"The forty-nine-year-old Icelandic artist is best known for his endeavors of communal endurance: in "Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage" (2011/14), a projection of his parents acting in a 1977 film is accompanied by ten live musicians playing guitar and singing a song whose lyrics are taken from the movie's dialogue. When the piece was shown at the New Museum, in 2014, the performers played all day (with breaks) for much of the eight-week run."
"He's also a maestro of repetition: in this case ten people (including Kjartansson) create a folk-art tableau vivant while performing the chorus of the song over and over. This sameness limits emotional catharsis, even as the bucolic setting invites it. Such dichotomies animate his work, which is, at its best, absurd and profound in equal measure (to wit, the phrases "You must learn to live / live without love / love is not good for you" are sung plaintively)."
Sunday Without Love is a single-shot, nineteen-minute video drawn from a three-hour outdoor performance on a lawn in Italy. The staging and costumes reference a mid-twentieth-century folk postcard and evoke Seurat's A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The soundtrack is a heartfelt reworking, with collaborator Davíð Þór Jónsson, of the German comedy song "Ohne Liebe Leben Lernen." Ten performers, including the artist, form a folk-art tableau vivant and repeatedly sing the chorus. The insistence on repetition curtails emotional catharsis even as the bucolic setting invites it, producing an interplay of absurdity and profundity.
Read at The New Yorker
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