Lounging around: Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage, an installation by Ragnar Kjartansson at Barbican Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavík. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images
Every five years the artist Ragnar Kjartansson stands in a living room and films his mother spitting full into his face.
The four completed editions of this work, Me and My Mother (2000-2015), are featured in a solo exhibition of the acclaimed Icelandic artist at the Barbican where, through side-by-side television screens, you can see artist and mother age in their bizarre interaction.
It’s one of the less obviously spectacular works included here, but one which ably synopsises the levels on which the exhibition operates: humour, film, time and context, story, repetition and framing.
Kjartansson’s work plays with choral forms and polyphony, deploying counterpoints and harmony to create incredibly complex and rich films and performances. On the ground floor the musicians of Take Me Here by the Dishwasher: Memorial for a Marriage (2011) play in live interaction as they lounge on mattresses and couches, accompanied by a vintage film loop of the artist’s parents.
Music is a unifying theme throughout the show, both as the stuff of the installations and referenced and pictured in the paintings and images upstairs and down. The centrepiece of the exhibition is the nine channel video piece The Visitors (2012), curtained away from the live troubadours by the entrance but sharing some of the same spirit and communal feel.
Bath time: pre-installation image of ‘The Visitors’, an installation by Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine, New York and i8 Gallery, Reykjavík. Photograph: Elisabet Davidsdottir
Created at Rokeby Farm in Upstate New York, each of the nine screens of the piece feature a single musician, removed from each other around the house but playing in unison for the hour the filmed performance lasts. On entry it is a gently swaying song, a complete and whole musical piece, but as you stay and move from one screen to the next the directional speakers pull out the individual voices and instruments in an intensely fascinating manner.
It is tiresome to reference Björk and Sigur Rós just because the artist is from Iceland, but there is something that links Kjartansson to these more familiar cultural exports. An odd balance between the ethereal and an endearing dorkiness, a cool that is un-ironic in a manner that might just be totally uncool.
Ragnar Kjartansson exhibition at Barbican Art Gallery. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavik. Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images
This is best exemplified by my favourite piece in the exhibition, Guilt Trip (2007), where the Icelandic comedian Laddi wanders a ridiculously desolate and beautiful snowy landscape, firing a shotgun into the air and occasionally fumbling to reload it.
It sounds stupid, like an armed Mr Bean, but I found it incomprehensibly poignant and quite moving. The shotgun blast is so loud that once you’ve heard it then it seems incredible that you weren’t aware of it from the moment you entered the gallery.
Like many of the works on display it is hypnotic and strange but immediately relatable and faintly familiar. Visually Kjartansson references movies, television and the culture we consume on a daily basis, but plays with their presentation until they seem bizarrely remote.
On Saturday and Sundays throughout the show’s run, two women straight out of a period drama kiss whilst rowing across the Barbican lake. In the moment it makes sense, but try to explain it and you feel it run away from you.
There is an enormous amount to engage with here, to watch, and experience, and be taken in by. Kjartansson’s work doesn’t take itself overly seriously, but is an important intervention in the galleries it is shown in.
It is incredibly encouraging to see the Barbican continue to engage with performance, and doing it well. Presenting performance art in a sensitive and complimentary manner is often a challenge to galleries and museums (take note, Tate Modern) but here it feels as at home as any other form. Kjartansson, although perhaps an artist unfamiliar to many, is well worth your time.
Two women kiss whilst rowing across the Barbican lake, an artwork by performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Courtesy of the artist, Luhring Augustine New York and i8 gallery Reykjavik. (Photograph: Tristan Fewings/Getty Images)
Poppy Jackson performs Hay Barn in Rosekill, New York. Photograph: Maria Foque
In November the artist Poppy Jackson made headlines around the world when her performance piece Site, which she presented at the SPILL 2015 festival of performance in London, provoked extensive media coverage. Jackson sat naked astride the gable of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel across two days in four-hour stints, a durational performance that was observed by the crowds that gathered in the courtyard and those in the surrounding buildings. A single tweet from a worker in an office looking over the performance snowballed into extensive tabloid coverage, international news stories, and television appearances for the artist and her work. As I wrote in a previous piece for the East End Review, media interest overtakes and obscures the art all too often in such situations. I met with Jackson to discuss the piece, her wider practice, and what comes next after a brush with viral fame.
Lewis Church: Before we talk specifically about Site, could you speak a little bit about your artistic background, and your practice as a whole?
Poppy Jackson: Well my mum is an artist actually, so I’ve always grown up with her making paintings and prints and helping her with exhibitions. That has been a really big influence, inspiration, and a huge source of support. During high school and A-levels I decided I really wanted to do art, although mainly painting and drawing rather than performance. It wasn’t until I went to Dartington [College of Arts] in Devon that I began seriously making performance. My 2D work also continued in tandem with the performance, and the paintings and drawings have also always been on the subject of the body. Eventually it just made sense to experiment using my own body, and so the paintings got bigger and I was using my own body to do them, painting with my hands and my hair. It then became more about the process of making a work and what was going on physically than about just the body.
LC: There seem to be a number of artists in the UK right now who are returning to the body. Do you think that has something to do with how our lives work now? With the mediation and fragmentation of social interaction?
PJ: I think so. It is a good way to return to a really basic form of communication with each other, to return to the body. It’s also to do with a lot of the jobs we are doing. I now spend a hell of a lot of time on the computer, writing applications and things. So to really feel present in your body and using that is the best antidote.
LC: Are there artists working in the UK at the moment with whom you feel a strong kinship, in terms of your strategies, and the concepts you are working with?
PJ: Definitely. When I moved to London I met the performance artists Bean and Benjamin Sebastian, and became an Associate Artist at ] performance s p a c e [. So that venue has definitely been a kind of home for me. And there are so many artists who have been through that space, whose work I’ve witnessed and been so massively inspired by. Sinéad O’Donnell, Alastair MacLennan, Mark Greenwood, Bean and Benjamin themselves, Hugh O’Donnell. Even if it’s not work that I think is like what I do, to witness somebody going through a raw act of communication using their body is an incredibly special experience.
LC: I’d like to stay away from the publicity and tabloid reaction to Site and think more about the artwork itself. What do you do during the piece, and what do want the audience to see?
PJ: In Site I was in position on a building that people could move through, an inhabited building. People could use the architecture themselves to look around the piece, climbing the interior stairwell for example, to look down on my body and see where I was positioned amongst the buildings. It was a public space, and you could also see me on the roof from the street. I think it’s extremely different when you witness it live because the people there with you go through an experience as well. They have some kind of empathy, they can feel the temperature even with their coats on, and so as a live experience you can kind of tell what the performer is going through.
The idea had been cooking since about 2010 when I did a sketch, using my menstrual blood as paint on the paper. I didn’t know that it was going to happen on architecture though, as I didn’t yet know what that steeple shape was. I did a version of the piece called Hay Barn in Rosekill, New York, where I was on an amazing 1940s hay barn looking down. Myself, Jill McDermid-Hokanson and Tif Robinette curated the weeklong festival ESSENTIAL DEPARTURES, where fifteen artists (some of whom had never made performance work before) delved in and created incredible work in 100 acres of wild land. My piece there was a very similar action physically, but actually very different because the isolated context was completely opposite to Site in London.
Site by Poppy Jackson. Photograph: Marco Berardi
LC: Obviously the piece has reached a huge number of people, far more than you might have originally expected. But to go back to the actual audience who were there, what were you hoping that they would experience or take away?
PJ: I was hoping it would be a very positive experience, but also something that would critique the fact that a naked body is a problem in our culture. A celebration of that body on its own terms is not something that we usually see, especially in public space. All of the female bodies that I normally see in public spaces are trying to sell something, or shown in a way that is really alien to how I feel about my body. There is this connection between consumerism, capitalism and the female body, where the body is devalued by being the thing that sells something, like a blank canvas. I was trying to critique all of these things and cut through them by placing a real body there. I don’t want my work to just be an attack or to just point out negatives though.
LC: How does that relate to performing on the roof of Toynbee Hall? I read that you were thinking of the radical history of Toynbee as being something that contributes to that feeling of challenge, but also as something positive.
PJ: For sure. Toynbee was built as a radical centre in the 1800s, to train future leaders so that they had the potential to bring about social change. I think the legacy of that and the special energy of the place remains, especially when you think about its social role now with local women’s groups for example, and the input of ArtsAdmin, which is based in the building. It’s amongst local businesses and flats in the East End and I wanted the performance to be seen by a non-arts audience as well as the festival audience. I also used to work down the road so this location has personal significance too. I’ve always had a job on the side, like most artists do to fund their practice.
LC: Has the experience of Site affected your plans for the future, and what you might do next? I remember when I talked to you during the festival that you said it had almost become two pieces, the media reaction and the performance itself.
PJ: Exactly, because there were people who’ve only seen the piece through the media coverage, and they’ll be thinking completely different things from someone who was there and witnessed it. One thing I’ve got to think about now is the side effect of this work, all the media attention, and how that affects the next piece. It’s something I’ve really got to think about. Even I only know my experience of it, I don’t know what it was like for those witnessing it from the stairs or on the ground. It has become two related but distinct pieces, and the documentation like the photographs and video, are very different from the performance. I think that if people witnessed it live they’d see that actually it was a very quiet piece, that it was very still, and really wasn’t about trying to shock anybody.
I think maybe doing the piece again live will provide another way for people to witness the work. It’d be great to do it again, but I’ll leave a little while to process everything before I return to it. I have some really good sites in mind, but I want to go back to painting before that. I go through cycles with performance, I return to painting and then back again. I’m working on a series of paintings at the moment, pieces that link very strongly to my performance work.Then I plan to return to Site.
Documentation of Site is available at spillfestival.com/spill-tv poppyjackson.co.uk
In the piece Jackson sat, naked, across the gable of Toynbee Hall in Whitechapel. She stayed there for four-hour stints, across two days. Jackson was just about visible from the street (if you happened to be looking up at the right moment), although in order to really see her properly the audience gathered in the Toynbee courtyard, and lined the stairs inside the building.
On the first day, someone working in an adjacent building tweeted a photo, asking ‘What’s happening?’. Several news organisations then picked up the story, prompting a slew of sensationalist articles and the familiar below-the-line griping in the comments section.
Spill has circulated a press release detailing Jackson’s intentions, and Lyn Gardner has since written in the Guardianabout how the piece fits in to the rest of the festival and a longer history of performance art. Artists like Jackson are asking questions, in a language that most might not be used to, but they do so not to provoke needlessly.
The city has become a prescribed place, our public and shared spaces monetised, corporatised and gated off. Jackson’s dignified sitting, against the cold and the stares, highlights to me just how boring the streets and buildings of the city have become. I’m glad she was there, and that I got to witness it. Art is not limited to oil paintings of horses.
For me though, this is not a story about a piece of art, but about the ‘journalists’ that spend their days trawling Twitter for clickbait to bump up website traffic. ‘Can (insert newspaper here) use your picture?’ appears hundreds of times under the original tweet, a sadder indictment of current reporting than of the state of the art scene in London.
Art, theatre and performance critics are being scrapped, whilst newspapers desperately scrape together lowest common denominator articles. Sensitivity to experimental work is lost when it’s presented in such a reductive way. Artworks that are trying something new, or that maybe require a different kind of engagement from its audience, are written off as a joke.
Look at the two pictures that were originally tweeted, really look at them, and you can see the beauty in the image. Across the roofs and red brick walls of that corner of East London, Jackson sits quietly, dignified and statuesque. Amongst the moss, ivy and tiles her body stands out, a little fleshy intervention, a different perspective on the space. What’s happening is an art piece, a piece of art. You might not like it, you might hate it, you might think it’s funny, or you might not care. But to treat it like a joke is to dismiss something powerful.
