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Hello, Everyone
Welcome to social distancing.
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I found a way out of my funk. It worked for me; sometimes listening to someone else's experiences gives us new ideas of how to deal with our own.
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A couple of years ago, I saw a work by Ragnar Kjartansson
called The Visitors at SF MoMA.
In the original, there are 9 large movie screens, each projecting an image of a different room in a house. People with instruments and headphones on, sit or lie in these rooms, and begin to play music together. It’s a pretty simple song. There are only two verses, lasting about 3 minutes total. The choruses make up the other 50 minutes of the video’s run time, repeating almost infinitely.
Ragnar Kjartansson has always been interested in how much a person can repeat an idea. It’s not minimalism (which, for all its discussion of repetition, is actually about CHANGE), it is the performance art of repetition. Kjartansson is into music, but views himself as a performance artist. He got a group of friends together at a beautiful house and just… put on a show.
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I love this kind of spirit, the spirit of innovation, the freedom to just make art happen.
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The work is about an hour long. Below is a youtube version of this piece. It may not capture that same send of grandeur as what I'd experienced at SFMOMA, but it's surprisingly wonderful. The lyrics were written by Asdis Sif Gunnarsdottir, a performance and visual artist, and incorporate Gunnarsdottir's usual sense of magical thinking– images of “There are stars exploding around you/there is nothing (Nothing) you can do.” But the bulk of the work is the repeated chorus...
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Once Again I fall into
My Feminine Ways.
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Repeated again and again.
There is comfort in the repetition. It is the backbone of the work. In other works by Kjartansson, the repetition opens a portal to new emotions through exhaustion. In this piece, the repetition is not exhausting, but comforting, a backbone for the creativity.
Kjartansson invited a group of friends to join him at Rokeby Farms a 200 year old house with 43 rooms where the piece was performed and filmed. They lived in the house for 4 days, rehearsing, partying and sleeping, in equal measure.
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The piece opens with Ragnar sitting naked, in a bathtub filled with water, holding a guitar above the water line. An out of tune, buzzed guitar chord plays twice, before turning elegantly into a progression. The song is in minor at first, and Ragnar begins singing, with a broken voice. There are other sounds (mostly the percussion adding in high bowed sounds that are nicely resonant) but I think we can understand this as a portrait of solitude.
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“A pink rose, in the glittery frost, a diamond heart, and the orange red fire.”
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On fire, the tenor of the song changes; it’s our first major chord, and it places the piece more solidly in C Major. Then the rest of the group comes in. So an artist, sitting alone and naked in a bathtub begins to play in a broken manner. But by moving towards something more positive, other people are able to join. But they don’t join him physically. Each of them remains isolated in their own room. It would be easy to place all of these people on stage at the same time and attempt to achieve the same effect, but by having them remain separate from each other, the song becomes about overcoming the distance between us, to come together.
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About 18 minutes in, a large group of people are assembled outside, the mood changes. The individuals inside become more quiet after a great raucous improvisation), and everyone is pretty clearly the center of their individual frame. The group outside seem to be from another world. Their group singing is bizarre. The choral music here feels a little out of place. Or is it?
From the dissonance of the improvisation, it's clear that the people inside are the ones who are out of place. The group outside represents everyone, feeling a range of different emotions, some shared, some not, but all expressing themselves and functioning in the world. The group inside is retreated from the world.
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For me, the most striking frame is the only frame with two people: a guitarist playing on a bed and behind him, a woman, lying in a sleeping position, almost as if she was taking a nap through the entire experience. She never sings or adds to the sound. At the end, though, everyone breaks their confinement and comes together in the room with the piano. She is there with them, robed and welcomed into the group. She belongs there.
The film version tends to move to frames where things are happening, focusing on the motion and the music. But seeing it live at SF MoMA I was taken in by how still everyone was and could be. Whenever you hear one person, or two people going at it, remember that means that you are surrounded by seven frames of people listening. At any given moment, most of them are doing nothing but focusing on each other. That sort of attention is really hard to create at a distance, but I find it deeply worthwhile.
I’ve been re-reading Shakespeare's Twelfth Night . Olivia says “Love sought is good, but given unsought better.” We are in a time when, because of our separation from each other, we are unable to give each other that daily affection, those little acts of unsought love that can make the difference. Seeing these people listen to each other, watching them make art together as friends, seeing the creative instinct of people coming together, an inexhaustible font of beauty and acceptance, it helped to bring me out of my funk of deep separation.
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I love you all. Remember that art and music and poetry still exist.
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