"The Icelandic Artist Ragnar Kjartansson, Absurd and Profound in Equal Measures" by Jillian Steinhauer

Ragnar Kjartansson’s new exhibition, “Sunday Without Love” (at Luhring Augustine, through Dec. 20), consists of just one work—and it’s relatively tame, by the artist’s standards. The forty-nine-year-old Icelandic artist is best known for his endeavors of communal endurance: in “Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage” (2011/14), a projection of his parents acting in a 1977 film is accompanied by ten live musicians playing guitar and singing a song whose lyrics are taken from the movie’s dialogue. When the piece was shown at the New Museum, in 2014, the performers played all day (with breaks) for much of the eight-week run.

“Sunday Without Love” is more minimal—a single-shot, nineteen-minute video capturing a scene from a three-hour performance on a lawn in Italy, shot this past fall. In classic Kjartansson fashion, the piece is a cultural mashup: the staging and the costumes were inspired by a mid-twentieth-century folk postcard he owns, evoking Georges Seurat’s iconic painting “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte”; the music is a heartfelt reworking, with the collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson, of a German comedy song from the nineteen-nineties titled “Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen” (“Learning to Live Without Love”).

Read full article at newyorker.com.