This issue features a microinterview with Ragnar Kjartansson, a performance and video artist from Iceland. Kjartansson’s work often involves heroic acts of repetition and the removal of clothing, occasionally in odd locations. He once filmed a piece in which his own mother cleared her throat and spat viciously in his face. A six-month performance for the Venice Biennale, The End, involved the artist showing up each day to drink, smoke, and paint 144 portraits of his peer Páll Haukur Björnsson. For his art, Kjartansson has paid gypsies to lie on a grave in a public cemetery, dressed as the grim reaper and addressed a gaggle of schoolchildren, and gotten drunk at a blue-chip gallery party while singing “Ode to Joy.” Kjartansson is also the former flamboyant front man for an actual, successful rock band, Trabant. The Believer conducted this microinterview with Kjartansson at the Modern, a bar on MoMA’s first floor.

–Scott Indrisek

PART I

THE BELIEVER: In those performances, when you’re singing the same phrase over and over again: If I was standing in an audience watching the performance for an hour, for two hours, my attention would drift. I’d let my mind wander, but I’d come back to it.

RAGNAR KJARTANSSON: Your mind starts traveling and goes back. And I’m so interested in that because I used to be really religious when I was a teenager. Once, the priest said: “God speaks to when you are asleep, so never feel ashamed of falling asleep in church.” So I thought toward art, a concert, in a theater. It’s not bad if you go to sleep. One of my favorite movies, La Dolce Vita—I’ve seen it five times but I’ve never been able to finish it. When the psychedelic, crazy part starts—I don’t know, I think it’s psychedelic because I always fall asleep at that part. La Dolce Vita is the ultimate art piece: you follow it, you fall asleep, and then you wake up at the end. It’s so great.

PART II

BLVR: Many ’70s performance artists were lacking, to a degree, this really robust sense of humor. Is there an Icelandic sense of humor?

RK: In a way there is kind of this Nordic sense of humor: Icelandic, Swedish, and Finnish humor. It’s totally depressing, kind of like Ingmar Bergman movies. They’re ridiculously funny. I think it mainly comes from all the Lutheranism, this very dry religion, really heavy shit. In most religions, you are not totally responsible for your sins. In Lutheranism you are totally responsible. There is no middleman between you and God, and that’s depressing. It’s totally an impossible situation. It’s just guilt,...