Letter - Letter to the Editor

ArtForum, Feb, 2003

ICELAND COMETH

ERIC DEMBY REPORTS FROM REYJAVIK

THE DAY I ARRIVED in Reykiavik the Kitchen Motors art and music collective hijacked the local Bonus supermarket's sound system and replaced its consumer-friendly Muzak with an "audio environment" of sonic glitches, twitches, and textures. While the music was intended to snap shoppers out of their anesthetized state, most went about their business, perusing the bins of cheese bread and racks of smoked fish, seemingly unfazed. This oblivion proved either that consumerism trumps the conceptual or that Icelanders have grown accustomed to finding the avant-garde in the everyday.

The Kitchen Motors intervention, which wove together music, politics, and a sort of upscale street theater, was the most conceptual offering at last October's fourth annual Iceland Airwaves music festival, a four-day showcase of local rock and electronic-music artists that attracts adventurous international music professionals. Since many writers and producers caught their first glimpse of Sigur Ros at the first two Airwaves and rook quartet Leaves signed a major-label deal after last year's fest, the cool radar was in full sweep.

Following the Kitchen Motors event that same frigid, windy evening, the biggest Icelandic independent record label, Thule Musik, presented a program of live electronic music that crystallized the character of today's native musicians: Though hapless, hopeless young romantics at first glance, their plaintive, shimmering soundscapes and tumbling, at times piercing rhythms demonstrated an informed, even evolved, take on the world scene. A young man who records as ILO "played" his laptop and mini-mixer in front of a projected video shot from a camera that had circled a generic plaza over and over, in a sort of visual elegy to public space worthy of a Chelsea gallery. The next night, breakout band the Funerals channeled latter-day bluesmen Nick Cave and Syd Barrett in a dive called Vidalin, mixing irony and alcohol into a mesmerizing cocktail.

The next day I set off to meet the scene's key players, including Funerals leader and performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson (whom the New York Times followed around the island for a 2001 feature story); Johann Johansson, Kitchen Motors cofounder and an accomplished film- and theater-score composer; and Kristin Bjork Kristjansdottir, a fellow Kitchen Motors cofounder who is building the most intricate bridges between sound, video, and reality-overlap performance in this city of barely 100,000. Judging by what I'd encountered onstage around town, I figured we'd talk about technology, decomposition, innovation, clicks, cuts--all the phenomena informing any innovative music community in 2002. Maybe the fluidity between Icelandic music and art or the influence-on both of unearthly landscapes and democratic socialism would come up. Or we'd talk about how Icelandic artists, unlike their European and American counterparts, are spared the burden of tradition, given their relative dearth of culture historically. (Music and dance were banned by the all-powerful Lutheran church until the nineteenth century.) Soon enough I'd have Reykjavik pegged as the next Berlin or Barcelona--with Olafur Eliasson its native art star and Roni Horn, who has visited and photographed Iceland regularly since 1975, its pioneering expat--a city newly awakened to the arts and populated by artists utterly free of constraints. As it turns out, what appeared thoroughly modern, even avant-garde on the surface has roots a thousand years deep. Yes, even now, with their enviably progressive conditions--100 percent literacy rate; geothermal heat generating 70 percent of the volcanic island's energy; the world's first democratically elected woman president-Iceland's artists are consistently indebted to, of all things, Old Norse literature.

You can't throw a lava rock in Iceland without hitting a devotee of the sagas, a series of about forty stories written between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries populated by a rotating cast of Icelandic farmers, Norse Vikings, Celts, and myriad kings and queens. The sagas' heroes and dramatic plots--Ketill Flatnose and his daughter Auour the Deep-Minded wage a feudal-land battle; Gunnlaugur Serpent-Tongue the poet courts Helga the Fair--recall Greek or Roman mythology, and their integration into Icelandic society as both historical document and timeless folklore is no less seamless. "What we have is the sagas- that's the great literary foundation of Icelandic culture," says J6hansson. "It's only literary, there's no visual element, there's no musical element, so that's been totally lacking until this century. In Iceland it's almost like we're building history now." Reykjavik's little scene, in short, is imposing the art of the story onto the contemporary template with a singular mix of magic and humility.

Kristjansdottir, a sound artist, experimental musician, and puppeteer who possesses the deep dark eyes, sprightly grin, and intense modesty typical of Icelandic women, remembers the sagas with wonder. "When I was little my dad would read the sagas to me; he never read Walt Disney or any of that," she says. "I still find those stories of drifters in the highlands and Icelandic ghosts quite charming." In college Kristjansdottir pursued what she calls "diary studies," searching out private records of daily life. "If you're going to understand the soul of a community, diaries are a secret door," she explains. "Our most honest way to get in touch with our history is by studying and looking at it through detail rather than the world story of kings and queens and presidents."