Ragnar Kjartansson: Song opens Thursday, March 10

The landscapes of Ragnar Kjartansson’s videos are often similar in their intensity to the famously bleak volcanic blacks and stark whites of his native Iceland. His subject matter often mines metaphors for isolated singularity in the face of bleak or awesome natural surroundings. In 2010’s The Man, for example, an old blues singer is set in a long, unyielding field, and in 2008’s The End, the artist and a friend are pictured before the imposing, sublime landscapes of the Canadian Rockies.

But with Kjartansson, none of these stereotypical adjectives—“bleak,” “isolated,” “sublime”—are as they seem. Kjartansson’s work is more like Kjartansson himself: A charismatic vaudevillian showman for whom cultural stereotypes—of Iceland, of storytelling and performance, of “the artist” itself—are but an array of the colorful costumes and resolute personalities at his disposal. Bringing together a decade of these performance videos, plus a new performance piece created for Carnegie Museum of Art’s Hall of Sculpture, Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is the first U.S. solo museum show by this important and exciting artist. (The exhibition opens Thursday, March 10, with a discussion between Kjartansson and curator Dan Byers at Carnegie Museum of Art’s Culture Club.)

Several of the videos in Song highlight Kjartansson’s penchant for long-duration performances and skills from his other career as guitarist and singer in the rock band Trabant. In Satan is Real, the artist is buried up to his chest in a public park, singing a song fragment that is ecstatically extended and repeated over and over again. This practice gains new light at Thursday’s opening, which also marks the launch of Kjartansson’s latest durational performance piece.

In this performance, called Song, the artist’s three nieces will inhabit the museum’s Hall of Sculpture for most of March, repeatedly singing a song Kjartansson composed based on a misremembered snippet of Allen Ginsberg poetry. Like much of Kjartansson’s work, it will be both beautiful and slightly off-kilter; at once spectacular in its efforts, and subtle in its ambitions: A piece that will exist in the oral history of Pittsburgh’s art world for years after its echoes have retreated into the marble walls of the hall.

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song opens with an artist’s talk and discussion at Culture Club, 5:30–9 p.m. Thursday, March 10. Happy hour with discussion. Admission is free; cash bar.