Iceland review - 2012, Qupperneq 17

ICELAND REVIEW 15
explains. “When you’re young and dream of becoming an
artist, you envision yourself doing nothing but drinking,
smoking and painting. Then it turns out that the life of an
artist is more about drinking coffee, sending emails and filling
in Excel files. And during this process I came to realize that
being a drunk and a bohemian is very hard work! Having a
beer when you don’t feel like it is quite disgusting,” he says,
cringing at the memory. “We had water floods and a rat infes-
tation; it was cold and damp, and my model came down with
pneumonia and a nasty cough. It was just like in Puccini’s La
Bohéme!” As time passes, the paintings noticeably improve, he
adds. “Also, the misery becomes more and more evident. Just
as I intended.”
Repetition and endurance, as seen at the Biennale,
are a recurring element in Ragnar’s art. Recent
examples include Song (2011), a three-week-long perfor-
mance at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, featuring
his three young nieces performing a song, which the art-
ist wrote based on a slightly misremembered phrase from
Allen Ginsberg’s poem of the same name. Other works are
The Man (2010), filmed outside Austin, Texas, featuring the
recently deceased Pinetop Perkins, the legendary pianist
who enjoyed seven decades of bluesman living; and The
Schumann Machine (2008) featuring the artist himself per-
forming Schumann’s Dichterliebe for seven consecutive days.
“I use repetition like a frame in which different things can
take place. It turns a performative act into a sculpture, but at
the same time it is alive,” he says. “As a child I remember sit-
ting in the darkened theater watching the same scenes being
rehearsed over and over again. Also, having played a small part
in my father’s play, which was shown 200 times, I became an
expert in repetition. And it just stuck with me. As a child, I
was an altar boy in the Catholic Church, a religion based
on constant repetition. That is in fact the foundation of
any religious practice. Through it, you reach a higher state
of consciousness. I basically regard my performance art as
humanistic religious practice,” he concludes, referring to the
clearest example: Bliss (2011), a 12-hour repetition of the clos-
ing scene of Mozart’s opera The Marriage of Figaro. “For this
scene, Mozart composed this insanely beautiful aria in which
everybody pretends to be filled with forgiveness and happiness.
When you repeat that constantly you begin to think about
those elements in a very abstract way, as human nature is such
a complicated phenomenon. There’s such beauty to be found
in man’s imperfection. This undertone, this strange tension,
fascinates me. I hate it when people say that irony isn’t honest.
Irony is the most powerful means of expression. That’s why I
love Mozart. He applies it in this amazingly profound man-
ner. Seeing his opera Don Giovanni for the first time I was so
shocked. With his heavenly arias, the protagonist is blatantly
lying to the ladies just to get them into bed!”
ART
bliss (2011)
the end (2009)
Scandinavian Pain (2006)