Ragnar Kjartansson

Photo by Wolfgang Träger

"Schumann Machine" (2008). Installation view, Manifesta 7, Rovereto, Italy, 2008.

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To get to Ragnar Kjartansson’s countryside studio, I flew to Reykjavík, drove to a scarcely inhabited fjord called Borgarfjörður an hour north of the city, splashed across a tidal waterway in a four-wheel-drive vehicle, and pulled up to a bluff overlooking the glacial river Hvítá. There, in a small cottage, I found the artist fixing a proper Icelandic repast of dried haddock and headcheese and bottles of Egils Gull beer. This old-school welcome, offered in a studio otherwise redolent of modern bohemian life — an electric guitar thrown on the sofa, DVDs strewn about the room, an easel at the window — seemed at once a straight-up country snack and a marvelous mise-en-scène. As I was soon to learn, this young Icelandic artist has made a career of turning the deepest Icelandic traditions into works of performance that are part myth, part put-on, and part spontaneous adventure. Tapping into a rich storytelling lineage and dramatic sense of place, the artist has captured the creative resilience of this complex island nation. As he cheerfully handed me another helping of rice pudding, I could already see that for Kjartansson, every waking moment is a glorious, unscripted act.

Born into a family active in Iceland’s theatrical scene, Kjartansson, 33, likes to say he was conceived on the set of the nation’s first erotic thriller, Morðsaga, wherein his mother plays a lonely housewife and his father a plumber called to fix the dishwasher. (His conception took place the same month the love scene was filmed.) He would come home from school and sit in the darkened hall where his parents variously performed, wrote, and directed, listening to actors rehearse their lines. In Kjartansson, this repetitive toil of the stage struck unusually fertile ground. As a student at the Icelandic Academy of the Arts (he graduated in 2001), he was drawn to what he calls "performance loops" whose Beckett-like routines push toward the transcendent. Since then, the artist has pursued the liberating magic of dramatic art. His preferred medium — an amalgam of music, theater, and painting — is an arena for time-based works with sometimes soaring payoffs. Drawing on a boyish realm of knights and Vikings, wandering troubadours and pop idols, he concocts a fantasy world where anything goes. To some degree, as he readily acknowledges, an escapist urge fuels these acts. "Performances are these fantastic experiences," he says. "It’s like a holiday from the real world."

Yet for Kjartansson, that journey is anything but happy-go-lucky. Though his works are often animated by a canny sense of comedy and easy-to-grasp, pop-culture riffs, Nordic foreboding is never far behind. The 2003 video Colonization shows a Danish merchant beating up an Icelandic peasant, but recent works are more nuanced. The video Mercy (2005), for instance, presents an alt-country ode consisting of a single lyric — "Oh why do I keep on hurting you" — which Kjartansson, standing alone with a guitar, sings over and over in front of the camera like an actor perfecting his role. Now plaintive, now crass, now searching, now pleading, the line takes on a haunting quality not quite undercut by the tune’s tongue-in-cheek twang. The work introduced a recurring motif in the artist’s repertoire: the slick-haired singer, a persona Kjartansson has honed in real life as front man for the synth-heavy Reykjavík rock band Trabant, now on hiatus. The band’s performances — as seen on YouTube, anyway — have been blowout affairs, full of rock ’n’ roll swagger and screaming teenage fans. Mercy was a first step toward connecting this sassy streak with the artist’s maturing explorations of Icelandic identity.

That breakthrough moment came with Kjartansson’s most powerful work to date, the video installation God (2007), starring a troubadour in modern-day guise: the crooner. Backed by 11 musicians on a soundstage draped with pink satin, he repeats one single refrain — "sorrow conquers happiness" — to bewitching effect. For a half hour, he sings on as the music swells in melancholic grandeur. But far from being downbeat, as he stands before his microphone and smiles into the camera, Kjartansson exerts a boundless exuberance. Here that melancholy aspect so celebrated in Icelandic literature is transformed into something wholly amazing, just as the nation’s hardscrabble landscape — portrayed in writings like Halldór Laxness’s defining novel Independent People — becomes redeeming. Kjartansson’s work has only gained in emotional resonance with the nation’s economic collapse, almost as if he had sensed the impending disaster. As the artist told me of the nation’s capitalist adventure, "There was a mood here in Iceland, something really weird going on, and you couldn’t put your finger on it." With God, he preemptively turns Iceland’s ruin into a stubborn sort of joy.