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Indepth Arts News:
"Ragnar Kjartansson : Song"
2011-03-11 until 2011-09-25
Carnegie Museum of Art
Pittsburgh, PA,
USA
Carnegie Museum of Art will present Ragnar Kjartansson: Song, the first solo American museum exhibition of Ragnar Kjartansson (b. 1976), one of Europe’s most exciting and influential young artists. The exhibition will feature a site-specific, long-duration live performance in the Hall of Sculpture entitled Song—newly commissioned by the museum—featuring Kjartansson’s nieces; four video works; and a world-premier, one-night-only, vaudeville-style concert starring the artist, members of his family, and his friends. Kjartansson’s enthralling performances and videos, which combine sublime environments, repetition, and humor, made him a star of the 2009 Venice Biennale. Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is the 66th installment in Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series, dedicated to presenting the work of contemporary artists.
“Kjartansson’s performances and videos walk a thin line between darkness and light. The effortlessness of his romanticism and his subtle subversiveness, coupled with his gregarious charm, make Ragnar an ideal artist to enliven some of Carnegie Museum of Art’s most interesting spaces and galleries,” said Dan Byers, associate curator of contemporary art, who is organizing the exhibition.
The exhibition opens Thursday, March 10, at 5:30 p.m. when Kjartansson will be the featured guest at the museum’s Culture Club event. Song will also debut that evening.
About Ragnar Kjartansson: Song
Ragnar Kjartansson: Song explores Kjartansson’s artistic interests through a variety of media, all based in some way on performance. For the site-specific performance piece Song, Kjartansson’s nieces—Ragnheidur Harpa Leifsdóttir, Rakel Mjöll Leifsdóttir, and Íris María Leifsdóttir—will reside in the museum’s Hall of Sculpture for three weeks, repeatedly singing a short song that the artist wrote based on a slightly misremembered phrase from an Allen Ginsberg poem. Song evokes Kjartansson’s previous site-specific long-duration performance works such as The Great Unrest, in which the artist—dressed in Viking costume—sang for eight hours a day in a dilapidated theater in rural Iceland. Similarly, in Scandinavian Pain, Kjartansson played his guitar day after day in an abandoned barn in a region of Norway made famous by Edvard Munch. Many days, not a single human visitor would come across the performance; on one occasion, his only audience was a few cows that wandered in from the nearby field. By combining abjection with endurance, Kjartansson created an authentically Scandinavian interpretation of the blues, becoming the lonely, deep-feeling singer he was playing.
For Song, however, Kjartansson wished to abandon the brutal masculinity of Viking landscapes and suits of armor for the peacefulness of family and femininity embodied by his nieces, their voices echoing in the Hall of Sculpture as they sing the central lyric: “The weight of the world / is love.” According to Byers, Song contrasts the warmth and softness of the performers with the hard marble room, while the hall’s casts of famed classical sculptures provide a constant audience. Welcoming and alluring, the performance also verges on the hypnotic, inspiring a strange state of reverie only achieved through endless repetition.
About the Videos in Ragnar Kjartansson: Song
All videos will be on view in public spaces throughout the museum’s first floor.
The End, 2008
Five-channel video, DVD; color, sound, 30 min., looped
Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galleri i8, Reykjavik
The immersive, five-channel video installation The End pits Kjartansson’s rock-musician bombast against the sublime landscape of the Canadian Rockies. One-half of the artist’s critically acclaimed work at the 2009 Venice Biennale, The End shows Kjartansson and his musical collaborator wrapped in winter coats and fur hats and dwarfed by the insurmountable mountains, playing warped Neil Young–like music on grand piano, banjo, and guitar. The End makes a beautiful exaggeration of the clichéd rock ’n’ roll story, “It’s you and me against the world.”
The Man, 2010
DVD; color, sound, 49 min., looped
Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galleri i8, Reykjavik
The Man shows 97-year-old American blues legend Pinetop Perkins sitting at a piano in a Texas field near an aging farmhouse. Perkins plays, sings, and tells stories while Kjartansson’s camera frames him in a manner evoking Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting Christina’s World—as a living impression of the American struggle between the individual and his cultural and physical landscape. Perkins—the last remaining link to the great bluesmen of the ’30s—loops through his stories and songs, repeating himself, flipping through his memory like a history book. Despite its legendary subject, The Man is much less a documentation than a meditation on memory and performance, showing Perkins as a man whose showman persona has become inseparable from real life.
Me and My Mother, 2000–2010
Three videos, DVD; color, sound; 30 min., looped
Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galleri i8, Reykjavik
The trilogy of Me and My Mother (2000–2010) is shown together for only the second time. The works present the eponymous couple standing next to one another, with mother spitting on son in scenes that are at once absurd and touching. One of the first video pieces Kjartansson made while he was still in art school and contains a subject that he has chosen to revisit in five-year increments. Kjartansson’s mother is a fabled theater and film actress of the 1960s and ’70s whom her son describes as “Iceland’s Marilyn Monroe.” But when asked to spit on her cherished son, that “acting” ability breaks down into silliness—her professionalism and parenthood are at odds with one another, achieving that point between the yin of performance and the yang of reality. The three works also show how both mother and son have aged and changed through the years, even as their environment and actions remained constant.
Satan is Real, 2005
DVD; color, sound; 64 min., looped
Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and Galleri i8, Reykjavik
In the 2005 video Satan is Real, Kjartansson appears shirtless, buried waist deep in the dirt of a public park, strumming a guitar and repeatedly singing the piece’s single eponymous lyric (“Satan is real / and he’s working for me”). Children playing in the park stroll in and out of the camera’s view—sometimes quizzically approaching the performer, sometimes boldly ignoring him. It’s a humorous mantra on the absurd and, more importantly, the ineffable joy of experiencing that absurdity with a welcoming, innocent audience.
An Evening with Ragnar Kjartansson and Friends
Family and song are central themes in the one-night-only concert An Evening with Ragnar Kjartansson and Friends, a cabaret-style musical performance by Kjartansson and his relatives and friends, who happen to be among the most important artists in Iceland’s vibrant music and theater community. The concert, scheduled for 8 p.m. on March 24, 2011, at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland, is presented jointly by The Andy Warhol Museum and Carnegie Museum of Art as part of a new collaborative initiative to bring select installments of The Warhol’s acclaimed Off the Wall and Sound Series performance series to the Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. The partnership highlights the museums’ interest in sharing resources and ideas, and in broadening the possibilities for presenting contemporary performances in Pittsburgh.
Though Kjartansson and his friends perform together on Sunday evenings at his mother’s house in Reykjavík, this special evening marks the group’s first public appearance. Joining Kjartansson are the playwright and video artist Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir; multi-instrumentalist and frequent Kjartansson collaborator Davio Ror Jonsson; and the artist’s nieces from the Song installation performance.
About Ragnar Kjartansson and His Work
“My work often is about this ethic of ‘pretense,’” says Kjartansson. “That’s my field of interest—the friction between pretending and doing; pretense and reality at the same time. It’s a constant struggle between truth and lies, and between tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious.”
A sense of theatrical, joyful absurdity, even in the face of the bizarre or the dark, is at the heart of Kjartansson’s work.
Kjartansson was born into a legendary Icelandic theater family: his father is a highly respected playwright and theater director and his mother an actress in film and theater. That lifetime of theatricality has had a profound impact on Kjartansson’s life and art—from his glam-rock band Trabant, which made him a rock hero in Iceland, to the strangely sweet trilogy Me and My Mother.
But Kjartansson’s work relies on a foundation that runs far deeper than his family’s theatrical bent. His interest in durational performance, repetition, and music stems, he suggests, from Iceland’s enduring legacy of oral culture—the repetitive transmission of knowledge through sagas, folk tales, and folk songs, rather than through lasting visual artwork. This fascination is apparent in Song, which treats Allen Ginsberg’s poetry as work that will be altered like oral-tradition folk songs; and in The Man, in which Kjartansson goes straight to the source: Pinetop Perkins, one of the last direct links to the American folk idiom. Most importantly, however, it appears in Kjartansson’s emphasis on performance—rather than the predominance of the art object—in all his work. In this realm, Kjartansson wavers between a besotted romanticism that honors truth and beauty above all else, and, at the other extreme, a highly self-aware, obsessive desire to entertain.
“There is no visual art history in Iceland—almost no objects,” says Kjartansson. “But there are all these stories: nothing but sagas and poetry for a thousand years. My performative works exist mostly as stories. I’ve never believed in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—you don’t even have to see the art piece! When I performed The End in Venice, people kept suggesting, ‘Oh, you should have a webcam!’ But I like the idea that very few people saw it—the ones who did will have a small anecdote about it, and it will exist as a story.”
Previous Exhibitions
Kjartansson was trained at the Royal Academy in Stockholm, Sweden, and the Icelandic Academy of the Arts in Reykjavik. His solo exhibitions include The End, Luhring Augustine, New York (2010); The End, 2009 Venice Biennale; God, The Living Art Museum, Reykjavík (2007); Guilt Trip, i8 Gallery, Reykjavík (2007); Hot Shame the Quest of Shelley´s Heart, Galleria Riccardo Crespi, Milan (2007). Group exhibitions include 2nd Turin Triennal, Turin, Italy (2008); Manifesta 8, Rovereto, Italy (2008); It’s Not Your Fault, Art from Iceland, Luhring Augustine Gallery, New York (2008); Repeat Performances: Roni Horn and Ragnar Kjartansson, CCS BARD, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2007); Where Do We Go From Here? Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2004); Etoiles Polares Vooruit, Ghent, Belgium (2004); and Winter Mass, The Nordic House, Reykjavík (2004).
Support
Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, the Virginia Kaufman Fund, and the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, with presenting sponsorship provided by Rodgers Insurance Group and Motorists Mutual Insurance Company. Support is also provided by The American-Scandinavian Association.
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