Clearly we went to The Broad again.
Turns out we missed a great deal when went shortly after the new museum opened, chiefly, for me, Ragnar Kjartansson’s performance art piece, The Visitors. For the piece, Icelandic artist Kjartansson invited friends and fellow musicians up to a dilapidated, gothically beautiful mansion in upstate New York and recorded them all performing an hour-plus long song in unison, each in different rooms of the mansion. The result was personally touching for me—it brought me to tears and, once I walked into the room where the piece is running, with nine dedicated HD projections and associated speakers, I couldn’t leave.
It’s beautiful, haunting, emotionally stunning, and any words I write or images I post of it will, in my opinion, fall far short of it as a work of art. I strongly encourage anyone reading this to make plans to experience it as soon as humanly possible. It’s now one of my favorite performance pieces ever.
Oh. And one of the instruments that makes up the song is a cannon being fired.