Marc Weidenbaum on the closing of Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors at SFMOMA. In its latest run here I went about half a dozen times; it was a wonderfully meditative experience for me and I’m going to miss it.
I notice different things in the sound and the images every time — at this point countless — that I take in The Visitors, and two things stood out this visit:
One was that the roadie seen at the very end of the hour is also there at the opening. I love the closing bits of the experience, as he walks around the house, thus making it possible for the audience to, finally, connect the various screens’ relative proximity based on his path.
The other was that the audience at SFMOMA came, at the end, to collectively focus on that outside-view screen, and in turn came to resemble the audience within the work. By watching together, we had, in effect, turned the gallery into a porch. When I noticed this, I stepped back into the furthest corner, took a photo of what I was witnessing, and recognized that Kjartansson has engineered a scenario in which is audience became a tableau just like the one he had filmed.