Ragnar Kjartansson. The End, 2009; video. Courtesy of MOCAD, the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

Like Edmund Burke’s sublime landscape,^[1] which informed 18th- and 19th-century romantic landscape painting and writing,^[2] Kjartansson positions human beings as solitary and commanding against the vast and sometimes chaotic natural world. Devoid of the architectural markings of human development, Kjartansson’s landscape is a field of white snow, mountains, and pine trees. Each of the five videos in the installation begins with shots of a landscape that includes the musicians’ equipment and instruments. Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson walk into the frame to play their song for thirty minutes and then walk off camera and into the landscape. This suggests that the landscape is the stable entity, with the duo intervening only for a brief time. Without a visible audience, the duo plays for themselves and the camera. However, at one moment, Kjartansson turns and plays toward the canyon below, pauses, and then listens as the music echoes off the ravine and disappears. While sited in the mountains, the musicians also play to it, suggesting landscape as a dynamic thing in itself.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The End, 2015; exhibition installation view. Courtesy of MOCAD, the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

Just as the landscape surrounds Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson, the five screens of the installation surround the exhibition’s viewers. Without any obvious edits or special effects, the videos take on a documentary quality and the camera angles create an almost 360-degree panoramic view, suggestive of an omnipresent eye that sees everything simultaneously. However, each video is shot at a different location, with Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson appearing simultaneously on the five screens. Standing in the middle of the installation, viewers are immersed in the landscape, but in a mediated form.

While Kjartansson’s work speaks to a “naturalness” of landscape, he suggests but never reveals the monumental feat of creating the video. We never see Kjartansson hauling a grand piano out into the mountains, but its presence in the wilderness suggests the romantic grandeur of his project.  Moreover, we know that the microphones and amplifiers require electricity, presumably provided by an off-camera generator, as no other electrical sources exist in the Canadian Rockies. While Kjartansson does not reveal the tremendous effort of this production, these unnatural elements contrast with the untainted landscape. Adding to the heroism of the production, the artist and musician endured -4 degree Fahrenheit weather and play their instruments stoically, only occasionally rubbing their hands to warm them. 

Ragnar Kjartansson. The End, 2009; video. Courtesy of MOCAD, the Artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.

Kjartansson and Jónsson reference a Davey Crockett-like outdoor woodsiness and traditional North American roots music, which as Icelanders they only have a secondhand or media-based relationship with. In raccoon-fur hats and beards,  Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson sip whiskey and smoke cigarettes. While playing, the duo occasionally fall to their knees while playing guitar or stand up while emotively playing piano. Despite these theatrics, Kjartansson and Þór Jónsson refrain from hamming it up further with camera effects, close-ups of their grimacing and intent faces, or tempo breaks that would highlight these gestures. In addition to the more traditional instruments (a banjo, acoustic guitar, and piano), Kjartansson includes a small glittery pink electric guitar, which complicates his portrayal of country music.

As a former pop-music star with the Icelandic bands Kanada and Trabant, Kjartansson’s hybrid practice probes the relationship between performance and music through duration. Originally created for the 2009 Venice Biennale, The End dialogues with its companion piece The End – Venezia (2009). For The End – Venezia, Kjartansson transformed Iceland’s pavilion into an artist’s painting studio and had fellow Icelandic performance artist Páll Haukur Björnsson act as his life model for the entire six months of the exhibition. The artist is scheduled to produce a new piece for MOCAD in February of 2016, and if he continues on this trajectory, one might expect an endurance piece that breaks down the conventions and myths of the artist and musician in gorgeous and wry ways.

^[1] Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757).

^[2] http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/sublime

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The Visitors is a recording of a group of musicians—all friends of Kjartansson—playing on Rokeby Farm in New York. At the time of filming, the artist was going through a divorce and was blindsided by reading his wife’s poetry. He started writing music to fit one of the poems; maybe it was a way to deal with his own defeat, maybe to just have a last moment with his wife by adopting her work. He saw the opportunity to bring together his friends and created a family-reunion-like atmosphere on the farm. Kjartansson selected people, but not the instruments they would play. The group played music in the house for a week, trying out different things for the song “Feminine Ways,” and scheduled the cameras, headphones, and everything else around filming (including a cannon fired twice) in one take at sunset.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

A pink rose
In the glittery frost
A diamond heart
And the orange red fire
Once again I fall into
My feminine ways

The group is composed of excessively talented art-school musicians who have each mastered numerous instruments and can predict each other’s musical quirks. They are more than capable of creating ineffable moments of brilliance. By chance, they’ve captured a wistful nostalgia, but I’m not sure that’s their intention. Kjartansson’s wider oeuvre shows a longing for a time that didn’t exist: for example, the myth of the rambling blues musician—he doesn’t seem to understand that those blues musicians were not really free to travel, they were forced to flee. It would be easy to deride The Visitors as a pastiche of art-school hipster flophouses and rent parties, a cosplay of American beatnik aesthetics. It brings together the pain of listening to a jam band noodle along for an hour with costumes from Portlandia, rendered in HD on nine screens. Yet its optimism and poise immediately gets under the viewer’s skin.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The music world mirrors the tightening economic conditions of contemporary times, in which fewer musicians get more, and more musicians get nothing. This group has succeeded by creating micro-economies for their work—and they’ve needed to, as their works are entirely too smart, too talented, and too diligent to be mainstream. They occupy a distinct space in the creative economy, at the center of a giant Venn diagram of band member, poet, theorist, alternative economy conservatory/art-school attendee, disruptor, internationalist, business professional, and artist impresario. If the music doesn’t get you, their rugged beards and wispy dresses will seduce even the most all-black-wearing, stern, academically credentialed, anti-capitalist stoic. They hit that spot in your soul where you wish your charisma was, and it’s impossible to resist.

You protect the world from me
As if I’m the only one who’s cruel
You’ve taken me
To the bitter end
Once again I fall into
My feminine ways

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

Recently Boris Groys spoke of the aestheticization of politics, or creating a useless politics that will outlive the ordinary, everyday use-value of political machinations. It would be easy to read The Visitors as a politicization of aesthetics. Instead of creating art-for-art’s-sake from politics, Kjartansson is creating a utopian space where people can play, which is a radical economic and political move.

There are stars exploding around you
And there is nothing you can do

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

The Visitors exposes the way musicians come together as well as how they interact with the passive viewer. Instead of recording in a studio and releasing an antiseptic song-as-a-song, The Visitors is a video of a performance. I refer not to the musical performance here, but the event, the coming together of solipsistic individuals who are scheduling around complicated professional obligations.

Ragnar Kjartansson. The Visitors, 2012; still from video of a 64-minute performance.

These pro musicians cannot pretend that they don’t have stage personas. They perform with their stage faces, with a studied apathy for the music world and the recording. By the end, each camera transforms from busy character study to a lost potency, from a buzzing house to an empty one. The whole process is an intermingling of modes: an art residency, a single object, and downtime with friends. In the end, they all break character: Exposed by friendship’s piercing gaze, they look into each other’s eyes, and they have to smile and walk off into the distance together, leaving The Visitors soaked in their relationships and mutual trust.

The Visitors is on view at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in Boston through November 2, 2014.

Ragnar Kjartansson. Take Me Here by the Dishwasher (Memorial for a Marriage), 2011, 2014; installation view, Ragnar Kjartansson: Me, My Mother, My Father, and I, 2014. Image courtesy of New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.

Such an ambiance fits easily within the oeuvre of the Icelandic artist, who has recently made the figure of the moody musician and the aesthetic of the hangover his principle subjects. New Yorkers may remember The Visitors (2012–2013), a multichannel film capturing the artist and several close friends jamming in the romantic milieu of an upstate farmhouse, or A Lot of Sorrow (2013), in which acclaimed indie rockers The National performed the titular tune over and over for six straight hours at Kjartansson’s behest. Then there was S. S. Hangover (2013), the artist’s warmly received submission to the 55th Venice Biennale, in which a six-piece brass band sailed circles around the Arsenale’s shipyard in a small boat, serenading viewers with a subdued, melancholic melody until dusk fell.

Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, which was first staged in 2011 at the BAWAG Foundation in Vienna, begins from material at once lower on the cultural register and, at least in a literal sense, closer to home for Kjartansson than the works that have succeeded it. Its cycling film scene is trite melodrama: A bored housewife dozes into a fantasy about seducing the plumber, then awakens to disappointment. It just so happens that the actors are the artist’s parents and, family lore has it, he was conceived the very night this steamy scene was shot.

Ragnar Kjartansson. Me, My Mother, My Father, and I, 2014; installation view. Image courtesy of New Museum, New York. Photo: Benoit Pailley.

That’s a personal story if ever there was one, couched though it may be in fiction, and Kjartansson tells it with great tenderness as well as melancholy. It is unclear whether this work is a “memorial” because the marriage has ended or only because it inevitably will; Kjartansson’s works of repetition and dilation often function as mementos mori in the latter vein. Whatever the case, the troubadours’ song, composed by Kjartan Sveinsson (formerly of the Icelandic band Sigur Rós), is deeply elegiac, aligning in mood with the female film character’s moment of disillusionment even as the lyrics recount the dialogue within her fantasy of passion: “Are you a man? Show me what you can do to me! Take off my clothes! Take me, take me here by the dishwasher!”

By comparison to this clear double narrative, Kjartansson’s subsequent works seem almost formal: more concerned with constructing mood and emotion in the abstract than in delineating any particular objects thereof. Kjartansson’s formalism possesses a powerful grip. A piece like The Visitors rooted viewers to the spot for its full duration—A Lot of Sorrow and S.S. Hangover for hours on end. These works owe much of their poignancy to the sense of an impending, if repeatedly delayed, ending that is intrinsic to the works as performances.

The possibility of such wholeness is notably absent in Take Me Here by the Dishwasher, the duration of which is determined post hoc by the display site’s open hours and the length of the exhibition’s run. After ten or twelve cycles of the scene, the work’s hypnotic hold loosens and the typical viewer shuffles out to see what the rest of the museum has to offer. (There are two other parental collaborations in the Kjartansson exhibition, which is titled Me, My Mother, My Father, and I, but they are positioned as distinctly ancillary to the main performance and prompt only cursory attention.) As a distinctively content-driven work in Kjartansson’s oeuvre, memorializing a specific marriage while offering a meditation on the lifespans of romantic relationships in general, Take Me Here by the Dishwasher is worth seeing. As Kjartansson’s New York museum debut, however, it works more in the service of the New Museum than the other way around.

Me, My Mother, My Father, and I runs through June 29 at the New Museum.