The Icelandic artist presents six of his performance and installation pieces in Buffalo. With one exception, they each speak, with sweet jest and eloquent irony, to why we hold onto received ideas like they were flotsam in a whirlpool. He takes apart the tradition of uncomplicated mommy love by having his own mom spit on him (Me and My Mother, 2000–25). He literalizes, with a live performance in a tuxedo, the reactionary idea that masculinity as we know it is, gasp, in peril (Bangemand/Scaredman, 2023). And he sends up idyllic romance among the rich (Scenes from Western Culture: The Boat, 2015) with less TV-bred flab and distraction than White Lotus.

The one exception to this cliché-coded tendency is breathtakingly committed to creating an epic out of perilous sincerity: Kjartansson’s The Visitors (2012). It’s only been about 15 years since its debut, but Kjartansson’s nine-screen video installation has already acquired legendary status. Rightly so: If you’ve never witnessed these melancholic Icelandic musicians and bohemian layabouts muse for over an hour with their warbled-out, perfectly imperfect tune about getting in touch with your feminine ways … well, you haven’t lived. The Visitors is routinely cited as one of the greatest works of art of the 21st century. ARTnews ranked it Number 51 on one such list; and The Guardian took it further, crowned it number 1. For me, it’s the best video installation to bring your crush to on a first date: This cuffing season, consider Buffalo, NY.

Though The Visitors has been praised widely, it’s been hosanna’d in too annoyingly presentist terms. “Imbued with the optimism of the Obama years” declared The Guardian. “Echoes and distills our gradual, vaccine-assisted transition from prolonged isolation to summertime resumption of social life” boomed The Washington Post. Inaccurate! There will be fans a century from now who won’t know all that! Kjartansson more accurately (and more modestly) describes the work himself to The Post: “It’s a bunch of Icelandic White kids being drunk in some fancy mansion and playing mediocre country.”

And who doesn’t dream of such a vibe? Sloppy, climaxing in an irregular manner, funny, felt through with strange human voices that the robot could never replicate: The Visitors is sexy, gorgeous, alive to fluctuation. In its imperfect musical eccentricity, it proves that humans are capable of more than rote checkmarked correctness. And it’s no paean to singular male genius: It’s a proudly collaborative work, sui generis and communal, a milestone in the long global histoire(s) de l’art.

Each visitor exists morosely within their own screen or box, like all of us in iPhone-land, yearning for that mystical love connection. After the cannon booms shatters these boxes, the ensemble tumbles together in a finale worthy of Tchaikovsky. It’s a reminder that I—no, we—exist. And all of a sudden, it’s like we can make it work in this lifetime. This is movie fantasy at its highest. Fantasies guide us. They will harden into cliché, sure, but in the spring, they’ll melt into dream.

Beyond The Visitors, the other great draw of the Buffalo exhibition is Sunday Without Love (2025). It comprises a tableau vivant recreation of a midcentury postcard Kjartansson once received, showing a sunny and green Italian mountainside. In the video version, a ragtag group of Von Trapp Family-esque singers in mountain peasant regalia sing a song, with the paterfamilias (Kjartansson) leading on jazz guitar. True to Kjartansson-ian form, there is only one maniacally repeated chorus, adapted from a 1996 German comic song: “You must learn to live. Live without love. Love is not … good for you. Stop all this longing …”

This sly perversion of The Sound of Music (1965) starts off initially as one of Kjartansson’s minor jokes. The idea might seem clever, as if the artist has cannily illustrated how the lovey-dovey notion of romance and family is hokey, brain-dead, false. But the performance goes on. More voices, more instruments beyond Ragnar’s jazz guitar join in—even children, with their sweetly warbled vocals and harps. Soon, what is repetitive is fresh again. The more the lyrics swish around, the more their implications start to weigh. One feels both the solitude and the solidarity of mutual romantic delusion.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, Kjartansson burrows deep into the zone of the obvious, tackling such weather-beaten subjects as love, mothers, home, friendship, and manliness. He approaches the world with humility, as when, in a sublime nanosecond, he disrobes in The Visitors and uses his towel to clean a pool of freshly popped champagne off the wooden 19th-century Upstate New York floors. (He is, after all, a mere visitor to this house.) He’s tickled by everything, and he uses performance—the bizarre movements of the humming body—to analyze that which unnerves him and his friends.

Among his influences Kjartansson counts Carolee Schneemann, Yoko Ono, Chris Burden, and Marina Abramović. From them, he creates a startling, almost manic-depressive mélange, coupling art history with a love of the pop song and the Hollywood film.

Still, one can’t predict where Kjartansson’s fancy will bring him next. He can be sly, winking, and open-armed, but also chilly, brainy, ironic. In Scaredman, a live performance sees a man in a tuxedo trying to scale a tiny ledge hovering over the gallery. It’s Kjartansson’s most blatant work, yet its thrilling banality lingers in my mind. What is going through the post-Fluxus stuntman’s mind?

One figure looms over the show: the alternative family. Philip Larkin’s dictum “they fuck you up, your mum and dad” is well illustrated by the one-two sucker punch of Me and My Mother and The Visitors. Get together with great friends. Find a house. Make art in it. What kind? Doesn’t matter. Every day, we are isolated; only headphones connect us. But we’re still somehow able to march to a shared erratic rhythm, a shifting time signature. We are all orphans of capital, rotting like the wood in the house wherein we squat. We are beset with limitations. So why not create—furiously, blindly, passionately? The song we write will have no conventional climax. Dull spells and lulls will crop up, building like waves, peaking, crashing, then dissipating.