![]() What happened after you all wandered into the horizon at the end of the video? We went back in the house and got hammered. You really feel like a gilded-age person in the bathtub. When I go to Rokeby – and I go a lot, they’re like my American family, the Rokeby people – I still like to get into the bath and smoke a cigar. Were you always going to be playing the guitar in the bath? Yeah. Photograph: Farzad Owrang/Ragnar Kjartansson, courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavik Sumptuous and profound … an installation view of The Visitors in New York, in 2013. It’s almost like the last day of our youth. The Visitors was shot at this tender moment where our youth is just about to go. I wanted to document this vibe in my generation. Everyone in there is a legend or a friend from different bands. How did you work out who took which role? I was really creating my dream band from the Reykjavik music scene. It made us create more of an opus than a repeated loop. The material just called for that – maybe it was the feeling of being there in this band for a week. The repetition isn’t boring – how did you pull that off? Well, usually I really like boring repetition, but when we were arranging it we were interested in doing it in a more narrative way. We did two takes: a try-out then the take. Then we got in the cameras, set up the gear, and just went for it. There was a lot of liberal optimism in those days and that somehow is captured in the piece.ĭid it take a lot of rehearsal? We stayed there for a week and me and Davíð Þór Jónsson, who plays the piano, made a plan for the song, and we spent a week in the big ballroom rehearsing, creating this sort of opus. I was in love with America, Obama was president, the whole thing is a love song to the country. ![]() I don’t think I’d make a piece like this now because we live in much darker times. Hippies doing pagan ceremonies, fantastic. This is the only one that is super alive. All the places around it are now owned by super-rich Google people or they are museums. It’s really an ode to this house and the life that’s lived there. How do residents feel about their place being immortalised ? They felt good. ![]() I really wanted to do something else, though the idea never really looked good on paper: just making a sentimental country song with my friends in this really great place. My friend knew the people who lived there. I first got to know Rokeby when I did a performance piece there called Folk Song. ![]() ![]() I’d just been divorced and I was falling massively in love – it was like a Midsummer Night’s Dream. What are your memories of making The Visitors? It was a super time. So how does it feel to have made the best artwork of the century so far? It feels pretty damn good, I tell you! I’m a sucker for your communist website. A memorial to the end of Kjartansson’s marriage, a paean to the twilight of youth, a celebration of friendship, music and America itself, The Visitors is sumptuous and profound. As the New York Times put it, the effect is “alternately tragic and joyful, meditative and clamorous, and that swells in feeling from melancholic fugue to redemptive gospel choir”. Named after Abba’s final album and presented as a nine-screen video installation in galleries from London’s Barbican to the Broad in LA, The Visitors mesmerised viewers, most of whom stayed for its entire 64 minutes, moved to tears of euphoria and sorrow. The result was The Visitors by artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Together, they played a song that went “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways” – over and over. On one gorgeous summer evening, they gathered on the terrace while nine Icelandic musicians, including members of Múm and Sigur Ros, each took over one of the house’s rooms, from the ballroom to the bathroom. R okeby is a crumbling 43-room mansion in upstate New York, where the descendants of the grand American families the Astors and the Livingstons – as well as their bohemian friends – participate in everything from puppetry to organic farming. ![]()
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