I’ve tried not to write too much about art in these essays. I find it too elusive, to express what I’ve seen and heard with conviction, in a way so you understand how the pitch of a thing resonated with me, when I’m not completely sure how it resonated with me?
A few weeks ago, we went to the Broad Museum in downtown Los Angeles. We went to see a single piece of art, a video piece we’d seen years ago, that recently had been reinstalled. We arrived just after opening and went straight to it, and when we walked in, we had it all to ourselves. We stayed for over an hour. It was wonderful to behold. I plan on visiting it again soon, and maybe a couple times more after that. But to give a sense of the thing, what the experience was like and why I found it so moving, so marvelous – to string together an array of meaningful expressions and conjure it up for you, too, well, I just don’t see that happening. I can’t even point at it. “The Visitors,” by Ragnar Kjartansson, is the rare thing to not live online. It isn’t conveyed well by an image search, or even a semi-pirated film. Basically, other than to tell you that it is in Los Angeles at present, duration unknown, in a pair of rooms inside an imposing-looking building that, while free to access in terms of price, requires advance reservation accessed through the internet, and perhaps a generalized comfort for walking into fancy spaces, I’m at a loss.
Also, I’ve known all week this essay would be a failure.
But let’s say that’s okay, let’s say we can get past that and go a bit further. At the museum, you navigate past four or five large rooms of contemporary art on the first floor, you ignore them. In another is a door buffeted by tall curtains. You enter a pair of large rooms, every wall and divider flaring with light. Or perhaps everything’s dark; it depends where you are in the cycle when you arrive. There’s no other art in the rooms except this piece of art, which is composed of nine large screens, each big enough to cover a wall. So, two rooms, nine walls, nine video screens, and you wander around and take in as much as you can tolerate, with no idea of what you’re looking at, at first. Who’s that woman in the nightgown with the cello? Why is that naked man singing in the bath? Also, above each screen hangs a loudspeaker, conveying the audio of what’s shown, and then there are other speakers playing the audio of all screens combined – each screen represents the view of a single camera, set up in a room somewhere in an old mansion decorated from a more lavish period, and in each room is a person, a musician, sometimes two, and sometimes there’s an additional person just laying there, doing nothing. The cameras are all switched on at about the same time to begin recording, so you’ve got nine views into this house full of musicians being recorded simultaneously. (One camera is set up outside to record a group of friends sitting on the house’s terrace, some of them also playing instruments, some not, also a pair of what seem to be people who are groundskeepers, one of whom sets off explosions occasionally.) And then the musicians begin to play a song. The song lasts about an hour, with approximately three phases and very few lyrics – over and over, the phrase, “once again, I fall into my feminine ways” – but still, a lot of singing, and much of the singing is repetitious, circular, and the whole thing, the song or song cycle, cycling through dynamics and moods, modulations of the lyrics and melodies, great swelling choruses and also quiet arias, seems to never end, takes more than an hour to complete, so if you stay in the rooms for the hour-plus, wandering around, listening to the music, watching the different players do their parts – one taking a solo, two singing in harmony (sounding in the vein of a band like Sigur Rós, but more melodic), you start to wonder if you’ve heard it all before, if it’s on repeat, but then you notice new details in a frame, people wandering from room to room – you realize that you feel like you’re in the house, too, which is an odd, wondrous feeling! But eventually the song does finish, and it’s still not over, the musicians and their friends leave the house, singing and playing instruments, and walk away – the outdoor camera films them – across a field, disappearing out of view. Until finally a cameraman, humming the song you just heard, goes through the house, room by room, switching off each camera, until he turns off the last camera and now the installation in the museum’s pair of rooms is completely dark, and then the whole thing starts again.
It really is one of the best things I’ve ever seen.
Here is how the museum describes it:
Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s nine-screen installation The Visitors was filmed at the historic Rokeby farm in upstate New York. Kjartansson invited a group of friends to stay with him for a week at the ethereal, yet decrepit estate, culminating in the ambitious performance… Running for over an hour, The Visitors was produced in one take, recording each musician’s performance simultaneously in different rooms of the mansion. The friends play the same song, instilling it with nuanced meaning through voice, instrument and movements of the body. Kjartansson himself plays much of his rendition in a bathtub. The installation elicits feeling through duration and repetition: rituals are personalized, subtle variations emerge and decay is pervasive. The lyrics are based on a poem by Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir and the musical arrangements are by Kjartansson and Davíð Þór Jónsson.
The art writer Dave Hickey recently died. He once said in an interview, “Art is not good for you. It’s not necessarily therapeutic. It’s supposed to be exciting. It’s not penicillin. It’s more like cocaine. It’s a drug. It gets you excited and makes you want more.” All of that’s right. A painter doesn’t make art, they make a painting; art is what happens in the moment for an audience, it happens beyond consciousness, sometimes it emerges to consciousness. So, no wonder it’s mysterious and hard to describe.
And notice how I said that thing a moment ago, “one of the best things I’ve seen,” notice I even felt stupid in the moment writing it and inserted the “really” modifier to back away, and I haven’t gone back and edited it out, despite it being such a stupid comment?! But also because in the flush of a moment, when I’m moved by beauty, or by disgust, the mind flies to superlatives, and our rhetoric loves superlatives – the “best ever,” the “worst ever,” the most amazing, the stupidest, one of the top three, top five things seen, done, read, none of which tell us much, though they are decent signposts, and I know when I’m in the grip of deep feeling and lack the words to say how I feel, a signpost can be as good as it gets.
So, what was “The Visitors?” to me, that morning, that place and time, with a pandemic swirling outside? It was an exercise in endurance. It was rapture by trial. It was silly and mesmerizing and dirge-like and dance-able. It was boring, joyful, surprising. The harmonies made me choke up. The dirge-y droning of it all, the rāga, was both, for me, transporting and sometimes twee. It was a fugue state. It was a gospel choir in lockdown. It was mostly like a world apart. Was there a narrative? Was there the total absence of narrative? I know most of all, as I write this in a motel room on the East Coast, weeks from seeing this piece of art, that just thinking about it stirs something inside and makes me want to escape into its world once more.
When we left the museum, I asked at the gift shop if they had anything related to the piece. An employee pointed me to a postcard, which I brought to the cashier, and I asked the cashier if he’d seen the piece yet. He said no but he was planning to, he said he’d heard of customers visiting four or five times. “Several people have told me,” he said, “it was the best thing they’ve ever seen.”
From tomorrow’s “Sunday Supplement” for supporters – my Sunday bulletin with three-plus things I loved recently – some recommendations for airplane books, personal ads, and the software I use to keep the shop running smoothly.
I have a bad habit of throwing nothing away on my computer. Weird because I’m pretty scrupulous about things in my life off the computer - I don’t own much, I don’t hoard, I buy clothes that last me a decade or more. But files upon files clog my hard drive, and it feels like every week my laptop sends up a cry for help, threatening to expire.
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“Meditations in an Emergency” is a weekly email published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful. “The Sunday Supplement” is his weekly recommendation bulletin.
Rosecrans’s latest book, Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, is available from Bookshop, Amazon, or your local store. Any other books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.