The work was a space that had become a studio, a place to paint, a place to play the guitar and for sure a place to consume alcohol and even possibly live in. Its inhabitants were two males, one the artist, the other the artists model. They were engaged in the live act of art making and a particularly macho brand of studio living. I looked, took it in and left wondering if what I had witnessed was a relational work or a choreographed performance or some hybrid of these possibilities. Where did fiction begin and reality end? This work The End, is now presented as part of a retrospective of Ragnar Kjartansson’s work at the Barbican, though its realisation here, is to a certain extent as post-production. What we are given are the 144 pantings produced in Venice of the artists model, one of which was produced each day over the six month period that the Biennale ran. The salon hang of the paintings are less intriguing than the activity of their making, so whilst it completes the narrative for me, it may be less compelling for the new viewer.

More recently this year I experienced a showing of Me and My Mother (2015) as part of a group show called Illumination at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark. Here the audience was presented with the most recent of four video works where Kjartansson’s mother spits at him. The mothers persistence and disgust is equaled only by the passive endurance of the son, who benignly accepts the abuse. The work was presented here as a projection and almost at eye level, on a par with the staircase it it installed over.

The Barbican’s presentation of all four works, side by side on smaller monitors, gives us something else, a chronological evolution of a work which first started in 2000 then 2005, 2010 and finally 2015. The work operates as a portrait and record of the artist and his mother, getting older, but with a relationship that remains in the moments of this performance, consistent, throughout 20 years. The mother, Kjartsansson’s own and an actress in her own right, stands next to her son, acts and is convincing, whilst the son is well the son. The beauty of this work is the collision of the crafted acting and sincerity of the mother’s performance and the lesser-acted, more comedic resolution of the son. The actual mother and son bodies, performing mother and son, blur the distinction of what is real and what is fictional.

Two of the more substantial works in the Barbican show are a live performance and installation called Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011 – 14) and the beautiful multi-video installation The Visitors (2012). Take Me Here…consists of ten singing and guitar playing male troubadours, performing in a space that consists of domestic paraphernalia such as chairs, beds, beer bottles, fridge etc. against a backdrop of a large video screening of two flicking scenes of interior domestic spaces. In one we see a man and women, getting into a seduction and then sex scene on the floor. In the next we see the back of a women’s head sitting on a sofa, and then getting up with her dressing gown on. The two scenes show similar spaces but the emotional content is very different. They seem to question and query the success of 1950’s/ 1960’s models of the women as domestic goddess and home maker. All the while we hear the performers singing the lyrics ‘take me here by the dishwasher’, a romanticised group crooning and soundtracking of the found film footage. The actors in the movie are Kjartansson’s own parents, acting a love scene on the day that fiction became, later that day a reality, when the conception of Kjartansson himself is said to have occurred. The troubadours not only perform as accompaniment to the film, but also to us the viewers, as we are embraced and co-opted into the performance area.

The Visitors is an hour long, ten screen projection depicting nine scenes of the interior of a large, Victorian style house and one screen of the exterior, the balcony space outside the house. Each room is different and presents us with a space ready for the making of music. In one scene we see a roll-top bath filled with water and a speaker and microphone, in another a set of drums in a kitchen, in another a grand piano in a living room area and so on. Alongside these the one anomalous depiction of a group of people lounging and waiting on an outdoor balcony area. The interior spaces to begin with are devoid of human presence and have a stillness about them, that evoke a sense of anticipation in the audience. Then the first musician appears by the piano and subsequently each musician, one at a time arriving into their individual performance space, until the final countdown orchestrated by Kjartansson himself. They begin to play and continue to repeat the main lyrics over and over for nearly an hour. The isolation of each musician is off-set by the collaboratively delivered musical score, the group outside operating at times as choral support. I leave the piece, with the lyrics “once again I fall into, my feminine ways” and “there are stars exploding around you and there is nothing, nothing you can do” ringing in my ears, like ear worms. The projected screens have ‘tableau’ qualities which are intensified by the colour richness. The oft still-life nature of the images are reminiscent of stills and light boxes. The romance and poignancy of each of the singular performers being and activity is intensified within the group delivery and works so well here.

There are many other interesting works in this retrospective of Ragnar Kjartansson’s work such as God (2007), Guilt Trip (2007) and Scenes from Western Culture (2015), which wont fail to appeal. In each the staging and composition of the works for performance is so unerringly controlled, the photographic values reminiscent particularly of Jeff Wall and also Bill Viola. Whether working with cliches such as those of Western societal desires, human emotions such as sorrow and joy or the telling of autobiographical stories, there is an inherent showmanship, theatricality and tragic-comedic quality to the work which cannot be denied.

Author: Mona Casey