Reykjavík Grapevine - 05.04.2013, Page 22

22The Reykjavík Grapevine Issue 4 — 2013
In a conversation published in this paper in late 2012, cura-
tor Markús Þór Andrésson spoke up for art which makes
an emotional engagement, challenging the assumption
that theory-based, academic critique is necessarily the
most relevant art for politically turbulent times. “Abstract
concepts are of course relevant to us,” he clarifies, “but they
are somewhat limiting on a human level.” Now, as curator
of the sixth Sequences Real Time Art Festival, returning
to Reykjavík from April 5–14, he’ll have the opportunity to
put his principles into practice. Sequences brings together
Icelandic and international artists working in durational
installation, performance and media art; this year’s mission
statement proclaims that the art comprising Sequences VI
“resists the surge of logic and reason into art by reflecting
the constant uncertainties of the everyday.”
Markús explains that the artists he’s assembled are
“sharing the experience of everyday life, by looking at how
each individual is coming to grips with time passing.” The
festival, with its overarching emphasis on time-based art,
naturally wrestles with the common matter of living. More
specifically, he says, many of the exhibitions and perfor-
mances will examine “how you try to take charge of your
own life, but there’s always something out there—the wheel
of fortune, if you will—that you cannot control.”
The festival’s featured artist is Gretar Reynisson, whose
show, ‘The Decade,’ at The Living Art Museum and the
adjacent Artíma gallery, represents ten years of his life, pre-
sented in public for the first time. At the turn of the century,
Markús says, Gretar made the decision to withdraw from
exhibition and, in essence, live his life as a series of system-
atic, repetitive artistic gestures. The piece “52 Shirts” is a
rack from which hang the identical white dress shirts Gretar
wore every day for a year, switching out one for another
every week. The approach, Markús says, “is rigorous and
mathematical, but also physical—you see that the shirts are
worn out, with sweat stains and smudges.”
It will be quite a challenge, Markús allows, to accurately
represent ten years of work in a ten-day festival, but in a
sense that gap, between life as lived and as documented,
or even as remembered, promises to weigh heavily on the
show. Memory is a key concept within “Kept but Forgot-
ten,” a tableau of small-custom-built boxes—“it’s like a
landscape, like looking onto Manhattan”—each containing
an object, like a dead computer mouse or inkless pen, which
had exhausted its function in Gretar’s life. “He says that he
stops remembering what’s in each box,” Markús says.
LETTING LIFE IN
Gretar’s “cool, distant, calculated attitude” towards the
passage of time is contrasted with a full spectrum of
approaches. “The repetitive notion of the everyday,” as
Markús describes it, will be fodder for structural discipline
and humorous intervention. “Life always finds its way into
the work, no matter how preplanned,” he continues: the
festival will be, in short, “full of stories.”
To wit: the Dutch-born artist Guido van der Werve is
showing a video, ‘nummer veertien, home,’ which docu-
ments him as he swims, bicycles, and runs the thousand
miles from Warsaw, birthplace of Frédéric Chopin, to his
gravesite in Paris’s Père Lachaise cemetery, accompanied
by his own classical music composition. Markús describes
the piece as a “grand, poetic gesture reflecting the self-
inflicted strain of making art.”
A number of other media artists will play with the pas-
sage of time. Tumi Magnússon’s ‘Four Times to the Shop’
is a four-way split-screen video in which recordings of his
regular grocery trip are sped up or slowed down to the
same running time. Aging, and its technological sibling
obsolescence, are the respective preoccupations of the
American feminist artist Martha Wilson’s ‘I have become
my own worst fear,’ which juxtaposes a video from the ‘70s
with a recent self-portrait, and Rebekka Erin Moran’s ‘don't
stop now, cuz we're havin' a time,’ an installation inspired
by the Spinning Wait Cursor.
THE POLITICS OF THE EVERYDAY
For his ‘Self portraits from room 413,’ Ragnar Kjartansson
explains, “I checked myself into Room 413 at 3 o’clock on
the 21st of March with five empty canvases and oil colours
and a toothbrush. Then I checked myself out at two the
next day with five self-portraits,” which will hang in the
hotel’s gallery during the festival. Ragnar has done this sort
of “performative painting” before—representing Iceland
at the 2009 Venice Bienniale, he painted a friend, in public,
every day for the duration—and describes the paintings that
result as “documentations, in a way… The happening of the
painting becomes omnipresent.” Over the course of time
in which a painting, even a self-portrait, is being painted,
the things surrounding it find their way in. Ragnar thinks
the viewer will be able to see how his paintings grew out of
the hotel’s “sort of ‘80s interior design, all that mahogany
and gold and pale pink walls,” as well as its gallery, the
most extensive survey of 20th century Icelandic painting on
permanent view, including murals by Ragnar’s grandfather
and namesake, the sculptor Ragnar Kjartansson.
Ragnar describes his all-nighter as “a daydream come
true, to order Chablis, gravlax, and paint… a little holiday
from my life.” He suggests that “to look at yourself is kind of
escaping yourself.” But on the other hand, looking outwards
at the world means looking from a specific place—“like the
old painters used to say, every painting is a kind of self-por-
trait. Nobody has really anything new to say—but people
have their personal point of view, and that can be fresh and
new. I am a crazy art aficionado because I am interested
in going into somebody's personal world, whether it’s an
artist or a writer or a musician. It’s all self-portraits, but what
we are looking for is how they reflect on us.”
Similarly, Markús describes the art in the Sequences
VI program as “generous”: the featured artists are making
offerings of their experience. And it’s in this sense that
he feels that the festival, though turning away from the
academic, is not a retreat from the political. In the Grape-
vine conversation from late 2011, he rejected the notion
that, in times of national crisis, art needed to force itself
into political dialogue: “Emotional arguments for social or
environmental affairs can be just as weighty and ‘concrete’
as ‘political’ ones.”
“We’re not dealing with issues that come from social
structures, it’s about how you as an individual are deal-
ing with the passing of time," Markús says of this year's
programming. "It’s self-reflective, but not wallowing, self-
pitying. We’re dealing with common issues, which takes us
from the viewpoint of the individual to the social and com-
munal, and in that sense the personal becomes political.”
- Mark Asch
The Passage Of Time
5
APRIL
All over Reykjavík– 14
APRIL
Visit www.sequences.is to see
the full programme of events.
Sequences Real Time Art Festival
Photo: Lilja Birgisdóttir
Art