美国国家公共电台 NPR Art Star Ragnar Kjartansson Moves People To Tears, Over And Over

Art Star Ragnar Kjartansson Moves People To Tears, Over And Over 

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Well, now, we're going to meet one of the art world's biggest stars, even if he hasn't designed a soy sauce bottle. He is from Iceland, but he's spent the past year going from Berlin to London to Tel Aviv to Washington, D.C. That is where the latest of his one-man shows just opened at the Hirshhorn Museum. NPR's Neda Ulaby paid a visit.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE 2: Some names are almost too much, even for public radio, so bear with me. Ragnar Kjartansson is the artist from Iceland.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON: (Foreign language spoken).

ULABY: Right now, the 40-year-old is rehearsing a new work. He's talking with his assistant and surrounded by women wearing gold strapless gowns. This piece, like so many of his other works, relies on repetition. One woman at a time will climb onto a slowly rotating pedestal and strum one chord on a golden guitar over and over for two and a half hours.

KJARTANSSON: It's so ridiculously simple. Let's just hear the sound.

ULABY: Kjartansson tells the women their performance will feel meditative 3, like a reprieve 4 from our ADD world of mobile phones and social media.

KJARTANSSON: I mean, it's going to be mind-blowingly boring sometimes (laughter).

ULABY: Each woman seems remote and regal on her pedestal, part of an artistic 5 tradition of women playing lutes that dates back to ancient Greece, says the museum's chief curator, Stephane Aquin. And he adds that E minor 6 feels almost other worldly.

STEPHANE AQUIN: Maybe the most melancholy 7 of all chords.

ULABY: Aquin says work so melancholy and yet so playful is why this artist is such a big deal.

AQUIN: He's a huge deal. He's been sort of rocking the art world in the last 10 or 15 years with amazing performances.

ULABY: Like one filmed a few years ago with nine musicians in a crumbling 8 Georgian mansion 9.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

ULABY: The light is soft. It's morning. Each musician has the illuminated 10, lovely face of a Dutch painting. One's lying in bed. One's in a bathtub. They're each in their own rooms on different screens but playing the same phrase together.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

AQUIN: Weighing my words, it is considered one of the greatest works of our young century. It is moving. It takes it out of you. It is just all so touching 11.

ULABY: The mesmerizing 12 quality of repetition was impressed on Ragnar Kjartansson in his childhood by his actress mother and playwright-director father. The artist grew up backstage.

KJARTANSSON: Watching him in the theater just, like, repeating the same scenes over and over again. That sort of created what I do in my art.

ULABY: Iceland's not exactly known for its visual art tradition but, Kjartansson says, for its stories.

KJARTANSSON: The air is thick with culture and history, but there's nothing to prove it. It's just all these histories and sagas 13 but no monuments or old ruins or anything. It's just you're, like - you're standing 14 on a hill and, like, so much stuff happened on this hill, and so much poetry has been written about this hill, but it's just a hill.

ULABY: That said, he's the first to admit that being Icelandic has been something of an advantage in a competitive global art world where nationality can be used as a gimmick 15.

KJARTANSSON: There's that innocence 16 about being Icelandic. It's sort of - people just think you're cute.

ULABY: Kjartansson's performances are filmed and released in limited editions, which sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars. He's had more than 20 exhibitions in the past year alone. People often cry when they sit through a few of his cycles. The artist says that's because repetition is somehow about failing to reach perfection.

KJARTANSSON: All the longing 17 to make something great, but it's never great. It's always mediocre 18. And I - I just love that. I just love it when human beings are trying to achieve something and it sort of doesn't happen. I think it's the ultimate human moment.

ULABY: A moment Ragnar Kjartansson lovingly showcases over and over and over. Neda Ulaby, NPR News.