Where once performance art was a “scary, visceral, rude, wild, revolutionary” medium, you could now be forgiven for thinking it has become “too safe, too middle class”, said Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Thank goodness, then, for the Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson. Now 40, Kjartansson has been described as “the world’s finest performance artist” – and this may not be an exaggeration. The Barbican’s new retrospective of his work since 2000 brings together performance, music, film and painting, taking in everything from video works in which the artist’s mother spits in his face repeatedly, to a live performance featuring ten “unkempt” guitarists singing a song about his conception. It is “tangy, exciting, inventive, visually intoxicating” and, yes, “obsessive and unsafe”.
Kjartansson began his career as a musician and has…
