded enthusiastically at the end of each iteration of the song, cheered the musicians on, and clapped along. As the last notes of the final rendition of the song faded out, the audience cheered wildly with a sense of shared accomplishment. At Performa in 2011, Bliss came to a similar ending: as the singers on stage sang their way through the last scene of The Marriage of Figaro for the last time, the conductor gesticulated wildly, the musicians in the pit all stood up, the audience applauded vigorously, whooped and cheered.Whereas Abramovicć seeks to achieve a powerful connection with her audience on a personal level—in The House with the Ocean View, she established eye contact with individual visitors to the gallery—Kjartansson celebrates the collective unity of performers and audience in a spirit of “we’re all in this together” quite different from Abramovicć's stance of “I’m doing this for you.” It may be said, however, that these two artists arrive at similar places by very different routes. Abramovicć intended The House with the Ocean View to be a balm for New Yorkers traumatized by the events of 9/11; Mary Richards describes it by saying, “the space within the gallery provided a haven from the complexities and complications of the rest of the world.”15 Mark Swed, a music critic for the Los Angeles Times, described the REDCAT performance of Bliss in very similar terms: “for a dozen hours REDCAT became a Mozart safe house. The longer you stayed, the greater the effort required to leave, the outside world seeming downright threatening.”16 The same can be said for the idyllic world of The Visitors, a carefree place where life is devoted entirely to making music with your friends that makes the real world outside the installation seem disappointing by contrast.As Deanna Sirlin observes in her review of The Visitors, there is a particular poignancy in seeing this piece now in this time of social distancing.17 Like all of us recently, the musicians in The Visitors are physically isolated yet connected by an electronic network that enables them to join together to make something happen. Ultimately, they play out the happy ending we all hope for: the end of social distancing, the ability to come together once again, hold hands, and rejoice. But the situation of the musicians in The Visitors is actually the inverse of ours. They engage in social distancing by choice rather than by obligation and they are free to move among the rooms. They are all in the same house but appear on individual screens. We are all in different houses but appear on the same teleconferencing grids.The Visitors is named for the last album (prior to their recent reunion) by the Swedish pop band ABBA, released in 1981. The cover photo for the album sleeve was taken at the preserved atelier of the Swedish painter Julius Kronberg, a nineteenth-century interior that bears more than a passing resemblance to Rokeby. ABBA was a group built around two married couples; by the time of their final album, one of the couples had already divorced and the other was separated. The music on this album is much darker and more introspective than ABBA's usual peppy pop confections. Although the group was frequently depicted as two happy couples, like on the sleeve image for their Waterloo album of 1974, the cover photo for The Visitors shows the four members as occupying the same space but distanced from one another to reflect the state of their relationships at the time. In the final scene of The Marriage of Figaro, Count Almaviva begs his wife's forgiveness for his infidelity, which she generously grants, leading to celebration. Swed observes that the repetition of this scene in Kjartansson's Bliss can induce us “into believing that redemption, however unreceptive our current culture, is the only way of the world.” By transforming the disconsolate members of ABBA, who must make music together despite their eroding relationships, into the happy band of musicians in The Visitors, whose isolation from one another in separate rooms of the same house belies the palpable warmth that unites them in their common love of playing music and, ultimately, in being together, Kjartansson performs his own act of redemption and invites us all to the party.