‘Scandinavian Pain’ at the Hirshhorn

It is October 2016 in the United States of America, about two weeks out from the end of this staggering and extraordinary presidential election. The atmosphere is thick with sexual assault, dirty money, Jihadist extremism, labyrinthine networks of partisan corruption, foreign hacking of government servers, refugee crises and the Holy Trinity of taxes, abortions and guns.

To escape this tension is impossible. For so many weeks, I have scanned my news apps each morning from the foot of my bed to see if another blistering headline has once again rocked the free world. It is born from something like anxiety or dread, or the morbid impulse to rubberneck near the scene of a freeway pileup.

In a normal year, the holiday hysteria would be reaching its annual fever pitch, but no one is talking about Christmas yet. The world is on hold.

So, in this moment, it is especially odd and hilarious to ascend the escalator of the Hirshhorn and see pink neon type light up the wall with the words “Scandinavian Pain.”

That would be pretty funny by itself, but it’s hard to make up anything more misplaced in Washington right now. The White House is under siege, and across the street someone is asking us all to consider artistic interpretations of the modern North Germanic ethno-cultural condition.

This is the environment into which the Hirshhorn’s retrospective of Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson has been introduced. While it was obviously planned long before anyone could know of the traumatic delirium that the election would bring on, and it would be fairer to appraise it on its own merits, there is just no way to perceive this or any exhibition outside of these circumstances.

Art does not exist in a vacuum, especially not now, especially not at a federally funded museum on the National Mall during a historically divisive presidential election.

And this is in some way what makes “Scandinavian Pain,” on view through Jan. 8, so good.

Kjartansson’s works — mostly recorded performances from the past 15 years that incorporate music and literature — are towed by an undercurrent of longing. They are wry and genuinely funny pastiches cut with earnest nostalgia for moods and aesthetics of bygone eras. Because he honors and flays his subjects in equal measure, contradictory feelings coexist comfortably in his work: sorrow and joy, pride and shame, graveness and frivolity, camaraderie and isolation.

A gallery draped with pink prom curtains projects a video of Kjartansson standing before the same curtains and looking like an overweight Bobby Darin, in a full tuxedo, his hair slicked with pomade. Backed by an 11-piece orchestra on a dais, he performs an endless ballad with a single refrain: “Sorrow conquers happiness.”

Kjartansson’s crooner is a dim reflection of the Sinatra archetype, looking not so much like the Golden Age of Hollywood as a Soviet postwar emulation of 1950s American late-night television — a little tackier, drearier, stiff, slightly claustrophobic.

This was not performed in front of a live studio audience. Behind these satin curtains is not a sprawling soundstage with a tech crew, but the white cinderblock wall of a community recreation center. The edifice of old Hollywood glam thinly veils a stifling atmosphere of sadness. This is the Hollywood of overdosing starlets, of waning celebrity careers groaning under the weight of public indifference. Judy Garland would have loved this.

These sentiments ring particularly true right now, and it’s not difficult to make connections. Think about “nasty woman” — a misogynistic comment by Donald Trump directed at Hillary Clinton, scathingly rebuked by Democrats, feminists, women’s rights advocates and decent people the world over — which has turned into a rallying cry for women to come together, to be powerful, to get out the vote.

There is such a dynamic concoction of rage, frustration and excitement flowing through our national dialogue, that to see it broken down into raw emotion and abstracted through ambiguous parables of entertainment, philosophy, art and music has a stabilizing effect. Kjartansson’s work seemed to bring down my heart rate.

Raised in a family of Icelandic actors, Kjartansson draws upon his own history to create work that combines theater with experiments in repetition and endurance. Bringing together live endurance theater, large-scale projection, popular music, photography, painting and drawing, this exhibition introduces American audiences to the collected output of one of today’s most exciting and evolving artists.

“World Light — The Life and Death of an Artist” is a four-channel video installation that shines light into the genius of Kjartansson’s playful brew of philosophy, art, history, perception and entertainment. It documents the artist’s cinematic staging of the epic novel, “World Light,” by the Nobel Prize-wining Icelandic writer Halldor Laxness (1902-1988). The story of a poet whose romantic longing and search for beauty leads to self-destruction, “World Light” is described by Kjartansson as a masterpiece of irony, one that mocks the romantic spirit while also cherishing it.

Kjartansson reenacted the tale with friends, family and a live string ensemble during a one-month performance. The performers were continually on view to the public, allowing the audience to simultaneously watch a show and its backstage production unfold.

“World Light” is 20 hours long, with four component videos playing simultaneously on separate screens, so (needless to say) I did not see the whole thing. But here’s what I did happen to catch: Two men lying dead in the snow, one in a white tuxedo. The camera pans out to show the production crew — the boom mics, then the key grips, then the prop master tossing handfuls of artificial snow from a bucket in front of an industrial fan that blows it onto the actors, then unit directors on computers talking through headsets to the crew. The actors get up, brush off the snow, blow it out of their noses, clear their throats and begin to prepare for the next scene.

Blending together emotional and philosophical environments with armature of their physical construction forms something even more human, flawed, deranged and unusually beautiful than a polished film. It nearly resembles the all-over news coverage of an American political campaign.

The media reports on a candidate’s speeches, press releases, official interviews — things that are composed by campaign managers and press secretaries, designed for public consumption. But they also follow candidates on the campaign trail, reporting on events between their public appearances, speaking with internal sources and exposing background information to scrutinize a candidate’s rhetoric alongside his or her record, history and private life. It is the simultaneous broadcast of both a polished production and its messy internal wiring.

Where is that line between what someone presents to the world and his or her internal environment?

Going to a modern art museum in the current volatile political climate feels especially weird. It is a welcomed change of pace, yet somehow disconnected. When the world is bleeding, it feels uncomfortable, even irresponsible to worry about art.

But the works in “Scandinavian Pain” helped point out to me, an arts writer in Washington, significant differences and commonalities between art and politics. Ragnar Kjartansson made me consider the abstract nature of political language — all predictions, opinions and promises — which somehow made the blistering rhetoric over the past year seem less damaging, less permanent. He also gave me a haven in the private, personal language of art, music and poetry.

His work is so effective because his themes are both deeply personal and widely universal. Ideas of birth, death and family meld with satirical commentary on politics and Western culture. Such a finely tuned sensitivity to one’s time is on some level the sign of a great artist.

Welcome to America, Ragnar Kjartansson. We are also in pain. Perhaps we can lean on one another.