Although Björk’s music was always above reproach, her relationship with the art world was more complex. Yes, we all loved her appearance at the opening of the Venice Biennale this year in a DJ set dressed like Lapopo, but her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015 may have been the institution’s worst-reviewed show ever. Jason Farago called it “a fiasco”, Jerry Saltz called it “a turbulent mess”, and Roberta Smith called it “childish and absurdly boring”. And all this hatred was collected in turn by the great New York critic Peter Schjeldahl, who said that the museum had “ridiculously gone out of the way of the wannabe collection.”
But Venice proved that we will never tire of seeing Björk appear in an artistic context. “Echolalia” and “Metamorphlings,” two concurrent exhibitions that opened earlier this summer at the National Gallery of Iceland for the Reykjavik Arts Festival, take over all four of the museum’s galleries in collaboration with the collaborative world of Björk and James Merry, its longtime creative director. Merry’s show marks the first retrospective of his career at the museum, featuring more than 80 masks and ritual objects including embroidery, metalwork, jewelry and 3D printing, made for Björk but also for Tilda Swinton and Iris van Herpen. Björk’s half consists of three immersive music-centric installations: a preview of her upcoming album and two elegies from the album’s era Vosora (2022), predecessor and Sad soil. This is a tribute to her late mother, environmental activist Hildur Rúna Hauksdóttir, and is being re-staged in Reykjavik on a theatrical scale. The one-day attached rave, also called Echolalia, will coincide with the August 12 solar eclipse in Hafnarfjörður and celebrate the 40th anniversary of the brand Björk co-founded, Smekkleysa (“Bad Taste”).
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“Björk: Echolalia“ |
In the catalogue, Merry says he finds it amusing to sometimes be identified as “Björk’s mask maker”, because “it was always like this little side quest I’d do at night”. Moth (2015) came out of an all-nighter while the two lived together to prepare for the ill-fated MoMA show and first live performance of Vulnicura (2015), her album documenting her breakup with Matthew Barney. Björk had left moth samples in the kitchen and Merry used them to provide a dramatic, curvy shape. Like much of Barney’s work, it demonstrates the influence of science fiction and S&M, but there is no doubt that the piece is out of its realm. Look closely and you will see symmetry in the appearance of the pearls, and order in the chaos.
Björk always lets you find her bass notes. Divorce is good, but what about the bigger end? Its resin Sega spoon (2021) She came out of a period in which her mother, grandmother, and grandfather died. Björk sat on her grandfather’s deathbed and on his last day was handed “this ugly plastic spoon” to give him glycerin to ease his breathing. I asked Merry to design a more beautiful death spoon. He took his inspiration from the Icelandic tonglort (also known as the “moon plant”), as well as the mouths of small birds. Appears in the movie to predecessora small, shiny, exotic purple orchid that contains a small receptacle that can hold the sap. in the museum, predecessor It is organized as a ritual procession in a remote Icelandic valley. Sindri Eldon, Björk’s son, sings in the chorus and one can see how the spoon represents all these themes in one thing. Life is not the sum of zero, but rather passes from one entity to another.
The collaboration between Merry and Björk can be seen in this light as well: translating one person’s energy into new forms. The song Sad soil In these galleries it becomes a nine-part polyphonic choral mass presented as a spatial audio installation with 30 speakers, each transmitting one voice from the Hamrahlíð Choir conducted by Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir – the conductor who conducted Björk in the same choir when she was a 16-year-old member of the Icelandic post-punk band Tappi Tíkarrass (“Cork The Ass Bitch”). Björk is not someone who lacks creativity but thrives on guidance and collaboration. “I got four hundred eggs,” she sings. Sad soil“But only two or three nests.” This gallery looks at a few of those nests.
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