Ragnar Kjartansson: Sunday Without Love, Installation view, Luhring Augustine Tribeca, New York
Ragnar Kjartansson once asked his mother, actress Guðrún Ásmundsdóttir, to spit on his face. In the video “Me and My Mother,” she does so, aggressively and tenderly, completing this task the way you’d imagine only a mother with pure belief in their child’s artistic vision could perform it. And she doesn’t spit only once—in the original 2000 work, she repeats the act multiple times; Kjartansson would then further replicate the encounter by creating similar videos in 2005, 2010, and 2015.
Repetition is the process through which Kjartansson explores the porous boundaries between humor and anguish. In the 2013 piece “A Lot of Sorrow,” he asked the band The National to repeatedly perform their song “Sorrow” for six hours in front of an audience at MoMA PS1 (the performance was recorded, and the piece has since been shown at other institutions). “I don’t wanna get over you,” sings Matt Berninger over and over and over, visibly worn from playing and replaying these lyrics. With repetition, the song’s original melancholy gives way to something different: an exhilaration of emotions, which turns the feeling of heartbreak into a display of endurance and, through this, a kind of comedy.
His newest exhibition, Sunday Without Love, on view at Luhring Augustine, continues this tradition. The show is titled after the single piece in the exhibit, which is nineteen minutes long and plays on repeat in the gallery. The inspiration for the work was threefold: an idyllic postcard, the comedic German song “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen” (“Learning to Live Without Love”) by Rocko Schamoni, and Kjartansson’s own intimate feelings of depressive loneliness. Clad in traditional European folk clothing of vague origins, with billowing sleeves and Dutch bonnets, ten musicians—including Kjartansson himself—reenact the scene of the postcard in the Italian Alps. They sing an original song, with the lyrics, “You must learn to live, live without love. Love is not good for you.”
Read full article at exhibitsinnewyork.substack.com
