Reykjavík Grapevine - 23.05.2014, Blaðsíða 58

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 06 — 2014
In And Out Of Context
Kjartan, we were just talking
about whether this performance
will lose any of its meaning when
it is shown in Reykjavík because
it was made for the Volksbühne
theatre, where it was subversive
given the space, and especially so
given Germany’s history.
Kjartan: Oh, of course.
Okay, so you kind of disagree
with Ragnar…
Ragnar: [Laughs] I always go, ‘No, no,
it’s gonna be cool.’ [Laughs some more].
K: Of course, it will be very different.
This theatre in Berlin is the most avant-
garde theatre in Europe and Borgar-
leikhúsið showed Mary Poppins last
year.
R: Yeah, it’s actually pretty similar to
Mary Poppins.

Except you don’t have any ac-
tors or a story [or tap dancing
penguins].
R: And it’s just sad. It’s very much about
this melancholic feeling of searching
for beauty.
Subscribing To The
Laxnessian Worldview

Right, tell me more about how
this piece is inspired by the Hall-
dór Laxness novel ‘World Light.’
R: The title is a translation of “kraft-
birtíngarhljómur guðdómsins” or
“the explosive sonics of divinity.” It’s a
sentence in ‘World Light.’ And the cool
thing is, this description of artistic epiph-
any, which is “kraftbirtíngarhljómur
guðdómsins,” it doesn’t come from Hall-
dór Laxness. It comes from this guy Mag-
nús Magnússon.
K: Laxness based his character on this
guy.
R: He was a poet and he kept a diary for
many years, which was the inspiration
for Halldór’s ‘World Light.’ He was this
poet obsessed by the idea of beauty, had
a hard knock life, but kind of always cre-
ated this mediocre poetry. But he actually
wrote this down, this sentence “kraft-
birtíngarhljómur guðdómsins,’ ‘in nature
I felt the explosive sounds of divinity.’ So
it’s an idea that travels from him to Lax-
ness…

You’ve said that this book has in-
spired a lot of your work.
R: Yeah, kind of like my whole approach
to art. The book is very sincere and pow-
erful, but it’s also very ironic. Growing up
with this book and Laxness, you come to
adopt a certain worldview.

How do you describe this world-
view?
R: [Turns to Kjartan] How would you
describe the Laxnessian worldview or
approach?
K: Well, for me, the book is about this in-
ner debate about being an artist or a good
citizen.
R: Should you be politically active and be
of some use…
K: …and fight for justice.
R: Or should you just watch how the light
reflects on the wall...
K: …and praise beauty.
R: And you’re always stuck there be-
tween.
K: Yeah.
R: These two banal things are somehow
the plus and minus that keep the battery
going.
What do you think: should the art-
ist try to change the world?
R: I think the artist always does, in mys-
tic ways. It’s a mystery how art changes
the world.
K: It kind of depends on what is going on
in the world politically and artistically.
My opinion was always, ‘don’t say any-
thing, just create—that’s what’s going to
change the world.’ Today, I don’t know.
Maybe it’s time people speak up. Some-
times people need to say something,
sometimes things are said without say-
ing anything. Sometimes things are more
controversial at their time and sometimes
they don’t appear to be so until later.
Thinking Inside The Box
What’s it like working with Rag-
nar? Is it different from being in
a band?
K: Yes, it’s very different. It’s fun. That’s
the main thing. It’s fun and it’s inspir-
ing— the stuff he does is very inspiring
to me.
[Ragnar Laughs.]
Kjartan, what was it like, working
on this piece? You weren’t really
composing music ‘to’ anything, but
did you use Ragnar’s sets as inspi-
ration?
K: That was a bit of inspiration, of course.
I looked at them, but they weren’t really a
starting point. Later on, I kind of decided
which music fit which part, and Ragnar
decided to have four sets, which meant
that I was going to do four pieces.
R: And then I was actually listening to
some of Kjartan’s music when I was cre-
ating the sets.

One didn’t come before the other?
R and K: No. No, not really.
K: There wasn’t really any intense col-
laboration, either. Ragnar was doing his
stuff and I was doing my stuff.
R: You know, it’s such a joy to be able to
collaborate with trust. Then you don’t
have to do meetings and stuff. I do my
stuff. He does his stuff. And then occa-
sionally, we have a good time to celebrate
that we’ve finished some part of the stuff.

Speaking of which, the theme of
this year’s festival is “Not Fin-
ished.” Does your piece fit into
that?
R: No, it is so finished.
K: Oh yeah, it is very finished.
[Lots of laughs].
K: Is that the theme of the art festival?
R: Yeah.

So you’re just defying the theme,
then.
R: Yeah, we are like the exception that
proves the rule. In our modern times,
things are always half finished and open
to interpretation, so we decided, ‘this is
going to be a heavy piece, with heavy sets
and we’re going to hire a really heavy,
grand orchestra.’
K: It is very inside the box. We were to-
tally thinking inside the box.
Just A Breather
Ragnar, when we interviewed you
in 2009, you claimed that the visual
arts were the coolest art form be-
cause you’re your own boss and get
to do what you like. “It’s also the
most 'anything goes' art form,” you
said, comparing it to music, which
has to makes a certain amount of
sense. Do you still agree with that
today?
R: I don’t know. What do you think about
this, Kjartan?

Yeah, do you agree with this? Do
you think your job is more dif-
ficult?
K: Well, he always seems happy and
open, and I’m always miserable because
I’m a musician and he’s a visual artist.
R: Yeah, that’s totally the difference.
[laughs].
K: I don’t know…
R: Visual artists are very lucky to have
Marcel Duchamp as our hero. When he
was asked what he did, he just said, “je
suis un respirateur.” Just, “I am a breath-
er.” He kind of gave us this freedom. To
be an artist is just to be a professional
human being. And I really like that—the
respirateur part.
K: And music is probably a little bit dif-
ferent in that sense. It’s more difficult,
you kind of have to make some sense of
things, right? To a point.
R: Well, John Cage was kind of a disciple
of Duchamp.
K: But I’ve always thought of John Cage
as more a philosopher than a musician.
He did some really beautiful pieces as
well, but mostly he was just experiment-
ing with philosophical ideas. That’s not
really what inspires me in music. It’s not
the philosophy behind it—it’s the emo-
tional effect that it has on me.
R: Yeah, I kind of agree that his work is
interesting, but it doesn’t have an emo-
tional effect on me.
Rock Stars Go To
Art School
Ragnar, your parents worked in
the theatre, you acted as a child and
a teenager and theatre continues
to play a role in your art. Did you
ever consider just going into the-
atre full-time?
K: Of course he wanted to be a rock star.
R: Yeah, I mainly just wanted to be a
rock star. That’s a good point. I remem-
ber thinking, ‘the Rolling Stones, David
Bowie, and the Beatles—they all went
to art school. That’s where I should go.’
[Laughs.] If you’re an American musi-
cian, you kind of come from the soil, but
if you’re European, you go to art school,
that’s pretty common.

In our last issue we featured an
interview with Börkur [of i8 Gal-
lery, which represents Ragnar]
and he was pretty adamant about
rejecting the idea that there is any-
thing Icelandic about Icelandic art.
What do you guys think?
K: Oh yeah, we’re all very preoccupied
with that now, dismissing the fact that
there is anything Icelandic about Icelan-
dic art. That’s kind of what’s cool today.
R: Yeah, yeah. It’s also because of
Framsóknarflokkurinn [The Progressive
Party] that everybody just denies being
Icelandic now. [Laughs.]
K: Yeah, you are very weary of talking
about being proud to be Icelandic. It’s
kind of not allowed anymore.
R: Then you are kind of marching with
the nationalists or Framsóknarflok-
kurinn.
K: You see it in these Icelandic com-
mercials for Geysir [a clothing store in
downtown Reykjavík that carries up-
scale fashion and outdoorsy stuff], it all
kind of looks like ‘Heima’ from Sigur Rós
in 2005.
R: Yeah, you guys are kind of secretly re-
sponsible for the victory of Framsóknar-
flokkurinn.
K: Yeah, I apologise for that. [Laughs.]
R: It’s always like this. Something that
was created in resistance to the mate-
rialism of the pre-crash years has now
become this dreadful nationalistic thing.
K: What was happening before with ‘the
krútt generation’ [he says in a flat Ameri-
can accent], that was more of a reaction
to what was going on at the time. Every-
thing was about materialism and greed.
That’s when you get films like ‘Heima’
with Sigur Rós and all the cutesy…

…That’s still going on today though,
this krútt stuff.
R: Now we just have greed in a lopapeysa.
Of course it’s changed because krútt has
become…
K: …Middle-aged
A Piece For
Sigmundur Davíð

R: Yeah, and Sigmundur Davíð [Gunn-
laugsson, PM] and Bjarni Ben[ediktsson,
Minister of Finance and
Economic Affairs] started
their term by being krútts in
Laugarvatn, baking pancakes
at a cabin. They were like múm
making a record. [Laughs.]
I was like, ‘Nooooooo.’ So
now the krútts, we’re all eat-
ing international food, hiding
our lopapeysas and you know
[laughs…], artists always tend
to…
K: …to rebel against what’s go-
ing on.
R: The problem with this piece
is that it’s created in dialogue
with the Volksbühne theatre.
But when we take it to Iceland,
it’s like a play that Sigmundur
Davíð is going to be really
happy with: “It was beautiful
landscapes and beautiful mu-
sic” [he says in a Sigmundur-
like voice and laughs].
K: Yeah, it was fun to do it in
Berlin, where the goal has been
to kill beauty, to destroy it, to
not ever talk about it again.
R: This piece was kind of like
‘verboten.’ If you were doing
this in the 19th century, it would just be
like, ‘oh beautiful,’ but there are all these
twists and turns after the 20th century.
It’s so much fun to work with something
like beauty today.
There’s also this nihilistic statement
in the piece. You sit in the theatre and
there’s just snow and there’s this glacier
and the choir is singing ‘beauty shall
reign alone’ [another line from ‘World
Light’]. You know, ‘what the fuck does
that mean?’ There are no humans; it’s hu-
mans pretending to be in a world without
humans, just landscapes and the euphor-
ic.
When there is only beauty, isn’t that
just like when humanity has been wiped
out? [Laughs]. That’s why this piece is
dark in many ways. It’s full of this same
hopelessness that we were working with
when we did the ‘S.S. Hangover’ in Ven-
ice last year. I think all this hopelessness
is a certain reaction to the hopelessness of
our times now.

Do you think the times are hope-
less?
R: Yeah, I had so much hope, but after
Framsókn won I have no hope. [Laughs.]
K: Now you see we’re being political. I’ve
never done that before.
R: You’ve never done that before?
K: Yeah, I’ve always been quiet about it.

He sucked you in…So is there any-
thing else that you want to tell me
about the piece?
K: Nobody is going to want to see this
now. Everybody is going to think it’s so
boring. [Laughs.]
R: Well, Borgarleikhúsið was actually
our studio for this piece. All of the sets
were painted there. I had to make these
giant paintings. It’s about 2,000 square
metres of painting. Every painting is like
an apartment.
When I decided to do this, I kind of
dreaded that I’d have to be in Berlin for
three months painting—I’m a big home-
body—so I talked to Borgarleikhúsið and
they thought it would be a good idea to
collaborate with Volksbühne, so they
provided us with space last summer to
paint. We were there three months, all
day, all night, and we could take the sets
up to the main stage and test them, so in a
way the piece is coming home.

That’s a nice twist to the story.
R: Yeah...
“We were totally think-
ing inside the box.”
Ragnar
Kjartansson
is an artist perhaps most well
known for his performance
pieces.
Kjartan
Sveinsson
is a composer and multi-instru-
mentalist who recently left the
band Sigur Rós.
They have now collaborated
on four projects, with Ragnar
most recently asking Kjartan to
compose music for a piece called
“Take M Here by the Dish-
washer: Memorial for a Mar-
riage.” The line, “Take me here
by the dishwasher,” was uttered
in ‘Morðsaga,’ a semi-erotic
Icelandic film from the ‘70s star-
ring Ragnar’s parents. (As family
legend has it, he was conceived
the night after his parents acted
in that steamy scene.)