In the video Scenes from Western Culture (The Boat) (2015), for example, an elegantly dressed couple repeatedly and languidly sets off into a tranquil sea; the man stays the same while the woman seems to keep changing. Their evident wealth and ease, coupled with the impossible beauty of their setting, constitute the stuff of glossy travel brochures, the carefully constructed advertising tropes that wallpaper an office worker’s imaginary. Such an unachievably perfect two weeks’ vacation was, of course, a reward designed to help keep that same worker productive during the other fifty weeks of the year. Devoid of drama or incident, Kjartansson’s The Boat embodies the deep-rooted fantasy that leisure (enjoyed through the brief reprieve of a vacation or more durably attained through wealth) will cure what ails us. It illustrates a fiction that is as inherent to modernity as our increasingly digital and monitored working lives. 

The nearby live performance Bangemand / Scaredman (2023) offers a stark counterpoint to the holidaymakers in The Boat. Every day during the museum’s open hours, a man in a tuxedo inches along a narrow ledge high in a gallery, his body pressed anxiously against the wall. The scenario recalls cinematic tropes—from silent-era physical comedy to midcentury thrillers such as Vertigo (1958)—yet Kjartansson strips the scene of narrative resolution. A clean-cut, suited figure is typically a sign of masculine authority, composure, and control; in Scaredman, he instead appears beset by unseen and undefined forces. The performance evokes a familiar cultural script in which masculinity is cast as under siege, transforming a familiar archetype into a meditation on fear, spectacle, and the troubling logic that power sustains itself by staging its own vulnerability. 

In an interview, Kjartansson has reflected on the importance of holding opposing emotional registers in place: “There is always this balance between irony and sincerity. I think that’s where things become interesting.” This sensibility runs throughout the works in Politics of the Obvious. In Me and My Mother (2000–25), for example, a repeated, confrontational act between mother and son becomes a tender record of time passing. In No Tomorrow (2017), a group of performers with guitars take up historic entertainment repertoires while eventually exposing their artifice, seeming to dance around the fleeting nature of desire itself. The Visitors (2012) is one of the most beloved artworks of the twenty-first century. In the virtuosic installation, musicians each play alone in separate rooms of a decaying mansion in upstate New York. Their voices carry through walls, gradually enfolding a shared refrain and transforming the individual into a temporary collective. Sunday Without Love is a tableau vivant rooted in traditions ranging from romantic balladry to landscape painting that builds into a sustained meditation on loss.  

Kjartansson stands in wonder at the world’s contradictions. “I am just totally in awe of the world and all its mystical beauty and mystical violence,” he has affirmed. Seen together, the works in Politics of the Obvious describe a world in which aspiration and anxiety are tightly bound, with the quest for stability, beauty, and rest shadowed by a persistent sense of precarity. By confronting familiar images throughout the exhibition—of love, masculinity, leisure, and power—Kjartansson reveals their underlying instability and invites us to dwell in what often remains hidden in plain sight.

[Above: Ragnar Kjartansson (Icelandic, born 1976). Me and My Mother, 2000–25. Six single-channel videos; color, sound. Running time: variable. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York, and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik]

 

Ragnar Kjartansson: Politics of the Obvious is curated by Cathleen Chaffee, Charles Balbach Chief Curator with Helga Christoffersen, Curator, AKG Nordic Art and Culture Initiative.