A Last Visit to The Visitors – Disquiet

I don’t carry slips of paper much anymore. I photograph them, and if they’re needed for regular reference, then I add them to my phone’s favorites. This one has been on my phone for almost a year.

The document lists the show times for Ragnar Kjartansson’s installation The Visitors, which has been exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for the last few years. (At some point in the past, I was asking the ticket salesperson at the museum when the next showing was, and she pulled out this sheet. With her approval, I took this quick shot of it.)

That extended stay at SFMOMA came to a close on Sunday, September 28. I managed one last visit on Thursday, when the museum is open late. If you’re not familiar with The Visitors, look it up. It’s a fantastic, hour-long work in which members of a musical ensemble, led by Kjartansson, perform a single, slow piece of music. Each musician in the group is given their own screen, showing a different setting in a massive old home — equal parts dilapidated and stately — and there’s an additional screen that shows a view of the building from the outside, where an audience has gathered on the porch. The whole thing was recorded in real time in one take.

I notice different things in the sound and the images every time — at this point countless — that I take in The Visitors, and two things stood out this visit:

One was that the roadie seen at the very end of the hour is also there at the opening. I love the closing bits of the experience, as he walks around the house, thus making it possible for the audience to, finally, connect the various screens’ relative proximity based on his path.

The other was that the audience at SFMOMA came, at the end, to collectively focus on that outside-view screen, and in turn came to resemble the audience within the work. By watching together, we had, in effect, turned the gallery into a porch. When I noticed this, I stepped back into the furthest corner, took a photo of what I was witnessing, and recognized that Kjartansson has engineered a scenario in which is audience became a tableau just like the one he had filmed.

I can’t wait to see The Visitors again, likely in some other city, and to see how the audience responds there.