The Visitors
About a year ago we were staying with some friends in D.C. and on a whim went to the Hirschhorn. One of the exhibitions was a survey of the work of Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartensson. The show was billed as an exploration of "Scandinavian pain" — in fact, the words were emblazoned in giant pink neon letters as you entered — but it turned out to be more accessible and funny than that makes it sound.
The centerpiece of the show was a work called The Visitors, a nine-screen video installation spread across a huge darkened gallery. Each screen shows one room of a dilapidated upstate New York mansion and one musician playing their part of a song they are performing together there, kept in sync by an elaborate setup of cables and headphones. It sounds a bit like a game of Clue: a cigar-smoking man with the upright piano in the drawing room, a young man with a banjo in the library, a woman with an accordion in the bedroom, etc. Kjartensson himself lies naked in a sudsy clawfoot tub, strumming an acoustic guitar. The song is minor-key dirge that builds for over who knows how long, more than an hour, with lyrics by Kjartensson's wife, from whom he was recently divorced. It culminates in a refrain that is repeated over and over: "Once again I fall into my feminine ways."
We wandered in on The Visitors somewhere near the beginning, and almost against my will I found it utterly absorbing and indescribably moving. It made the idea of harmony seem so fragile and miraculous, and so lonely. I remember feeling awkward in my winter coat, bulky and insulated. I didn't want to wear it anymore and I didn't want to carry it.
Walking from screen to screen, I felt buffeted by waves of melancholy surging from each musician's realm. Maybe it was a synaesthetic illusion, maybe it was how the installation was designed, but moving closer to a specific screen seemed to make the ambient sound of that room louder. There was no vantage point from which the sound seemed perfectly balanced, no place from where you could take it all in, and part of the sadness in moving through the space was knowing you were losing something. It occurred to me that isolation was also oscillation.
I wasn't sure what to take away from The Visitors, or how long to stay with it. It felt very personal. I had it in my mind that the friends I came with were ready to move on. The song was so long that I wondered if the musicians got sick of the same changes.
With all the song's repetitions I would think of new possibilities for what "my feminine ways" were supposed to be, and they all felt vaguely like indictments. There are so many gender-based scripts that can keep things going and make the meaning of behavior ambiguous in its conformity. It seems like some of those scripts are currently in the process of being rewritten or discarded. Maybe it always seems that way.
As I remember it, we stayed to the end of the The Visitors, when all the musicians make their way out of their separate rooms and convene on the yard out in front of the mansion. Then they continue the refrain together, "Once again I fall into my feminine ways" a capella, as they walk down through a pasture to the Hudson River. One camera holds them in view as the fade in the distance. The rest of the screens, if I remember it right, showed empty rooms. We let ourselves be left behind.
At the Hirschhorn, the wall card for The Visitors noted that it was inspired by the Swedish group Abba's final album, also called The Visitors. This surprised me; I knew the album but only as the Abba record without any big hits. My go-to Abba album had always been Arrival, the one where the two couples who made up the group are sitting together in the bubble of a helicopter on the cover — a sublimely ridiculous deadpan image.
The cover of The Visitors couldn't be more different. It's hard to see anything in it at first; it's a grimy wash of yellow and brown, as if someone developed it in dirty ashtray water. But once your eyes adjust, you can make out the four members of the group seen from a distance, standing apart from each other in a dimly lit atelier, their shadows looming large on a wall of oil paintings behind them. It looks as though they has all been Photoshopped into the image independently of one another.
On the back, the front-cover image is repeated but within its own frame among the other artworks, a reflection of the album's semi-recursivity. There is no "real" scene, just art within art within art. Presumably the songs on the album, which was recorded in the wake of both couples divorcing, should be read as having at best an ambiguous relationship to their lives. It's more Scandinavian pain, marketed commercially on the widest possible scale.
That all helps make the connection to Kjartensson's work more obvious — the moody manorial backdrop, the isolation within a collective, the sense of life as a set of frames, the working through a breakup by making music. Then there's the song "The Visitors" itself, which opens the album. It's like Abba's answer to the Walker Brothers' Nite Flights, full of sinister ambience and paranoia from the very first line, intoned in a frosty, processed voice: "I hear the doorbell ring and suddenly panic takes me."
The song is ostensibly about life under surveillance from a totalitarian government, or something even more 2112-ish, but it's easy to take lines out of context and read them as cries of relationship despair: "Numb and frozen/ Among the things I love so dearly"; "My whole world is falling, going crazy,/ There is no escaping now, I'm cracking up"; "These walls have witnessed the anguish of humiliation" and so on. The refrain is especially ominous and chilling when decontextualized: "I have been waiting for these visitors."
It seems absurd to me to interpret that literally, as referring to some Stasi-like team of thugs coming to take the singer away. As with the "feminine ways" at the Hirschhorn that day, I come up with different possibilities for who the "visitors" might be — paparazzi? schizophrenia? the ghosts of those we've wronged? a gaslighting husband's tricks? — but it doesn't matter; inevitability itself seems like the expected, unwelcome guest.
The other day I was listening to The Visitors — it's since become my favorite Abba album — and I was trying to remember the full names of the women in Abba. I knew they were the two A's in the ABBA acronym, Anni-Frid and Agnetha (the men are Benny and Björn), but I was curious about their last names. I could have looked it up on my phone, but I was already holding the album jacket, so I looked there, only to discover that they are not credited among the musicians on the back cover, or anywhere on the inner sleeve. They don't have songwriting credits either. It's like they are unannounced visitors on their own album.
I wondered if this was some sort of pettiness on the part of Benny and Björn (who are credited with having written, arranged, and produced all the songs, as well as having played acoustic guitars, keyboards and synthesizers), but looking back at Super Trouper, Voulez-Vous, and The Album it was basically the same story. The names Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad do not appear. In a sense they were visitors to their whole career.