(A whole lot of) Sorrow

[fub]

During our holiday, we visited the Louisiana, a modern art museum on the coast north of Copenhagen. They had a special exhibit of works by the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who has a focus on performance art where the same thing gets repeated over and over so you can find the subtle differences over time.

One of his artworks is when he got the US band The National to perform their song ‘Sorrow’ back-to-back for six hours at the MoMA. There was a video playing of the official registration and we watched three or four iterations of the song. I keep thinking back to it. Here is the first part of the official registration, the first iteration — you can see Ragnar tape down the setlist in front of the singer, which is basically ‘SORROW’ repeated.

Another video (from the official Louisiana channel) shows how they just launch into the next iteration after finishing the song.

And here is a registration of the end of the six hours, taken from the audience. You can see Ragnar talk to the band members one by one to tell them the six hours are done. Once they finish that iteration, someone shouts: “F*ck yeah!” and they just launch into another rendition of the song, as an encore. What a legends.

The whole thing was also released as a set on vinyl. If you have a strong stomach, you can listen to it in its entirety.

Crossposted from my blog. Comment here or at the original post.

Comments

[millionbubbles]

This is pretty interesting and a bit insane! I never knew The National did something like this.

[fub]

Watching the video was mesmerising in a way. As for the insanity: one reviewer mentioned that this is not much different from what many people do for their every-day jobs. But I also don't think the band would want to re-create the experience!

The exhibit had more videos like this, like where a group of opera singers would do an end part of an opera over and over. And he had one piece that he had made for this exhibition: it was shown in the room in which it was taped, and it was 11 hours of two people saying: "What did we do to deserve this?" over and over again, as they recreated domestic scenes. The museum is open for 11 hours, so if you wanted to see the whole thing, you'd have to be there at opening time, go straight to that specific room and stay there until closing. Watching it all in one sitting would be a performance in itself!