One Fine Show: “Björk, Echolalia” and “James Merry, Metamorphlings” at the National Gallery of Iceland |
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One Fine Show: “Björk, Echolalia” and “James Merry, Metamorphlings” at the National Gallery of Iceland
Twin exhibitions bring together three immersive sound installations by Björk—including elegies for her late mother, staged at theatrical scale for the first time—and 80 masks and ritual objects by Merry.
Though Björk’s music has always been beyond reproach, her relationship with the art world has been more complicated. Yes, we all loved that she popped up at the opening of the Venice Biennale this year for a DJ set during which she was dressed like a Labubu, but her retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in 2015 was probably the institution’s worst reviewed show of all time. Jason Farago called it a “fiasco,” Jerry Saltz called it “a discombobulated mess,” and Roberta Smith called it “ludicrously infantilizing and tedious.” And all that hate was in turn collected by the ordinarily groovy New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl, who said the museum came “off ridiculous in the way of a wannabe groupie.”
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