To see Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson’s video installation The Visitors, at Luhring Augustine, gallery-goers duck behind a black velvet curtain and enter a small, squarish room lined with ten large-format monitors. By the time they’ve become accustomed to the dark, and to the other viewers shifting around inside, they understand that there are nine monitors showing nine different musicians performing in nine different spaces inside the same richly appointed, gorgeously decaying old country house. (The tenth monitor shows the house’s wood-columned front porch.) And they understand that each of these musicians is contributing a track to the folksy, slow-moving lament on the soundtrack, and that their performances are synced chronologically and spatially. So as the chorus ends and the wan, bird-boned singer in the parlor removes her headphones and collapses into her highback chair, we turn our attention to the muscular young pianist, who’s playing at the other end of the parlor, and can be seen on the monitor to her left. And when we hear feedback we turn around to see, on another monitor, a guitarist in an upstairs bedroom, whose face remains hidden behind long unkempt bangs, tuning his instrument and then sweeping his hands across its body with studied bravado. The 64-minute video moves at a pace far slower than commercial television and movies, so that even though there are ten monitors and ten different stories, there is plenty of time to take in everything seriously, properly.
This sort of video array is a magnificent way to describe orchestral music, as well as the interior architecture of a house. Viewers can inhabit each room, gripped by details like the uncommonly large square panes of glass on the dilapidated kitchen cabinets, the steely blue tint of paint on the bathroom walls, and an ornate gilded picture frame in the parlor that looks like it might have belonged to Peter the Great. The music moves in lulling, dirge-like pulses. Nothing seems to happen but the song plays on. Viewers, entranced, float from monitor to monitor, following the movement of the video but also their own desires. Each of the video cameras is still but slightly splayed, looking into a corner rather than directly at a wall or into an opening, so that even when standing directly in front of a screen viewers feel as if they’re sliding out of its space. The musicians emerge as full-blooded characters. It’s hard to look away from the acoustic guitarist in the bathroom, who has a comically disgruntled appearance and, at one point, looks as if he might drown himself in the claw foot tub. Things happen on various screens, intermittently: violence and nudity, drinking and smoking. But nothing in the video breaks the spell until, finally, as the song winds down, the musicians leave their seats, gather in the living room, and stream out of the house and into the surrounding countryside while the remaining monitors transmit still, empty rooms. Then Kjartansson himself appears on screen as he enters each room to switch off the video cameras. The monitors go blank, one by one, and the gallery-goers, who have been watching and waiting, are left standing in darkness, silence, and sadness. The Visitors notes the regretful, inevitable passage of time, the secret spaces inside a large house, and the fractured spirit of the people living inside it. These performers come together to play a song, and when the song is over they leave.