If you ask around about “The Visitors,” you’ll get some variation of the same simple response: “If you have the opportunity to see it, just go.”
It was the middle of the workday, but just 20 minutes after the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art opened on Thursday, a small crowd had already gathered in a dark room on the museum’s sixth floor, sitting silently on the carpet. They would remain planted there for an hour, occasionally swiveling their heads from one screen to another.
For what was likely the last time, they were quietly absorbing “The Visitors” by Ragnar Kjartansson – the nine-channel video installation the Guardian once called the best artwork of the 21st century. For the past three years, the video, which has also screened at the Broad in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim in New York, has found a temporary home at SFMOMA. But on Sunday, Sept. 28, the exhibition is set to leave the museum. This week, locals shuffled in to say goodbye.
A view of Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” 2012. (Katherine Du Tiel/Courtesy SFMOMA)
So did I. It’s hard for me to write plainly about the “The Visitors,” which is mostly because it turns me into a big sentimental baby. (I’m not alone.) My visits to the exhibit have coincided with turning points in life: the end of a three-year relationship and the start of life in an unfamiliar city, away from old friends. But even for someone without any baggage, “The Visitors” would be arresting. It’s the rare sort of artwork that, for a brief spell, peels back a person’s layers of coolness and cynicism like an onion’s skin, leaving the raw nerves exposed to the sun.
If you turn your head and squint, “The Visitors” is just one elaborate music video – a music video split across nine screens, stretched to 64 minutes and filmed in a single take. The concept is fairly simple: A group of musician friends travel to a very old mansion in upstate New York, where they film themselves singing an original, hourlong song, which sounds like the greatest Godspeed You! Black Emperor track to never be released.
They perform separately but in sync, fanning out across the home’s wallpapered rooms, plucking at their instruments alone. They wear bulky headphones to listen in on each other through the walls, with a video camera in every room. The guitarist sits on an unmade bed, where his partner dozes naked under a white sheet. Ragnar Kjartansson, the artist who orchestrated the work, plays guitar from a bathtub, just barely holding his instrument above the surface of soapy water. Between movements, a pianist puffs a cigar.
A still image from Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” 2012. (Ragnar Kjartansson/Courtesy SFMOMA)
In a museum setting, those cameras’ feeds are beamed from projectors onto nine separate screens, one for every musician’s room, which wrap around the exhibit. Attendees are quite literally surrounded by the performers, and they turn their heads as musicians drop in and out of the song. It’s impossible to catch every detail. Fixate too long on the pianists sharing drinks, and you’ll miss Ragnar emerging from the bathtub and toweling off.
The song progresses like a series of crashing waves, falling into near silence between crescendos. At its loudest, it’s a symphonic swell that’s up there with the best post-rock climaxes, marched forward by the heavy plodding of two grand pianos, a banjo, an accordion, a drum kit, two guitars, a cello and up to nine howling voices. (The band includes members of Sigur Rós and Múm.) In the lulls between, it’s an acoustic ballad. Although it meanders, the song circles back again and again to the same refrain: “Once again, I fall into my feminine ways.” That’s a line lifted from a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife, Ásdís Sif Gunnarsdóttir; “The Visitors” was made in 2012 after their divorce.
A still image from Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” 2012. (Ragnar Kjartansson/Courtesy SFMOMA)
“The Visitors” touches on loss, sentimentality and isolation. But for me, the video’s loudest theme is friendship. Without the help of any dialogue, “The Visitors” captures the fine, grainy texture of adult friendship and then blows it up to the scale of nine screens. At the end of their song, the musicians lay down their instruments one by one and convene in front of a grand piano. Someone pops a bottle of champagne and passes it around; cigars are exchanged. From there, they spill out onto the lawn and march out into the mist, arms around each other’s shoulders. You can hear the song’s refrain growing fainter and fainter. A friend snatches the red towel from Kjartansson’s waist, leaving him naked, and a chase ensues.
A still image from Ragnar Kjartansson’s “The Visitors,” 2012. (Ragnar Kjartansson/Courtesy SFMOMA)
Sometimes, it feels like the structures of the adult world – jobs, school, marriage – are appendages of an elaborate machine designed to break up friend groups and catapult individual members to faraway cities. “Oh, you’re in New York? I guess we’ll get lunch sometime next year.” It’s easy to get stuck on the same daydream: What if I could gather all of my friends into one big house? What if we could sing songs together, drink liberally and horse around like we used to? What if I could see all my friends tonight?
This is the dream “The Visitors” puts on the screen. It’s a celebration, but it’s tinged with mourning, like all gatherings are when your friends are scattered to the four corners of the earth. The house isn’t theirs; they are visitors, and visits have to end.
But for just one night, you can stumble naked down a hill with all your friends, champagne bottle in hand, singing the same song. And if you can’t, for two more days, you can get a taste of how it feels by watching Kjartansson’s film.
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