Ragnar Kjartansson: Song (March 11 – Sept 4, 2011) is the first solo US museum exhibition of the work of Ragnar Kjartansson. A musician as well as artist, Kjartansson has been drawn to the theater and performance since he formed a band in his teenage years. The exhibition at the Carnegie Museum of Art (www.web.cmoa.org) will feature a site-specific, long-duration live performance in the Hall of Sculpture entitled Song—newly commissioned by the museum—featuring Kjartansson’s nieces; four video works; and a world-premier, one-night-only, vaudeville-style concert starring the artist, members of his family, and his friends. This exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, associate curator of contemporary art.

“My work often is about this ethic of ‘pretense,’” says Kjartansson. “That’s my field of interest—the friction between pretending and doing; pretense and reality at the same time. It’s a constant struggle between truth and lies, and between tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious.”

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song explores Kjartansson’s artistic interests through a variety of media, all based in some way on performance. For the site-specific performance piece Song, Kjartansson’s nieces—Ragnheidur Harpa Leifsdóttir, Rakel Mjöll Leifsdóttir, and Íris María Leifsdóttir—will reside in the museum’s Hall of Sculpture for three weeks, repeatedly singing a short song that the artist wrote based on a slightly misremembered phrase from an Allen Ginsberg poem.

Song evokes Kjartansson’s previous site-specific long-duration performance works such as The Great Unrest, in which the artist—dressed in Viking costume—sang for eight hours a day in a dilapidated theater in rural Iceland. Similarly, in Scandinavian Pain, Kjartansson played his guitar day after day in an abandoned barn in a region of Norway made famous by Edvard Munch. Many days, not a single human visitor would come across the performance; on one occasion, his only audience was a few cows that wandered in from the nearby field. By combining abjection with endurance, Kjartansson created an authentically Scandinavian interpretation of the blues, becoming the lonely, deep-feeling singer he was playing.

For Song, however, Kjartansson wished to abandon the brutal masculinity of Viking landscapes and suits of armor for the peacefulness of family and femininity embodied by his nieces, their voices echoing in the Hall of Sculpture as they sing the central lyric: “The weight of the world / is love.” According to Byers, Song contrasts the warmth and softness of the performers with the hard marble room, while the hall’s casts of famed classical sculptures provide a constant audience. Welcoming and alluring, the performance also verges on the hypnotic, inspiring a strange state of reverie only achieved through endless repetition.

Kjartansson’s videos reflect an interest in music and theater and the personae of its performers, often coupled with extreme environments. The End (2008) features two musicians in a mountainous snowy landscape, while Satan is Real (2005) finds the naked artist buried to his chest in the lawn of a public park, playing a guitar.

In addition to his video work, Kjartansson has become known for inhabiting galleries and more unexpected locations where he performs live, often for extended periods. For the 2009 Venice Biennale, he painted portraits of his friend, day in and day out, for six months, in a crumbling palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal. The ornate stone room was eventually filled with hundreds of oil paintings and the aggregate ephemera of days spent in each other’s company. A “social sculpture” emerged from the accumulation of painting, palazzo, friends, trash, musical instruments, and exhibition visitors watching the artist and subject at work.

Kjartansson’s approach wavers between a besotted optimism and a deadpan, sometimes unnerving, directness. Ritual, repetition, and an almost hallucinogenic reverie share the stage with humor, levity, and a charismatic impulse to entertain.

This exhibition is organized by Dan Byers, associate curator of contemporary art.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is the 66th installment of Carnegie Museum of Art’s Forum series. Major support for this exhibition is provided by The Fellows of Carnegie Museum of Art, the Virginia Kaufman Fund, and the Juliet Lea Hillman Simonds Foundation, with presenting sponsorship provided by Rodgers Insurance Group and Motorists Mutual Insurance Company.  Additional support is provided by Sandeman Port. Support is also provided by The American-Scandinavian Association.

General operating support for Carnegie Museum of Art is provided by The Heinz Endowments and Allegheny Regional Asset District. Carnegie Museum of Art receives state arts funding support through a grant from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, a state agency funded by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.

About Ragnar Kjartansson

Kjartansson (b. 1976) has been experimenting with elements of visual art, music, and theater and considers himself mainly a performance artist. His pieces are characterized by the play between contradictory feelings- sorrow and happiness, horror and beauty, drama and humor.