Pop Music and the Reykjavik Art Scene
The Iceland Airwaves Festival was held this month as every autumn, featuring progressive popular music by Icelandic bands and artists, as well as by visiting acts from around the world. As always, the festival attracted crowds of music journalists from all over, eager to sample to delights of Reykjavík’s chaotic music scene as the city “opens its indie-rock heart for the über-hip music festival”, to quote MTV. The variety and sheer extent of the city’s cultural scene continues to baffle these visitors as Alex Ross writes in the New Yorker: “When considered en masse, the music of Iceland is startlingly diverse.” Part of the explanation may be sought in the extensive crossover between the music scene and other forms of art.
It may seem obvious to link contemporary art and current popular music but in fact the parallels are not so easily drawn. Historically we know that Jackson Pollock liked bebop and there was a clear synergy between music and the various visual arts in the 1960s but the connections are hard to map and much depends on personal relationships and the indistinct boundaries where art blends into design and consumer packaging or where more adventurous (and less commercial) artists and musicians team up for shows and performances that generally do not attract wide attention. This may, indeed, be why the link between the art and music scenes seems so much closer in Iceland than in larger societies: Since neither artists nor musicians have much hope of making significant amounts of money on their work, there is little commercial pressure and they can devote their energies to projects that would seem impossibly whimsical where the financial stakes in cultural life are higher.
Recent years have seen interesting crossovers in art and music and with the younger generation the two scenes have merged in interesting ways. The KlinK & BanK collective with its large factory-studio-complex in the Reykjavík city centre features both visual artists and musicians sharing space and often performing and exhibiting in tandem. They have also found that promotion involving both music and art is more likely to attract attention than more conventional art presentations or concerts. The scene has a reputation for originality and unconventional approaches, not least in that it does not respect the conventional boundaries between genres and art forms.
The international prominence of Björk has been influential and her active participation in various projects has done a lot to help foster the multi-disciplinary approach. Gabriela Friðriksdóttir’s Icelandic Pavilion at the Venice Biennale this summer featured music composed by Björk, among others, and as could be expected this drew a lot of attention. in fact the collaboration cuts both ways as Gabriela has also provided art for Björk’s album covers and taken part in shaping the visual style of her presentation, all much in the collective spirit which both of them cite as the basis of their art.
Some artists have also managed to bridge music and art in their own work, among them Egill Sæbjörnsson whom we wrote about in the last issue. Another notable example is Ragnar Kjaransson whose contribution to the Reykjavik Art Festival this summer was one of the most original pieces, a three-week performance in a disused community centre on Iceland’s sparsely populated southern coast. Ragnar also fronts one of the hottest bands in Reykjavík, Trabant, with a dedicated fan base that turns their every performance into a sweaty fest of dance as he sings his song “Nasty Boy” and other instantly recognizable hits.
http://www.icelandairwaves.com/
