Still from Ragnar Kjartansson’s The End (2009)
This past fall, I participated in an artist’s residency in Banff, led by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson; his wife, performance artist Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir; and their frequent collaborator, experimental musician Davið þor Jonsson. It was called “The Soirée Retreat.” When asked what my residency was about, I hemmed and hawed and, unable to provide a brief summary that did justice to the project, I settled for, “Well, it’s sort of like Romantic-with-a-capital-R hanging out as an artistic pursuit.” And so it was: the weeks were structured around improvised performance evenings called soirées, which were the only mandatory activity. Otherwise, we read aloud from Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain; we went on hikes where we paused to play Wagner records and paint watercolours; we congregated in the Banff Centre’s hot tub and discussed artistic philosophy; we congregated around fires and sang country songs. We were an exceptionally tight-knit group. I began referring to us all as the Gothic Cult of Northern Romance.
It occurs to me now that we were all collaborators in one of Ragnar’s epic performances. What went on at Banff is very much in keeping with how he structures his work, which is rooted in a paradoxical belief in the Power of Art. On the one hand, his work recognizes the silliness of cleaving to such an outdated notion; on the other hand, fully cognizant of the self-referential mechanisms of a contemporary art practice, he cleaves nonetheless. The alchemical result of this process is work that is at once absurd, comic, grandiose, Romantic, utterly beautiful, completely self-aware, and without a trace of irony. It illustrates the difference between accepting the terms of a given situation and being dictated by them.
The reason I applied to that residency to begin with was because of Ragnar’s performance as Iceland’s representative at the 2009 Venice Biennale. He squatted the Icelandic pavilion for the duration of the Biennale, hosting parties by night. By day, he and another young man hung out in the space in their underwear. At a given point every day, Ragnar painted his friend in his underwear. By the time I got there, about six months into the Biennale, the entire place was covered in dunes of cigarette ash, beer bottles everwhere, and stacks and stacks of paintings amidst the decadent Venetian tumult. In an adjoining room, a five-channel installation, titled The End, was playing on a loop. That video is currently installed at the Scrap Metal Gallery.
The video begins with five screens of harsh wintry landscapes (it was shot in Banff). In each, a different musical set-up: a drum kit and an electric guitar; amps, a pink electric guitar; two mics, a banjo and an acoustic guitar; two acoustic guitars; a grand piano in the middle of a frozen lake. Two men (Ragnar and Davið) enter each screen. They don their instruments, and begin playing an epic country-music improvisation in the key of G.
Watching this video a second time, I tried to remember what I thought of it before I knew these men. It was then, and is now, hilarious. Their embrace of the romance of it all — the towering mountain landscape, the ür-pop I-IV-V chord structure — is almost too much. Any trace of mocking irony would derail the whole project, but Ragnar and Davið accept the terms of their situation — the natural Sublime, three chords and the truth — and work their way through it. No excessive emoting, no sly winks; like any good musician, they play it straight.
To what does The End refer? Perhaps something concrete, perhaps not, perhaps nothing but itself. Part of the wit of the installation is that, for a piece that titles itself after a conclusion, it seems interminable. Just when you think that you’ve reached the end of The End, a new musical structure is introduced — a minor-key change — and a new movement begins. You think perhaps the video has looped, but no: the slow walk across the frozen lake away from the grand piano that Ragnar begins in one screen hasn’t finished yet.
This is unfolding in real time, and you begin to sense the seriousness of intent behind this horse opera. These men are playing instruments outdoors in a frigid winter mountain climate: you can see their exposed hands getting redder and rawer, their eyes tearing, snow accumulating around their cowboy boots. Just as in his award-winning entry for this year’s Performa festival, where Ragnar sang a Mozart aria over and over for twelve hours, The End is an endurance piece. Three chords and the truth might be an old country-music chestnut, but here, in The End, it is embraced with unflagging conviction, an utter seriousness of intent. They respond to their sublime surroundings in kind; no offering to the Sublime comes without sacrifice.
But, again characteristic of Ragnar’s work, endurance is joy rather than subjugation. Like any endurance piece, The End tests the will of the performer, but the physical discomforts and compromises are, like the Sublime, like country music, terms to accept and embrace. And what’s more, despite the fact that you can see Ragnar and Davið stoically suffering, trying to keep their hands heated and nimble, giving their all to the music and the landscape and paying the price for it, the result is so achingly beautiful that you want them to keep playing; you pray that The End never ends.
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Sholem Krishtalka is the Toronto Standard’s art critic.
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