There are a few firsts in life that really stick with you — the first time you read a book that makes you cry, the smell of your first boyfriend’s neck, the faint scent of leather and cigarettes that you always associate with your first car. If you’re a devotee of art, music or film, another important first might be the first time you see The Visitors, an installation by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, which ends its three-month run at the Frist Center on Sunday.
The backbone of The Visitors is its simple but profound concept: Nine videos that were filmed simultaneously in and around a house filled with musicians as they play a single song. Eight of the shots capture a different room in a run-down mansion in New York state, and a ninth shot frames the house’s back porch. Each screen is accompanied by a speaker that plays the audio from that particular room, so as you move throughout the exhibit, it’s as if you’re moving throughout the mansion itself.
The rooms are beautifully detailed, and each looks like a dramatic painting — the naturally lit kitchen like a Vermeer, the shadowy hallway more like a Caravaggio. In one room, a barefoot woman in a pale jersey dress plays the accordion and sings with an otherworldly soprano, like an effortless Joanna Newsom. In a bedroom there’s a withdrawn guitarist on an unmade bed, a reclining woman lying behind him like one of Ingres’ nudes. And the artist himself, naked in an unremarkable bathtub, strums an acoustic guitar.
But it’s the music that raises The Visitors out of its conceptually solid ground and into masterpiece territory. The song is based on a poem by Kjartansson’s ex-wife, and its refrain, “Once again I fall into my feminine ways,” is repeated like a mantra. The repetition of the song emphasizes the slight changes in phrasing that feel like a gentle heartbreak, before the song swells into crescendos so transcendent that when a cannon explodes in the mansion’s backyard, you might think you imagined it.
The music is so monumental that by the end of the 64-minute piece, even the act of draining bathwater seems momentous. So when Kjartansson wraps a red towel around himself and leaves the frame to join the cellist in what we can now see is an adjoining room, it’s more of a call to arms than a dismissal. Each of the musicians rallies around Kjartansson as they join the group on the house’s back porch, singing as they gather. The camera pans to follow the musicians, no longer isolated, as they walk into the distance, their voices gradually fading in one of the most effective representations of love and friendship I’ve ever seen.
For all its grandiosity, there’s an off-the-cuff quality to The Visitors that gives it an intimacy that’s rare to experience inside an art museum. The exhibition materials may claim that the work takes its name from ABBA’s final album, but the “visitors” in question could just as easily be the rapt Frist attendees, sprawled out on the carpet, transfixed.
