Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors
Ragnar Kjartansson: The Visitors
Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA)
Boston, MA
icaboston.org
Through November 2, 2014
“There are stars exploding…and there is nothing you can do.” So goes one of the lines from Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston. Sung over and over, this verse is a perfect expression of the urgent undercurrent that runs through this evocative work. The Visitors is simultaneously a sorrowful lament over the loss of time and place, and an ambitious endeavor to momentarily suspend the viewer’s experience of either. In considering physical displacement and the search for community, the work explores concepts of geography and identity that increasingly characterize 21st-century culture. Through the temporal aspects of performance and video, the work examines the nature of physical and psychological distances as expressed in language, music and environment.
The Visitors was recorded in 2012 at an elegantly rundown 19th century estate in upstate New York. The nine-channel HD video installation captures a sweeping choral arrangement performed by the artist and a group of his fellow Icelandic musicians. Running for 64 minutes, the performers continuously sing several lines of identical verse from multiple locations throughout the estate. The piece swells in complexity through serial repetition, the evolving staging adding new layers of possible meanings, from faint murmurs that echo between singers to a grand collective orchestration, conveying an emotional range from quiet acceptance to desperate longing and joy. The insistent melody of the score derives from the folk/pop backgrounds of the musicians, but the work also borrows from gospel music, giving the pop rhythms a deeper resonance.
Although the musicians are all Icelanders they sing in English, as many contemporary Scandinavian singers do (members from several Icelandic bands–Múm and Sigur Rós –perform in this piece). Inevitably the video invites reflection on potentially adaptive and alienated aspects of contemporary Icelandic culture, further contributing to The Visitors’ themes of dislocation and loss. The performers, however, do not allow the process of translation to define them. In the drawn out way they sing the lines, the English intelligibility of the words fade simply into sounds. This too reflects contemporary Icelandic music: Sigur Rós has composed an entire album sung in a wholly made-up language. By shredding a single line of speech into multiple strands of sound, the music explores the more universal power of phonetic sound over the limitations of textual meaning.
The performers are scattered throughout the extensive rooms of the house; one screen shows a group of people making up a sort of choir on the veranda, the other nine consist of a single artist and their instruments; they play out of sight from each other, connected only by recording devices and headphones. The screens act as homes for the performers in this encircling installation. With a freestanding screen set in the middle, it is impossible for the viewer to have a complete view of all the projection screens at once. Thus the audience is similarly pulled apart by the events that unfold on the different video screens as they are connected by the sounds that link them together.
The audience drifts around the room, mirroring the separation of the performers on the screens. We experience not only the physical distance between us, but also, as the title of the work implies, the dislocation of the performers from their home country. The performers and their audience strain physically or metaphorically to be at least in two places at once. Upsetting location, The Visitors is able to exchange influences and collaborate in a sort of void.
Carefully staged within the aging but still lavishly decorated rooms, the musicians appear as if posed in front of an easel. Indeed, as if they are lit by the glow of warm lamps, or through an open window, each projection becomes a moving painting rich with the color of many layers of peeling paint and fabrics. The performers inhabit this house with such a casual flair that in spite of the work’s insistent theatrical staging, the artists achieve a remarkable intimacy in their respective performances. This conceit is playfully driven home, for example, by Ragnar Kjartansson, who chooses to play his guitar in a bathtub; even less likely another musician plays in bed next to his seemingly insensible partner.
Objects and sounds are similarly evocative. There is no attempt to hide the recording equipment; the exposed cords have that sort of “cool” warehouse gallery feel, which could have seemed too much like a music video, but are made charming here, especially in those moments when we see the cameramen turn the equipment on and off. Objects mark the passage of time or changes of verse throughout the performance. Most dramatically, the musicians who sit on the veranda occasionally fire a cannon. Heard throughout the installation space, the cannon can only be viewed fully on one screen; in another, we see a glimpse of smoke through an open window. The explosion startles and sets the viewer off darting around the room to locate which screen produced it. Other markers of time are subtler. Ragnar has to add new hot water to his bath and eventually has to get out. A pianist smokes a cigar, which we realize will eventually burn out. Noticing these details unsticks the viewer from the time warp created by the song’s repetitions. Through sound the audience strives to take in holistically what cannot be viewed. Indeed the work anticipates this effect in its own staging, building its discourse around distance and how it can be collapsed.
Overall the piece celebrates both influences from Iceland and the U.S. and finds a way to strengthen a sense of community created through shared sound. As the piece draws to an end, the musicians leave their rooms’ “screens” to join each other outside the house. As an audience we also come together as a group for the first time. Mirroring the performers we move to close the gap between us in the gallery. The performance ends light-heartedly as the musicians laugh with each other and pop champagne. After sharing their music for an hour, it is difficult to not share in their joy and the depth of emotions that are running throughout the performance. It is only in staying for the entirety of the work that the viewer can get past the potential sentimentality of the music and its romantic staging for a more richly-layered experience.
Image Credit: Ragnar Kjartansson, The Visitors, 2012, Nine-channel HD video projection, 64 minutes, Edition 4 of 6, Gift of Graham Gund to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Gund Gallery, Kenyon College. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik.
Maggie Jensen is a Boston-based writer, curator, and producer of the art zine Accordion.