Nordic odyssey: in its first edition devoted to the visual arts, the Reykjavik Arts Festival paired a retrospective devoted to the late Dieter Roth with a nationwide exhibition of 35 mostly European and Scandinavian artists responding to Roth's work

Art in America, Nov, 2005 by Lilly Wei

Ascreening of Screaming Masterpiece (2005), an exhilarating documentary directed by Ari Alexander Egis Magnusson about Iceland's high-voltage music scene, was one of the opening salvos of the 2005 Reykjavik Arts Festival. This year, for the first time, the festival concentrated on the visual arts and not on the performing arts. Nonetheless, it listed Screaming and several other performance-related works on the official program. Shown at the Regnboginn Cinema, Magnusson's film was preceded by Now I See (2004), a 35mm film commissioned by the Art Institute of Chicago from the Albanian artist Anri Sala (b. 1974, works in Berlin) [see A.i.A., Dec. '04], who describes it as his "anti-MTV music video." In it, Sala's camera coolly sweeps a crepuscular stage from odd angles with abrupt shifts, panning the musicians of the high-decibel Icelandic art-rock band Trabant, sound and sight often desynchronized. Real scrutiny, however, was reserved for an interloping yellow dog-shaped balloon that floats onto the set and steals the scene. Screaming, in contrast, was more heated and direct, saluting a resplendent Bjork costumed like a glittering, techno-Titania in several high-production numbers. The keening Sigur Ros ensemble was also filmed in performance and interviews, as were a great number of wildly popular home-grown rock groups and other more traditional singers and musicians. It was a rousing introduction and presaged the strong, local tone for this sprawling, ambitious event, which, in the days that followed, became as much odyssey as arts festival. Sited at more than 20 venues throughout the country, in locations sometimes hundreds of miles apart, the festival raised cultural tourism to new heights, as its curators and artists used Iceland--its breathtakingly beautiful landscape of geysers, glaciers, waterfalls, volcanoes and lava fields, its culture and history--as more than a setting. It became, to an extraordinary degree, part of the exhibition itself.

The Reykjavik Arts Festival was founded in 1970, as a biennial, by the minister of culture and education and the mayor of Reykjavik, in cooperation with the city's art institutions and the Federation of Icelandic Artists. It was converted to an annual in 2004, with plans to hold a visual-arts exhibition every three years. Under the artistic directorship of Thorunn Sigurdardottir, this first visual-arts celebration (which ran from May 14 through Aug. 21) honored Dieter Roth (1930-1998) with a retrospective. Called "Train," it was the first such exhibition for the influential, peripatetic Swiss-German genius of junk and entropy in his adopted country and was curated by Iceland native Bjorn Roth, the artist's sou and longtime collaborator. In conjunction with the show, Jessica Morgan conceived a parallel exhibition, "Material Time/Work Time/Life Time." Morgan, curator of contemporary art at Tate Modern, was intrigued by how far Roth had pushed art into real life and real time, and how he had subverted and extended the modes of art production. For her exhibition she commissioned artists to respond to Roth's work, although at times the resulting connections seemed a stretch. As for demographics, all but a few of the 35 artists came from Western Europe and Scandinavia, with a solid Icelandic presence. Nearly half of the artists included were born after 1970 and three quarters after 1960. (Only a quarter were women, and, of those, two worked with male collaborators; all but one of the female artists were born after 1970.)

As is usual with such gatherings, installations and videos dominated. Presentations ranged from the excessive and viscerally dramatic to the austerely minimal and conceptual. Perceptual, personal, social and environmental concerns were much in evidence, while humor and irony, though not absent, took a back seat. "Material Time," despite its origin in Roth's overwrought and essentially dystopic outlook, was more orderly than not, more rationalized than dark and distinctly homogenous, its point of view limited, for the most part, to living white males, whether young or younger. The few potentially rowdy installations were tamed somewhat by the immaculate institutions in which they appeared. The presentations overall functioned as a series of solo shows--one or sometimes two per site--rather than as elements in a larger vision. The group events also seemed self-contained and gave each artist an individual platform. And yet maybe this very lack of frenzy was what made "Material Time" successful. It was smart, youthful, smoothly put together, more accessible than not--a seriously considered, substantive exhibition. If many of the artists were already well-known, their work familiar, there were also some surprises. Most critically, the level of achievement among the individual contributors was high, and the scale refreshingly manageable.

"Train"

"Train" was shown in three venues: the Reykjavik Art Museum (Hafnarhus), the National Gallery of Iceland and Reykjavik Energy's Gallery 100[degrees]. Much of the work--or variations on it--had been seen in "Roth Time," the brilliantly anarchic traveling exhibition that closed at the Museum of Modern Art/Queens and P.S.1 in 2004. In Iceland Roth's work looked more contained and comprehensible-but no less radical. Roth was a restless, innovative, astonishingly prolific artist who tried his hand at everything, from graphic arts to painting, sculpture, drawing, watercolor, photography, video, film and installation; he also composed music and wrote poetry. Influenced by the Constructivists, Dadaists, the Fluxus artists and the Vienna Actionists,