The idea sounds jubilant and inviting, at first; soon it grins with a senile smile. A theatre director wins a McArthur genius award that encourages him to create a timeless masterpiece without concerning the finance, and a couple walks singing backdropped in the Icelandic landscape, guitar in hand and wind interweaving with the music.
The liberated performances yet fail to land with a relatable warmth. Instead, it coils, twists, resists your effort to read. Behind the mask of the lens, both music and plays are supposed to be performed live, to have a stage and then extend beyond the stage. A camera yet restrings the seated audience from a theatre to its boundary, a force that aims for a chilling blend-in.
The artist views his video installation as a “kinetic sculpture” (artist’s interview), encouraging exploration from different physical angles that complement each other. Viewers are moved, indeed, but only to be barred from the created illusion on the screen. It is fairly rare to see a contemporary Icelandic artist premiering their work at the Metropolitan, and this means that the idyllic landscape in Death is rendered otherworldly from its home-coming nature.
You are awed and subdued by this escape from the metropolitan, until you see a visitor starting to approach the circular screens. Dressed in a bright orange T-shirt, unseemly as those alerting roadblocks in a hot summer day, he appears to be both reaching for the landscape and playfully shadowing himself in the projected image. The singing couples, of course, do not respond. They are well protected in a world without cause and consequence— the world is folded into a loop, allowing no accidental bifurcations or deviations—and death is kept away with no passing of time.
You take out the phone when a message rings through — connecting you to your world where, unlike here on the lower floor of Lehman wing, the signals are robust and constantly flood you with information and direction — and you realize 45 minutes have passed since you trapped yourself in this loop. When watches become often a badge of class rather than keeper of time, is time freed to elapse in a frivolous manner? You begin to picture a tuxedoed bald man waltzes his way as if weaving across the seven screens around you and blindfold you against the passing.
So where do you stand? Which world, if there’s any self-contained world, are you breathing in? You cannot tolerate an ambivalence as such, risking your life on a dangling cliff. The same question rises when you find yourself almost frustrated with the never-ending constructions in Synecdoche New York.