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Review by Kremena Nikolova-Fontaine. Photos by the author with permission of the museum.

"The End" in Hafnarborg.

Ragnar Kjartansson, 33, is the youngest Icelandic participant so far in this arguably most influential international festival for contemporary art. While this so-called art Olympiad first took place in 1895, Iceland didn’t have a participant until 1960.

Kjartansson's predecessors include: Gabríela Fridriksdóttir in 2005, a collaborator in the work “An ode to Bubbi Mortein” from 2004, Brigir Andrésson in 1995 who taught Kjartansson installation (the artist dedicates “The End” catalogue to his teacher, who passed away in 2007), and Kristján Gudmundsson in 1982 (you might remember him from my last art review as the 2009 Carnegie Awards winner).

“The End” is the title of Kjartansson's installation work, commissioned for the Icelandic pavilion by the Center for Icelandic Art in Reykavík. The project consists of a 30-minute-long video, which is mounted on a wall, and daily performances throughout the festival’s duration of six months.

The video was shot in the Rocky Mountains in Canada, featuring the artist and a composer friend, Davíd Thór Jónsson, playing cacophony in the wintery wilderness. It serves as a contrast to the extravagant location of the pavilion in a 14th century Italian Palazzo with frescoes by the Grand Canal.

The video documenting the daily live performances in Venice.

The concept of the performance is inspired by its historic ambiance. Kjartansson takes the role of a traditional oil-painter working on different portraits of the same male model each day, the performance artist Páll Haukur Björnsson, filling the space with canvasses and litter.

Even though the planned time-frame was the end of the festival, the perpetuation of the action could have been endless.

That's the point of it: an endless loop of monotonous activity with little variation. In “The End” catalogue, endurance appears to be a recurring theme.

Kjartansson goes back to his graduation work “The Opera” in 2000, when the “copy-paste” command became a wide-spread trend in the electronic world of music and art.

In “The Opera,” the artist, wearing a rococo costume, sings dramatic tunes for four hours a day over ten-day period while dining.

If you like, you can compare Kjartansson's work with Gilbert and George's tradition of durational performance, but the artist doesn't have groundbreaking ambitions.

Not without self-irony, Kjartansson simply takes the role of an entertainer, inviting the audience to observe a theatrical performance where reality and fiction become merged.

Born into a family of actors, role-playing and make-belief is evident in Kjartansson’s works. They remind me of Cindy Sherman's conceptual photographic self-portraits in the style of movie-like props.

For example, if you take Kjartansson’s work “God” (2007), which is not included in the Hafnarborg exhibition, the similarity of using clichés is striking. He does the equivalent of Sherman's legacy in video performance instead of photography.

The artist, who is dressed á la Frank Sinatra, sings the same endless mantra “Sorrow conquers happiness,” accompanied by an orchestra in a room covered with saturated pink satin draperies.

The quantity of the paintings that were produced in Venice, the artifacts of the completed performance, is stunning. From the floor to the roof, the exhibition hall at Hafnarborg is overloaded with them, imitating a real studio.

The quantity of paintings that were produced in Venice is stunning.

It made me admire the miracle of deadlines and persistence. Imagining the boredom of such an obsessive act, I was surprised that the quality of these paintings was not as bad as I expected. The artist-model team must have had some fun as well!

Drinking beer, chatting with guests and listening to music for six hours a day is not such a bad job, after all. It's not like cutting yourself with knives. The generation of Marina Abramovic and Carolee Schneemann is unsurpassed in their insane exhibitionism.

Kjartansson is the opposite of them: he loves self-indulgence, not self-inflicted pain. Cigars, chatter about German Romanticism and dandy clothes are typical for the gentleman.

My first encounter with Kjartansson's art was the video/sound/photograph/installation “Intimacy” (2004) displayed at the ASÍ gallery. The black and white photographs of the artist himself and a male friend of his in the nude were meant to be a piece about friendship and trust.

It made me wonder at first why every artist must undress to become an artist. On second thought, I did enjoy the melodramatic images with refreshingly unflattering depiction of nudity. One thing is for sure, the history of art has an excess of female muses and much fewer perfectly-toned Apollos.

The best part of the catalogue for the current exhibition is a staged correspondence through emails in the style of Victorian gentlemen between Kjartansson and his Swedish colleague Andjeas Ejiksson.

The style of the emails from both correspondents was so identically melodramatic, that it made me wonder if Eijksson is Kjartansson’s fictional alter-ego.

However, he turned out to be the co-editor of the Swedish art magazine Geist, where the two artists had published an earlier email correspondence of theirs in 2007.

Through laughter and bitter-sweet pain, gentlemen, please write to me such emails; nobody has ever done it so nicely!

“The End” runs until February 28, 2010. Admission is free.

Hafnarborg, the Hafnarfjördur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, is located on Strandgata 34, 220 Hafnarfjördur.
 
KNF – kremenan@gmail.com
 
Kremena Nikolova-Fontaine works at home for the elderly and is a passionate collector of art books, dedicating every spare moment to learn more about art while dreaming about having an exhibition of her own. She studied graphic design at the School of Visual Arts in Akureyri from 1999 to 2002. In college she realized that she didn’t want to be a designer or commercial artist but rather an illustrator and writer. At the moment she’s experimenting with her first graphic novel. 

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