On a Saturday this July, I sat by means of three runs of Ragnar Kjartansson’s video set up, The Guests, on the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork. I had imagined transcribing a few of what I overheard from different patrons, however within the three-plus hours I used to be there (The Guests has a 64-minute run time), nobody spoke. Nobody even pulled out their telephones, besides to movie quick segments of the movies projected onto the gallery room’s partitions.
Whereas I used to be there, I noticed one man in a crisp navy swimsuit stroll in alone. Earlier than he had taken 5 steps into the exhibit room, he gasped, clutched each arms over his coronary heart and began crying with an open-mouth grin plastered on his face. I watched as he slowly walked towards the middle of the gallery after which, spreading his arms out beside him as if readying himself to hug a beloved, he started to spin, his chin bobbing from silent laughter, tears nonetheless streaming down his face. One other man, additionally alone, stood unmoving in entrance of one of many 9 screens for all the size of the efficiency, shifting solely as soon as to take away his glasses and wipe tears from the crests of his cheeks. A woman who regarded about 13 sat by means of two performances with a person who was the best age to be her father. When the music swelled midway by means of the efficiency, she spun to face him after which tapped on his hand a couple of instances. He smiled down at her with an keen, nearly confused expression till lastly she grasped his hand and so they stayed like that for the remainder of the hour: shoulder to shoulder, fingers locked, trying collectively on the similar display. It was, in different phrases, a completely common afternoon in The Guests gallery.
The Guests was commissioned for the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Zurich in 2012. It’s, per The Guardian in 2019, the perfect Twenty first-century art work of any medium from anyplace on the planet. However even this outsized accolade is outshone by its cultish well-liked attraction. There are dozens of Reddit threads about it, populated by customers advising one another to arrange Google Alerts set to the artist’s identify in order to be notified each time there’s a brand new set up. An alert, right here, for these studying: after three years at SFMOMA, it will likely be taken down Sept. 28 this 12 months. Expertise it whilst you can.
On YouTube, a full-length recording of the set up has over 1,000 feedback, each single one constructive. Individuals write of touring internationally 12 months after 12 months to see it in every new nation the place it’s proven. (The work has been exhibited in over a dozen nations.) “This piece modified my life,” a number of folks, simply within the first web page of feedback, say. One commenter had a meet-cute within the gallery that was a whirlwind romance—one of the crucial impactful of their life. One other muses that “the folks concerned on this piece are among the many luckiest individuals who ever existed on this planet.” There’s a widespread chorus amongst these reflections: an individual reveals up in a gallery, having by no means heard of the work, and spends an hour or extra crying whereas taking it in. After they ultimately depart the room, they really feel completely modified.
That The Guests so successfully capabilities as a magic trick shouldn’t be revealed instantly; at first look, the present looks like a glorified jam sesh amongst a bunch of supremely proficient early-middle-aged associates. The piece has 9 video channels, every shot concurrently in a number of rooms of Rokeby Mansion in upstate New York. Every display focuses on a distinct musician. There’s a cellist, two pianos, electrical guitars—everyone seems to be out of sight from one another, related solely by headset displays. A choir is gathered below string lights on the mansion’s porch, smiling and laughing and sometimes getting into the piece with harmonies that may be at house in a gospel tune. Among the many performers is Kjartan Sveinsson, a former member of Sigur Rós and a frequent collaborator with Kjartansson. “I used to be actually creating my dream band from the Reykjavik music scene. Everybody in there’s a legend or a pal,” Kjartansson, who’s Icelandic, has stated.
Iceland is, if something, obsessive about a self-assigned sense of misfittedness, and this nationwide anti-identity is a trademark of the nation’s artwork. “In Iceland, there’s this concept that we don’t actually belong on the planet, this nation in the midst of the ocean and so removed from different nations,” the artist additional elaborated.
“Have you ever been to Iceland?” the poet Anne Carson asks within the liner notes of a limited-edition vinyl recording of the efficiency. “There may be nothing there however vacancy. A big empty wind wails alongside the very edge of each minute and tosses the odd dazed seabird out onto the empty seaside. Once you drive the only lonely freeway, an enormous piece of vacancy drives alongside beside you and goes wherever you go, then piles up in your driveway at house on high of the vacancy from different days. You see horses standing within the fields so soaked with vacancy they will’t transfer, they’ve been there for years, they may as effectively be waterfalls. After all, all of this exerts a psychic strain on inhabitants—the entire soul frays.”
It’s a nation of outlaws. “There may be even a statue of the Outlaw in Reykjavík, subsequent to the Nationwide Museum—and the thought of the outlaw right here is much like the thought of the artist. I feel making artwork comes from being slightly allergic to society, not desirous to belong.” And so this work is about within the verdant isolation of upstate, which has its personal legacy as being a spot to run away. However what exists on the far finish of any nice escape, if not utopia? That’s what the piece is basically about: the seductive promise of belonging.
However the tremendous print of belonging reveals that it’s not a passive enterprise however fairly an endeavor of compromise, unhealthy timing and perpetual effort. The sense of amongness in The Guests is more true to actual life and its ills than to the passive participation of utopia. That is most instantly true for the piece’s viewers; pay shut consideration and also you’ll be rewarded.
The nine-screen format permits for a gradual unfolding of its intimate behind-the-scenes entry; with sufficient consideration, the viewer ultimately features an entire architectural blueprint of what exists inside and across the seen parts of the work. Forty-odd minutes in, one pianist walks out of his body and straight into one other, the place one other pianist has been sitting. It occurs so shortly, the viewer realizes that the 2 of them have been in the identical room all alongside. By no means thoughts their nearness—the pair beam at one another like outdated associates reunited whereas they clink cups of whiskey after which relight their cigars. Later, as extra performers depart their posts towards the efficiency’s conclusion, there are longer time breaks between departures and arrivals. At one level, we hear the echo of footsteps hovering between two stereo units as somebody walks down the creaky stairs. Over the course of the hour, one turns into accustomed to the home and its patrons with the identical clip one may grow to be accustomed to at least one’s environs whereas attending a bustling get together.
This economic system of motion within the latter half of The Guests invitations the viewer to assemble a panorama that exists past the frames. It’s not fairly clear whether or not these gestures towards house and motion are supposed or incidental; both approach, they create a way of earned intimacy for a viewer paying shut consideration, as if one other visitor of the get together you solely by accident stumbled into has handed you a drink and is now taking you on a home tour, bringing you into messy bedrooms, into personal areas you wouldn’t usually see. If the piece makes a customer out of its viewer, the present itself is a incredible host.
Methods like this glimmer all through the efficiency. A big a part of the work’s attraction is that it’s not fairly clear how a lot of it was staged and the way a lot of it was natural. Its ramshackle atmosphere comes from the odd costuming or lack thereof—folks seem in denim, costume pants, nightgowns and bathtub towels—and in addition from the video’s cluttered frames. There are garments on the ground, baroquely patterned papered partitions with peeling edges. A few the staging selections are inexplicable: when the piece begins, a unadorned lady is sleeping within the mattress behind the electrical guitarist; Kjartansson is, for nearly all the movie, enjoying his guitar whereas submerged within the bathtub. That the setting is expansive and in addition decrepit offers The Guests the phantasm of being comfortingly dislocated not solely from time however class—a lot in order that the viewer can overlook that it’s happening within the artist’s old-money pal’s vacation spot mansion.
Collectively, all of this provides The Guests an nearly hyperrealistic sense of spontaneity. The scene is grungy and rapid but in addition a bit weird—how did these folks find yourself right here collectively after the golden hour, because the solar dips behind the mountains and the sunshine within the sky pales right into a shade of plum, enjoying this longwinded tune all of them know by coronary heart? And why haven’t I ever additionally discovered myself in the identical setting, the subtext of the piece turns into. It feels just like the Nineteen Nineties sitcom splendid of a walkable neighborhood and in addition like the school jam band all of us used to assemble round once we have been younger. Or, to place it one other approach, an unattainable fantasy. One thing I need and am damage by eager for.
“I needed to doc this vibe in my era,” Kjartansson stated in an interview with The Guardian. “The Guests was shot at this tender second the place our youth is nearly to go. It’s nearly just like the final day of our youth. I used to be 36. Not a youth youth. However we caught the tip of an period.”
This achey, present-tense nostalgia echoes all through. If it’s a lovely work, additionally it is, like all of Kjartansson’s creations, a brutal one. (“I prefer it when magnificence is usually a bit merciless,” the artist stated in an interview for the Estonian gallery Echo Gone Improper.) Maybe what makes it so troublesome, if additionally rewarding, to sit down by means of is that it forces the viewer to confront one thing that’s simpler left unsaid: that many people really feel enduringly alone—even and typically particularly within the presence of our beloveds; that I’m by no means in a position, even in the course of the sweetest moments of my life, to really feel completely within the current second, to lose my hypervigilant consciousness of the passage of time. Throughout the perfect moments of my life, all I can think about is what it’ll really feel like as soon as they finish.
The Guests is openly melancholic in a approach I’ve skilled in few different artworks. Of the few comparable examples I can consider, the closest cousin that involves thoughts is the poem by Jason Snider titled The Get together, which describes the stretched-out moments when everybody is aware of the get together’s over however nobody can fairly drag themselves to the door: “everybody standing round as if simply out of the pool,/ drying off, standing round, that’s it, standing, speaking”—indulging within the banal quiet earlier than everybody leaves once more, alone, as a result of, because the poet writes a couple of traces later, “it hurts/ to say goodbye, to tug your physique out of the nice and cozy water;/ to step out of the pocket of security, clinging to what you knew,/ or what you thought you knew about your self and others.”
That each one of this may be held concurrently in a single musical piece can also be because of the brevity and ambiguity of its lyrics. In a single hour, there are simply fourteen quick traces damaged into two verses, a two-line refrain and a two-line bridge. The refrain, particularly, is baffling: As soon as once more I fall into/ my female methods. Kjartansson has spoken about attending the Reykjavík Faculty of Housewives as a baby; he was the primary man to ever attend. In an interview with Echo Gone Improper, he recounted the Nineteen Fifties-era gender dynamics that haunted the college when he attended in 1997. “Once I was beginning this course, she stated: ‘Ragnar, I’ve to inform you, on Thursdays we normally train cleansing. And for those who discover it too degrading, it’s okay, you don’t have to indicate up,’” Kjartansson remembers. He noticed “this world of obedience, but in addition all of the attractive issues which are created inside it.”
One wonders what’s created within obedience for an artist whose works are almost all the time repetitional and endurance-based. In Mercy, the only lyric is repeated by Kjartansson, dressed like a crooner, for a complete hour: “Why do I hold hurting you?” After some 5 hundred repetitions, Kjartansson ultimately pares away no matter artifice may need plagued the phrase’s first utterance; the query circles again and again once more like a lonely midnight thought for the stressed insomniac, flipping like a Rolodex by means of each actual and imaginary ache he might have induced. By the tip of the efficiency, the chorus feels looser, rustier, stumbling nearly.
However the music in The Guests is tightly carried out; these are all professional performers. The one factor that sags or falters all through the piece is Kjartansson’s guitar, dipping time and again into what you need to assume has grow to be lukewarm water till, 50 minutes into The Guests, the artist throws off his headphones, units down the guitar on the moist tile flooring beneath after which plunges his arms into the water. He rests his head towards the again of the wall. His eyelids decrease. His expression turns into pained as a glance of dedication is changed by a glance of despair. Unexpectedly, it’s like he’s realized he’s within the bathtub, after which the intimacy of that setting envelops him. He touches his face, then drops his lengthy, skinny hand onto his chest—determined gestures made by somebody who’s given in. Maybe, then, femininity right here is give up—into isolation in addition to into neighborhood, every of which predicates the potential for the opposite. “As soon as once more I fall into my female methods”—maybe, as one falls into an eerie consciousness that concern and longing are the identical factor: abandon however not abandonment.
The ultimate traces are equally wealthy: There are stars exploding throughout you/ and there may be nothing you are able to do. That is one other set of traces one can undertaking something onto. Are they referencing literal stars, luminous spheres of plasma held collectively by their very own gravity, circling like comets throughout an interminable distance—a nod to eternity, a factor to make a want upon, a Faustian discount when there may be nothing else that you are able to do? Or are the celebs ornamental symbols like fireworks, a flashy show that the singer is grateful to witness? Or maybe the celebs referred to are the brilliant lights of others (all of us made out of stardust, et cetera), and the lyric is a reminder of 1’s powerlessness to forestall one another’s eventual extinguishment. No clues are given by the best way the road is delivered: it’s delivered in each perspective, . The cellist sings it whereas writhing in agony. Kjartansson delivers it in a raspy scream. The pianists, for his or her half, sing “nothing, nothing, nothing!” with smooth seems on their faces, the twinge of a smile of their unified voice. As soon as once more, the artists are locked of their separate methods, and as earlier than, this separateness solely provides to the textural depths of their melody.
At varied factors all through the set up, the performers in The Guests shout from room to room; they stroll in on one another bare; they gentle one another’s cigars and pour each other’s drinks. They’ve the informal chemistry of individuals in well-worn relationships, however they don’t appear to be watching out for each other.
That these artists are so clearly comfy right here collectively doesn’t collapse the space between them; their separateness is the obvious factor in regards to the work. They is perhaps linked by displays—they may even hear one another by means of the partitions—however they’re alone for nearly all of it. “Possibly the melancholy in Kjartansson’s work is so attractive as a result of he has turned the romantic’s longing-in-solitude into the nihilist’s longing-in-togetherness,” Maria Schnyder wrote for the e book Epic Love of Waste and Understanding, which Louisiana Museum in Denmark launched alongside a retrospective of Kjartansson’s work.
When two of the musicians rouse the sleeping lady within the mattress, she is neither dismayed at having been woken nor outwardly glad to have been remembered for inclusion within the grand finale of the piece. She turns from the display, and the others within the shot flip from her. Just a few beats later, when Kjartansson’s towel slips from his waist and he almost elbows the particular person nearest him whereas doing the jaunty dance he makes out of exaggeratedly rewrapping it round his waist, the viewers laughs, however no one on display does. Due to these touches, The Guests appears to just accept an unflinching honesty: belonging isn’t a straightforwardly joyous endeavor. It’s terribly exhausting and often lonely work.
Allow us to take without any consideration that the piece is about what Kjartansson has stated it’s about: “Intercourse, divorce, combating, longing, realness, pretending.” However having plainly established the inconquerable distance that lies between oneself and others, is the potential for intimacy actually compromised? Or is it made extra treasured by means of trustworthy accounting?
If such an intense sense of intimacy is evoked by The Guests, maybe it’s as a result of every viewing belongs solely to the particular person watching. There isn’t a goal viewpoint from which to behold it; the present set up at SFMOMA has the 9 screens projected throughout 4 partitions in a single room, and the viewers mingle within the center. Which means each expertise of the present is singular, distorted or amplified by angle, by distance, by whom one chooses to get lost from and who one chooses to linger with.
It could be inconceivable to know, with out sitting by means of it 9 instances and watching just one display at a time, precisely what occurs within the efficiency. Every of us is alone with our separate experiences of the piece, it appears, till this, too, is subverted. On the finish of the efficiency, the artists drain from their separate rooms into the good piano room, out onto the porch after which into the large discipline beneath the mansion, the place their voices grow to be barely audible whereas they snigger, sing and scream. All through the procession of those closing moments, the entire motion within the set up collapses onto two, and eventually only one, display. Because it does, the viewers—beforehand scattered all through the gallery, everybody in their very own pocket of isolation the place they sat at a well mannered distance from one another—reassembles itself.
We transfer as if choreographed, as a result of we’ve got been; one other pleasant mechanic of The Guests. As a result of the ultimate two screens are facet by facet, there’s at first a collective turning towards, and eventually, a close-knit crowd has shaped. In my second displaying, thirty-eight viewers all huddled intently across the six-foot-wide projection. With this, the piece’s thesis assertion has, just like the performers, exited the screens; right here it’s, now, in house between us: “Objectivity, subjectivity, the irruptions of others, their unhealthy timing? Their pathos,” as Anne Carson wrote in her liner notes. The singers are barely audible the place they stand on the far fringe of the display, and so all that continues to be is the sound of different viewers sniffling, ruffling the material of their sleeves below their moist noses, embarrassed and laughing too loudly. The piece ends, and all we’re left with is one another within the dimly lit room as a tech wanders the rooms and, one after the other, turns off the cameras till the gallery goes black.
Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Guests is on view at SFMOMA by means of September 28, 2025.
