“I saw this movie when I was 12 or 13 — it’s deeply Freudian shit,” said Ragnar Kjartansson. It was a dreary Friday afternoon during Frieze Week, and we were walking north from MoMA, discussing “MorðsagaI,” the 1977 Icelandic film featuring the artist’s parents that is the centerpiece of his just-opened installation at the New Museum. The work features a looped projection of a scene in which Kjartansson’s mother — playing a “desperate housewife,” in his words — is lustfully entangled on the kitchen floor with Kjartansson’s father, a visiting plumber. The artist characterizes the film overall as an “erotic thriller,” with a plot akin to Pedro Almodovar’s “Volver.” “My mother lives with a horrible husband. She kills him, and takes the corpse to a lava field,” he explained. “When they were making the film my mother was pregnant, and in the scenes when she’s dragging the corpse, she’s wearing a dress to hide me. I’ve got a cameo.”
For the New Museum installation, a group of 10 local musicians hanging out in a domestic set perform an ongoing, all-day rendition of a song composed of dialogue from the film’s sex scene, with “Take me here by the dishwasher!” being the melodic refrain. It’s an addition to Kjartansson’s ever-growing oeuvre of endurance-based performances — last year at MoMA P.S.1 he conscripted the National to play the same song for six hours — a sort of oddball outgrowth of the Marina Abramovic method, except with less ego, more heart, and a healthy sense of humor.
Kjartansson’s parents are both still alive, though they divorced when the artist was in his early teens. They attended the opening of the New Museum exhibition, and also introduced a screening of “MorðsagaI” on Friday evening. “They saw [the installation], but they got so self-aware,” he said. “I think they’re sort of: Ehhh, a giant screening of us, having sex in the ’70s!” (For the record, the film clip in question is woozily dreamlike, and nothing close to actual pornography.)
It’s not the first time that Kjartansson has enlisted his parents in his art practice. One of the first pieces he made — which is included in the New Museum show — involves him standing next to his mother, facing a video camera, while she repeatedly spits in his face. The artist’s mother, being an actress herself, wasn’t taken aback when he asked her to take part in the project. (“Yeah yeah honey, no problem,” Kjartansson remembered her saying. “How is it, are you spitting on me, or am I spitting on you?”) While he’d set out to make what he calls a “hardcore, in-your-face ’90s art piece,” the resulting film was, he said, “not shocking, but cute.” At certain points mother and son break into laughter. Kjartansson’s art teacher at the time, Aernout Mik, blasted him for the piece’s artificiality. “He said it was fake, and I was so bummed for two days, but then I realized: that’s what is interesting about it,” he recalled. “It opened this door for me, of working with pretending. Total honesty and total pretense.”
It’s a hybrid quality that Kjartansson finds in his contemporary Sophie Calle, who, coincidentally, also recently opened an exhibition in New York that involves her mother. (The two are acquaintances, and saw each other’s shows last week. “I suddenly realized how Sophia Calle-ian my work was,” Kjartansson said. “Some artists create sparks which give other artists freedom to express themselves in new ways.”) Calle’s exhibition, “Rachel, Monique,” is hosted in a side chapel of the Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue. It also involves a film projection, though the difference couldn’t be more stark: Calle’s is a roughly 11-minute clip of her dying mother’s final moments. Photographic works are arrayed throughout the chapel, including an image of Calle’s mother’s grave, and her body lying in a coffin, covered with items dear to her, presented by friends.
“I’m more used to doing works about absence than presence,” Calle said. “My mother was part of my work — she was one of the ‘Sleepers,’ and she’s in ‘The Detective.’ But she wanted to be the only subject, and she had to die for that.” This particular video work, which initially screened at the Venice Biennale in 2007, was instigated by a suggestion from curator Rob Storr, she said: “When I filmed her it was not to make a project — it was the fear that she would have something to tell me, and of not being there. I didn’t do it in order to make a work, that came out after, but maybe I planned it unconsciously.” The exhibition is a continuation of sorts from one held at Paula Cooper Gallery in late 2013 — in that show, Calle purposefully withheld the works that explicitly featured her mother’s dying breath, her coffin, and her grave. There’s no religious implication in the exhibition’s siting within the church — a text written by the artist at the entrance to the chapel acts as a disclaimer: “My mother was not a Christian,” it reads, “but she could never resist an invitation to the Upper East Side.” Calle simply wanted a place with poetry, she said.
Almost all of Calle’s family and friends understood the artist’s inclination with the project. “I do it for her, with her,” Calle said. “It’s my way to go through her death, to mourn her.” Only one person took serious issue with the piece’s intentions; he wrote Calle a letter, accusing her of “using” her mother’s death. She didn’t respond directly, but afterward attached a piece of faux-poop to the missive, and hung it on her bathroom wall. (“I still read the letter,” she said. “Everyone else sees it, too.”)
In many ways, it’s easy to see both Kjartansson’s and Calle’s exhibitions as attempts to connect — with the living, and the dead — through a productively uneasy mix of the personal and the performative. Calle said that she was surprised, when her mother gave her 16 years’ worth of diaries before her death, at what she read in their pages. “I found difficult things about me,” she explained. “She was sometimes angry, but not too much. She was more sad than I expected her to be.” (By the church’s altar, speakers play an audio recording of the actress Kim Cattrell reading translated excerpts from those diaries.) Kjartansson characterizes his own relationship with his mother as highly nuanced. “She was raised as an orphan and became an actress,” he said. “Sometimes it’s like I still don’t know who she is. She’s like Bob Dylan.” Kjartansson ventured that much of his work is actually about “maintaining relationships with my friends and family,” from “The Visitors” — a video installation that he made with ex-band members and loved ones in upstate New York — to “The Raging Pornographic Sea,” a series of drawings of the ocean that Kjartansson made in conjunction with his father in Iceland.
After I met with Calle at the church, she signed my copy of the book accompanying “Rachel, Monique.” I brought it home and decided to shelve it next to another prized, signed monograph: “Pretend You’re Actually Alive,” by Leigh Ledare, a series of photographs, many of which are highly sexualized portraits of his mother, who was also an aspiring actress. Freudian shit, indeed. And proof that even now there’s something uncomfortable and enlightening to be plumbed from those most basic and universal commonalities: the women who birthed us; how they lived; how they died. That’s some heavy work, and it’s no wonder that, as Kjartansson noted, it often involves a mix of fact and fiction — the hard truths approached by obfuscation, obliquely, maybe the only way possible.
