Iceland’s famous art-world trickster trades the silly for the sublime

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In the rarified setting of a modern art foundation north of Copenhagen, the sophisticated atmosphere is interrupted by the blast of a shotgun. The international gallery crowd seems unperturbed. After all, what’s a gunshot or two when you are surrounded by the many provocations of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson? Visitors have been introduced to this exhibition at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art by videos in which Kjartansson’s own mother spits in his face.

The shots are part of another piece from 2007, made just a few months before the collapse of the Icelandic economy: A man in a winter landscape (played by the Icelandic comedian Laddi) loads his gun and shoots it aimlessly into the air. He carries his cartridges in a yellow plastic shopping bag, a reference to the Bonus supermarket chain whose owner was implicated in the financial crisis. His pointless but repeated shots punctuate another persistent sound in the gallery: the drone-like song from Mercy, a 2004 video in which Kjartansson himself appears as country crooner with slicked-back hair, repeating the lyric “Oh why do I keep on hurting you?” for more than 60 minutes.

The Louisiana Museum, located about 40 kilometres north of Copenhagen in the leafy town of Humlebaek, is a tantalizing place – both bucolic and assertive. Established in the 1950s by Knud Jensen, the heir to a cheese wholesaling fortune, it is nestled in a modernist sculpture garden set on a cliff overlooking the sound that faces Sweden, and features a big-name collection of postwar art displayed in a honeycomb of low buildings and subterranean galleries. All that is very pleasant, but the real draw is a rich program of temporary exhibitions and this summer a retrospective devoted to the Icelandic trickster is Europe’s hot ticket.

On a recent Sunday, hip Danes and savvy tourists crowded into the show, entitled Epic Waste of Love and Understanding, to experience 20 years’ worth of Kjartansson’s videos, a suite of paintings created for the 2009 Venice Biennale and a continuing performance where an actor sidesteps his precarious way along a high ledge in a museum stairwell. The tongue-in-cheek title – is it the artist or the audience who are wasting their sympathetic efforts? – is typical of Kjartansson’s mischievous probing of the line between art and cultural cliché.

Canadians may know Kjartansson’s work from Death is Elsewhere, the hypnotic 2019 video installation in-the-round that features two sets of singing twins slowly circling the viewer in a volcanic landscape, and which showed at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto in 2020. Or they may remember what is probably Kjartansson’s most famous work, The Visitors, a nine-screen installation in which the artist and friends play music simultaneously but separately in different rooms of an old mansion in upstate New York. Unveiled at Zurich’s Migros Museum in 2012, it showed at Montreal’s Musée d’art contemporain in 2016. (The latter installation is included in the Louisiana show; the former is not.)

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These works are poignantly lyrical: The Visitors, named for ABBA’s last album, speaks hauntingly of human connection through music; Death is Elsewhere was shot at the site of a devastating 18th-century volcanic eruption. Notably, this retrospective reveals how Kjartansson developed two key approaches – repetition and duration – in his earlier, more provocative pieces yet also mellowed considerably in recent work. The video where his mother, the Icelandic actress Gudrun Asmundsdottir, spits in his face was first shot in 2000 and is repeated every five years against the same bookcase in the artist’s childhood home. Mother and son gradually age but the uncomfortable humour of the piece, undercutting enduring notions of maternal affection with a classic gesture of contempt, remains.

It’s one of many works where Kjartansson tested the viewer’s endurance. Colonization, a video from 2003, shows a Danish aristocrat in a wig berating and beating an Icelandic peasant (played by Kjartansson himself). It’s a satirical reference to Denmark’s long colonization of Iceland, which only gained its full independence in 1944. Like some slasher movie, the over-the-top piece directly challenges the viewer’s ability to watch as the blood flows and the peasant screams in pain.

Of course, Kjartansson’s 2013-2014 collaboration with the American band the National, in which they repeated their 2010 hit song Sorrow for six hours, also challenges the viewer’s stamina. At Louisiana, people came and went; few seemed likely to do the full marathon.

The Venice paintings of 2009 represent a different kind of marathon: During a six-month residency in a studio on the Grand Canal, Kjartansson hung out with his friend, the artist Pall Haukur Bjornsson, and painted him 144 times, showing him lounging about in his Speedo, smoking and drinking. Mounted in chronological order in a crowded installation at the Louisiana, they offer a pointed undercutting of any notion of a male artistic genius – this guy is a slacker – just as Mercy mocks the macho self-pity of the country star.

That humour remains as Kjartansson’s work has progressed, but it’s far subtler. The stairwell performance at the Louisiana may seem obvious – will he fall? Will he jump? Will you look? – but the climax of the show is another remarkable video piece that sits between the silly and the sublime with a half-hour duration that again becomes hypnotic.

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In No Tomorrow, a collaboration with choreographer Margret Bjarnadottir and composer Bryce Dessner, eight female guitarists – dancers from the Iceland Dance Company – perform simple but expressive movements all perfectly choreographed across separate screens. Dressed in jeans and white T-shirts, they strum slowly and intone the lyric “Oh babe, no tomorrow,” (a reference to the late 18th-century libertine social novel Point de lendemain, by the French writer Vivant Denon).

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Louisiana positions the work politically between its live performance shortly after the inauguration of U.S. president Donald Trump and its video version dating to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Originally conceived as a staged dance, the video adds an important new element because the dancers are initially isolated on separate screens but gradually come together on one, as though contradicting their depressive song.

Is it ridiculous to have hope? Scandinavia’s best court jester, Kjartansson performs on a knife edge between the naïve and the knowing.

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Epic Waste of Love and Understanding continues at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark, to Oct. 22.