"The Promise and Impossibility of Belonging in Ragnar Kjartansson’s Most Beloved Work" by Astra Lincoln

On a Saturday this July, I sat through three runs of Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation, The Visitors, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. I had imagined transcribing some of what I overheard from other patrons, but in the three-plus hours I was there (The Visitors has a 64-minute run time), no one spoke. No one even pulled out their phones, except to film short segments of the videos projected onto the gallery room’s walls.

While I was there, I saw one man in a crisp navy suit walk in alone. Before he had taken five steps into the exhibit room, he gasped, clutched both hands over his heart and started crying with an open-mouth grin plastered on his face. I watched as he slowly walked toward the center of the gallery and then, spreading his arms out beside him as though readying himself to hug a beloved, he began to spin, his chin bobbing from silent laughter, tears still streaming down his face. Another man, also alone, stood unmoving in front of one of the nine screens for the entire length of the performance, moving only once to remove his glasses and wipe tears from the crests of his cheeks. A girl who looked about 13 sat through two performances with a man who was the right age to be her father. When the music swelled halfway through the performance, she spun to face him and then tapped on his hand a few times. He smiled down at her with an eager, almost confused expression until finally she grasped his hand and they stayed like that for the rest of the hour: shoulder to shoulder, fingers locked, looking together at the same screen. It was, in other words, a totally average afternoon in The Visitors gallery.

The Visitors was commissioned for the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich in 2012. It is, per The Guardian in 2019, the best 21st-century artwork of any medium from anywhere in the world. But even this oversized accolade is outshone by its cultish popular appeal. There are dozens of Reddit threads about it, populated by users advising each other to set up Google Alerts set to the artist’s name so as to be notified every time there’s a new installation. An alert, here, for those reading: after three years at SFMOMA, it will be taken down Sept. 28 this year. Experience it while you can.

Read full article at observer.com.