By Valerie Ricordi, MOCA

The latest installment of Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami  (MOCA’s)  Knight Exhibition Series will open with  the first solo American museum exhibition of Ragnar Kjartansson, one of Europe’s most exciting and influential young artists. Kjartansson’s enthralling performances and videos combine the extremes of emotion with sublime environments, repetition, and humor. A native of Iceland, Kjartansson was the youngest artist to represent that country at the 2009  Venice Biennale with a performance that consisted of him painting from a male model every day for the duration of the five-month exhibition.  In 2011, he was the recipient of Performa’s first Malcolm McLaren Award for his work Bliss, which consisted of an excerpt from the final aria of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro performed in repetition for twelve-hours.

A one-night only live performance by Kjartansson featuring his recent work, Du Holde Kunst  (2012), will be staged during the exhibition’s opening reception on May 17. The performance will be live streamed on www.mocanomi.org at 7:30 pm. Kjartansson’s Du Holde Kunst was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami and premiered at its 15^th Anniversary Celebration in February 2012.  In this performance, Kjartansson sings one of Franz Schubert’s best-known lieds, An Die Musik, a romantic ode to the transformative power of music, while accompanied by dancing showgirls with feather fans, a brass quartet, harp, timpani and large crash cymbal. Ragnar Kjartansson: Song is organized by Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh and curated by Dan Byers, Carnegie Associate Curator of Contemporary Art.

“My work often is about this ethic of ‘pretense,’” says Kjartansson. “That’s my field of interest—the friction between pretending and doing; pretense and reality at the same time. It’s a constant struggle between truth and lies, and between tongue-in-cheek and deadly serious.” A sense of theatrical, joyful absurdity, even in the face of the bizarre or the dark, is at the heart of Kjartansson’s work.

Kjartansson was born into a legendary Icelandic theater family: his father is a highly respected playwright and theater director and his mother an actress in film and theater. That lifetime of theatricality has had a profound impact on Kjartansson’s life and art—from his glam-rock band Trabant, which made him a rock hero in Iceland, to the strangely sweet trilogy Me and My Mother.

But Kjartansson’s work relies on a foundation that runs far deeper than his family’s theatrical bent. His interest in durational performance, repetition, and music stems, he suggests, from Iceland’s enduring legacy of oral culture—the repetitive transmission of knowledge through sagas, folk tales, and folk songs, rather than through lasting visual artwork. This fascination is apparent in Song, which treats Allen Ginsberg’s poetry as work that will be altered like oral-tradition folk songs; and in The Man, in which Kjartansson goes straight to the source: Pinetop Perkins, one of the last direct links to the American folk idiom. Most importantly, however, it appears in Kjartansson’s emphasis on performance—rather than the predominance of the art object—in all his work. In this realm, Kjartansson wavers between a besotted romanticism that honors truth and beauty above all else, and, at the other extreme, a highly self-aware, obsessive desire to entertain.

“There is no visual art history in Iceland—almost no objects,” says Kjartansson. “But there are all these stories: nothing but sagas and poetry for a thousand years. My performative works exist mostly as stories. I’ve never believed in the idea that you have to obtain the art piece to have it—you don’t even have to see the art piece! When I performed The End in Venice, people kept suggesting, ‘Oh, you should have a webcam!’ But I like the idea that very few people saw it—the ones who did will have a small anecdote about it, and it will exist as a story.”

Ragnar Kjartansson: Song at MOCA: May 18-Sept 2;  770 NE 125 St, North Miami; $5 adults, $3 for students with ID and seniors, free for museum members; 305-893-6211 Opening Reception: Thursday May 17, 7-9 pm, features Live Performance Artist Talk: Saturday, May 19, 3 pm; free with museum admission