Posts tagged David Thor Jonsson
Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss
By Alexander Ferrando
A twelve-hour- long repetition of an excerpt from the final act of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro sounds disagreeable, or so one might think. Replete with a full orchestra, operatic singers in Baroque costumes, namely the great Icelandic tenor Kristján Jóhannsson, Ragnar Kjartansson’s Bliss quite extraordinarily incorporated all its parts to create one engrossing situation at the Abrons Art Center. For his Performa Commission, Kjartansson wed the spectacle of opera with the dramatics of endurance art—two disparate disciplines hardly known in today’s attention deficient culture for their ability to captivate—to present a performance that was anything but boring.
