A concomitant interest in place has also deepened his work, most notably in a monthlong performance staged in a ruined theater in the south of Iceland. Held in connection with the Reykjavík Art Festival, The Great Unrest (2005) entailed Kjartansson strumming a guitar, clad in Viking regalia and moaning a dirge for eight hours each day. He decorated the walls with his own small drawings and paintings, and scattered wailing cassette players around the space. The remote location attracted few art pilgrims, which made the work all the more sensational. "I had not so many visitors," the artist recalls. "One day it was only an old lady. Another day it was a herd of cows that accidentally wandered in." Playing to a bovine audience in the middle of nowhere could not have pleased him more. The site’s splendid desolation and his lonely routine again tapped that hard-bitten Icelandic identity as a nation built on the backs of lowly sheep farmers, fending off the elements. As if he were paying tribute to those who came before him, the artist fittingly sang the blues, weaving stories out of grief.

Kjartansson has an affinity for pioneers like Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic, whose physically exhausting works of the 1970s were complex feats of endurance. But he draws equally from the world of cinema, and this lends his one-liners an appealing heft. In his video Guilt Trip (2007), for example, the Icelandic actor and comedian Laddi, an icon of Kjartansson’s generation, is filmed against a bleakly gorgeous winter landscape. With an air of irresolution, Laddi fires a shotgun into the distance, pausing now and again to pull handfuls of shells from a yellow plastic bag. Trudging aimlessly in this super-Icelandic scenery, Laddi radiates both defeat and a defiant will to go on. "He’s always had this melancholic aura," Kjartansson explains. "Like most funny people, he’s kind of a bluesy guy. I met him in a bar, and he was very depressed. He said, ‘If I don’t do anything new, I’m going to have to kill myself.’ So I had to make this piece to save him." The scene’s absurdity has only deepened with time: Laddi’s shopping bag bears the piggy-bank logo of Iceland’s Bónus supermarket chain, whose owner has been blamed as a key player in the nation’s economic crash. As in many of Kjartansson’s works, a near slapstick humor — in this case, Laddi wrestles again and again with a balky shotgun mechanism — gives way to piercing emotional truths, a quality the artist traces to classic Hollywood films. "It almost goes back to Charlie Chaplin," he says. "There are no movies that make you cry as much as Chaplin movies. Because you manage to laugh at the absurd things, then when there’s something that’s emotional, it’s mega-emotional."

Kjartansson also draws deeply on the tradition of the Icelandic sagas, those bloody fables of conquest that are the country’s national treasure. "This island has always been a storytelling place," he says. "It was always the poorest nation in Europe, and the only identity it had were these sagas. I often think of my works more as stories than as visual pieces." As with God, those stories can wring redemption out of weltschmerz. For the weeklong performance Schumann Machine (2008), at Manifesta 7, he memorized the 16-poem song cycle of Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, a composition whose romantic air and laughing-through-the-tears sense of triumph he found in tune with his work’s dominating interest in melancholy. Singing in sonorous German for eight hours each day, while drinking prosecco and smoking cigars with his collaborator the pianist Davið Þór Jónsson, Kjartansson turned this bittersweet story — sung in the voice of a jilted lover who renounces his grief — into a furious ode to hope. That the piece was performed at pell-mell speed in the courtyard of an old tobacco factory in the northern Italian town of Rovereto made it all the more evocative, as if one had suddenly stumbled upon a beautiful tombstone to a vashished love, and indeed, a vanished way of life.