Exhibition of the week Ragnar Kjartansson
Barbican Art Gallery, London EC2 (020-7638 8891, www.barbican.org.uk). Until 4 September
Where once performance art was a “scary, visceral, rude, wild, revolutionary” medium, you could now be forgiven for thinking it has become “too safe, too middle class”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Thank goodness, then, for the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Now 40, Kjartansson has been described as “the world’s finest performance artist” – and this may not be an exaggeration. The Barbican’s new retrospective of his work since 2000 brings together performance, music, film and painting, taking in everything from video works in which the artist’s mother spits in his face repeatedly, to a live performance featuring ten “unkempt” guitarists singing a song about his conception. It is “tangy, exciting, inventive, visually intoxicating” and, yes, “obsessive and unsafe”.
Kjartansson began his career as a musician and has “never lost his attachment to his first medium”, said Ben Luke in the London Evening Standard. One video records a performance in which the artist encouraged American rock band The National to play their “brooding” ballad Sorrow for six hours straight. Rather than becoming “dull through repetition”, the song actually becomes “more moving”. Another “perplexingly admirable” film presents Kjartansson dressed as a Hollywood crooner, singing against a background of pink satin curtains. Best of all is the nine-screen video installation The Visitors, in which we see the artist lying in the bathtub of a farmhouse, strumming a guitar and singing a song written by his estranged wife. On the other screens, friends in different rooms play along to the tune with different instruments. When they eventually congregate on the same screen, the effect is “magical” – it may be one of the “great artworks made so far this century”.
Kjartansson’s work is “relaxed” and “gregariously social”, featuring friends and family, said Laura Cumming in The Observer. For his painting series The End, he took up residence in a Venetian palazzo for six months with a friend, painting hundreds of portraits and recording the detritus of beer bottles and cigarette butts the pair amassed. Outside the gallery, in the Barbican’s pond, he has staged a “sensuous surprise” entitled The Kiss. Here, two women in Edwardian costume sit in a boat, locked in an embrace that “goes on and on”, just as in a painting. This is a “terrific show”, said Louisa Buck in The Daily Telegraph, which “fills the Barbican’s galleries with an eclectic, often hilarious – and sometimes frankly bonkers – array of work”.