â€å“once Again I Fall Into My Feminine Waysã¢â‚¬â

Ragnar Kjartansson'south Adult female in E takes place in a circular room built from a gold tinsel curtain. Unlike many of his works, Woman in E features existent people, rather than films. Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík) hide caption

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Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavíthou)

Ragnar Kjartansson'due south Woman in Eastward takes place in a circular room built from a gold tinsel curtain. Different many of his works, Woman in E features real people, rather than films.

Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík)

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson stands surrounded by women in gold strapless gowns. One by ane, the women climb onto a slowly rotating pedestal to practise their functioning: strumming an E pocket-sized chord on a gilt guitar for two and a one-half hours. The group is rehearsing in a clangorous gallery at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C. The piece, Woman in Eastward, is a new-ish piece of work by Kjartansson, one of the art world's biggest stars.

"It's so ridiculously simple," he tells the women, all local musicians. He advises them to retrieve of their fourth dimension on the dais equally a reprieve from our ADD world of mobile phones and social media. Then he chuckles and concedes, "Information technology'due south gonna exist listen-blowingly boring sometimes."

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson grew up in the theater world with an actress female parent and playwright/director male parent. Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum hide explanation

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Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum

Creative person Ragnar Kjartansson grew upwardly in the theater world with an actress mother and playwright/director father.

Cathy Carver/Courtesy of the Hirshhorn Museum

Kjartansson is Icelandic, but he'due south spent the past year trotting from Berlin to London to Tel Aviv to Detroit. He's had more than than twenty exhibitions in the past year solitary, and been celebrated with worshipful profiles in The New Yorker and the New York Times Mag.

"He's a huge deal," says Hirshhorn Main Curator Stéphane Aquin, who organized Kjartansson'south Washington evidence. "He'south been sort of rocking the fine art earth in the concluding 10 or 15 years with amazing performances."

Aquin says Kjartansson is best known for endurance-based works similar Me and My Female parent, a film serial that shows his mother spitting on him every v years, and The Visitors, for which he filmed nine musicians (including himself) in a aging Georgian mansion in upstate New York. Each musician occupies his or her own screen in a dark room at the Hirshhorn. One is lying on bed; some other is in a bathtub. Their lovely faces are illuminated by soft morning light. Over and over, they play the aforementioned enigmatic phrase: "Once once more, I autumn into my feminine ways." (The expression is from Kjartansson'south ex-wife; the piece was filmed in the wake of their divorce.)

Nine musicians occupy their ain screen in The Visitors, seen here in a dark room at the Hirshhorn. People often cry when they sit through a few cycles of Kjartansson'south pieces. Cathy Carver/ Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík) hibernate caption

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Cathy Carver/ Courtesy of the creative person, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík)

Nine musicians occupy their own screen in The Visitors, seen here in a nighttime room at the Hirshhorn. People often cry when they sit through a few cycles of Kjartansson's pieces.

Cathy Carver/ Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík)

"Weighing my words, information technology is considered one of the greatest works of our immature century," Aquin says. "It is moving. It takes it out of you. It is just, also, touching." People often cry when they sit through a few cycles of Kjartansson'due south pieces, something this reporter personally observed at the Hirshhorn bear witness.

Kjartansson filmed The Visitors' musicians in a crumbling mansion in 2012. Elisabet Davids/Courtesy of the creative person, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík) hide caption

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Elisabet Davids/Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík)

Kjartansson filmed The Visitors' musicians in a crumbling mansion in 2012.

Elisabet Davids/Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine (New York) and i8 Gallery (Reykjavík)

The mesmerizing quality of repetition — and the catharsis it can bring — was impressed on the artist by his extra mother and playwright/director father. Kjartansson grew up backstage while they worked. "Watching them in the theater just repeating the same scenes over and over again — that sort of created what I do in my art," he says.

But Kjartansson says he didn't depict from an Icelandic visual art tradition. Rather, he says the country is better known for stories. "The air is thick with culture and history, but there'due south nothing to prove it. Information technology's simply all these histories and sagas, but no monuments or onetime ruins or annihilation. It's just: You're standing on a colina and and so much stuff happened on this hill and then much verse has been written well-nigh this hill — just it'south simply a loma."

Kjartansson jokes that being Icelandic might exist an advantage in a competitive global art world, where nationality can be deployed as a gimmick. "There'south that innocence almost being Icelandic," he cracks. "People just call back you're cute."

His performances are filmed and released in limited editions which sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He says much of his work, with its emphasis on repetition, is ultimately well-nigh failing to attain perfection. "All the longing to make something corking — but it's never great; it'southward always mediocre. And I just dearest that. I merely love it when human beings are trying to achieve something and information technology sort of doesn't happen. I think it'due south the ultimate human moment."

A moment Ragnar Kjartansson enjoys showcasing — lovingly — over and over and again.

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Source: https://www.npr.org/2016/10/28/498718095/art-star-ragnar-kjartansson-moves-people-to-tears-over-and-over

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