Ragnar Kjartansson and the Art of Pleasure

Abstract

Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-channel video installation The Visitors, acclaimed by The Guardian as “the best artwork of the century so far,” was commissioned by the Migros Museum in Zürich in 2012 and has been traveling the world ever since.1 Kjartansson gathered a group of friends from the Reykjavik music scene and installed them for a week in the mansion at Rokeby, a nineteenth-century estate in upstate New York owned by descendants of the Astor family. At the end of the week, they filmed the videos that make up the installation simultaneously in a single take. Eight of the nine screens that make up the installation show a single room in the house containing, for most of the piece’s sixty-four minute run time, a single musician, including three guitarists (two electric and one acoustic), two pianists (one of whom doubles on bass guitar), an accordionist, a cellist, and a drummer. Although these musicians are physically separate from one another, they wear headphones that enable them to hear each other playing. They are also guided by Kjartansson’s graphic score, which breaks the music down into individual units and identifies the instrumentation of each segment as well as chord progressions and other sonic events.