Bjork Moma 2015
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(2) Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY.
(3) in 2015, The Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a large-scale retrospective to Björk, and commissioned a new work by her, considering her to be one of the defining artistic practitioners of our times. At the heart of Björk’s work as a seminal composer, singer, and writer is the ongoing creation of relevant new content, expressed not solely as music, but also as innovative forms that cross all channels of our media-driven society.. Björk, aged one month.. Artists work with the images, sounds, and forms that surround them in daily life. Younger generations, in particular, are not only inspired and shaped by work that fits into a frame or onto a pedestal. Music, images, film, video, words, and sounds are experienced in real-life social settings such as museums, galleries, concert halls, and theatres, but also online and in the media. Björk is a groundbreaking pioneer in connecting many different creative practices in and around her work. An uncompromisingly original and highly accomplished auteur and solo artist in her composing, singing, and music, she is notably open to collaboration and interpretation of her output, extending even into education and audience participation. Over the decades she has developed a highly collaborative practice in order to visualize her music and lyrics. Working with photographers, film- and video-makers, designers, architects, craftsmen, and inventors, she crosses over into all categories of high and low culture, digital and analog, in most creative fields. With her music itself she bridges the classical and the experimental, the folkloric and the popular, the rural and the metropolitan, the visceral and the technological, the pagan and ancient with the futuristic and new; she even bridges the gaps between man and machine, living beings and dead material. Björk herself seems to be composed of binaries: aggressively vulnerable, bold and fragile, wild and sensitive, little girl and femme fatale, innocent creature of nature and romantic mountain hiker on the one hand and urban highflyer and metropolitan nightlife animal on the other. Driven by instinct and intuition, but at the same time methodical and almost scientific in her ways of exploring new form and content, she creates work that is highly personal as well as poetic, and often political and activist. She is the melancholic, suffering dancer in the dark, and at the same time the “violently happy” character singing “all is full of love.” As an era-defining artist, she has also been a catalyst and inspiration for a wider culture. As a woman from a geographically peripheral country—Iceland, with its mere 320,000 inhabitants—she can simultaneously be eccentric and take center-stage, be experimental and open the Olympic games, be alternative and nominated for an Academy Award (and shock at the Oscar ceremonies with her radical sense of sartorial expression). Over the last 22 years Björk has created an exemplary body of work that is grounded in seven seminal albums. For each album she has created a complex, multifaceted character, creating striking visual images that express and embody her music. These characters form the heart of this exploration.. Roots in 1944, after six hundred years of Danish rule, Iceland declared independence, establishing a new and sovereign republic. Björk’s parents were born shortly after the founding of the republic, and both grew into strong activists and civil leaders. Björk’s generation, born twenty years later, were the children of the first free-born Icelanders. This generation were naturally connected to native Icelandic tradition, but also had an openness to international exchange and opportunities to travel. Culturally, for native Icelanders, pagan tradition, folkloristic storytelling, and the universal mass-media society collided at an accelerated pace. After her parents separated when she was a year old, Björk was raised in a bohemian environment of creative people on her mother’s side and responsible craftsmen and later union activists on her father’s. Her mother was, as Björk describes her, a “dreamer,” who took her out of traditional patriarchy to live in a commune of musicians and artists on the outskirts of Reykjavík, a setting which Björk now describes as “a fairy tale.” Her paternal grandmother was an abstract painter, who took the young Björk to museums. Björk was inspired very early on to be both the wild, liberal spirit in the more traditional/ conservative/bourgeois paternal family, while at the same time acting as the responsible “wake-up call” for her mother’s more liberal way of life. For the first five years of her life she lived in the commune as an only child, but then acquired one halfbrother on her mother’s side and three half-brothers and three half-sisters on her father’s. Björk’s musical talent and open nature were evident from a young age. When she was still at school, she would ride the bus and sing in front of anybody who happened to be on it. She would also sing and improvise while walking to and from school. She liked to help the teachers distribute food and snacks to the other schoolchildren, rather than being part of the group being cared for. From the ages of five to fifteen, in addition to regular school, she attended a specialized music school. Several days a week she studied the theory and practice of music, and received a classical music education on the flute and recorder. While in music school, it was clear to Björk that she was fascinated by the study of musicology—the structure and composition of songs—which in many ways was one of the important educational principles of her album Biophilia, released in 2011. In early 1977, when Björk was eleven, she recorded her first album, and it made her a national celebrity. Bearing in mind Iceland’s small population—with most living in her home town of Reykjavík—she was not yet comfortable becoming a recognized public figure. Having lost her anonymity, she refrained from composing and releasing a second solo album. Instead, she dived into the group dynamics of an art collective and several different bands. In so doing, she was working collaboratively on her creative process, but much less visibly than if acting as a solo artist. It took her until she turned twenty-seven to appear on the cover of a solo album again.. During her teens, from 1980 to 1984, Björk was involved with a surrealist poetry, painting, and photography collective in Reykjavík which went by the name of Medúsa. The group members have remained important friends and collaborators, including Sjón, Matthías Magnússon, Ólafur Engilbertsson, Einar Melax, and þór Eldon, to whom Björk was married for five years and who is the father of her son Sindri. The collective opened Björk up to new ideas, and she began reading Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille and The Demon Flower by Jo Imog, which, she says, “basically became part of my DNA.” 1 Björk was also in the bands Spit and Snot, Exodus, Tappi Tíkarrass, and most notably the punk and orchestral group Kukl (1982–1984) and The Sugarcubes (1986–1992), meeting several important musicians and collaborators, among them Eldon, Einar Örn Benediktsson, Sigtryggur Baldursson, Einar Melax, Birgir Mogensen, Guðlaugur Óttarsson, and Bragi Ólafsson. Ásmundur Jónsson and Einar Örn Benediktsson were in addition members of a group called Gramm, who owned an Icelandic indie shop from 1979 to 1985, dealing with music, poetry, and literature, and functioning as a meeting place. Gramm, Kukl and Medúsa came together to create an indie label called Bad Taste in 1986, which went on to represent The Sugarcubes. While Björk was with the band she met Derek Birkett, who at the time was the bass guitar player in a British punk band, Flux of Pink Indians, and who has been a collaborator, co-conspirator, and close friend ever since. Musically, Björk broke with the traditions of Beethoven and Mozart and with the history of guitar rock while still in music school. She wanted to do something more organic and embraced Messiaen and Mahler, as well as the chord structures of Kate Bush and Joni Mitchell as female role models. When Björk was sixteen, she traveled to London for the first time and purchased with saved-up money several albums at a Virgin record store. Of the ten to twelve albums she recalls buying, she notes Brian Eno and Robert Fripp’s Evening Star, Eno and David Byrne’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a Kate Bush album, and an album by a band named Hybrid Kids. Björk’s time with Kukl, The Sugarcubes, and other bands provided her with the opportunity to work on covers, videos, and other visualizations within the protection of the group environment. She often took on the task of communicating and working with art directors, video directors, and photographers. At the age of twenty, while pregnant with her first child, she posed with three bananas hanging around her neck for the cover of an Icelandic women’s magazine, and considers this to be the first mature visualization she worked on. In 1992, Björk moved to London, and she released her solo album, Debut, the following year. By the mid-1990s, she had become a world-famous pop icon. She had lost her anonymity again and experienced the commitment of a large fan base that were in the overwhelming majority dedicated and knowledgeable music lovers, though there were exceptions.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 1 Author interview with the artist, May 2014.. 2. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction.
(4) There were two incidents at airports in Thailand and New Zealand, in which photographers harassed her and her young son until she was forced to intervene. Then in 1996, a disturbed fan sent her a letter bomb and tragically committed suicide, which he documented and videotaped. Public visibility had become a double-edged sword.. When the internet became popular in the 1990s, people created fictitious email addresses, such as spiderman@hotmail. It didn’t occur to users in the ’90s that it was a direct address, like a phone number; a name recorded in a passport, like a traceable identity—one to one. In the pre-Google internet era one would create a character that would not be immediately identifiable.. Early on Björk developed strong visual identities; recognizable personas that she adopted without hiding herself behind them. She developed various creative strategies, among them outfitting her characters with sets of signs, traits, and exterior skeletons, and she worked with numerous designers to create “masks” that would give her characters a distinctive look.. Parallel Worlds. Masks the symbol of the mask has been thematized throughout the ages. In the plays of antiquity, actors went on stage with a mask, thus simultaneously embodying a person and a persona, a living and a dead body. By the sixteenth century, the mask had disappeared, as actors felt the need to express the individual emotions behind their roles. The face as mask became the actor’s instrument. The voice, the accent, the diction were also part of the role. In engaging with readable signs—in adopting different masks—the actor could convey different characters. As an artist, Björk has adopted many visually compelling personas. She has worn some of the most experimental headcoverings, including wigs, veils, diamond-studded surfaces, feather ear-pieces, and extreme sculptural dandelion-like head-dresses designed by Maiko Takeda. But the mask is only one palpable, tangible embodiment of the idea of a character. Björk also created distinct, semi-fictitious characters to evoke and perform the author/actor/singer/protagonist/heroine/role of each album, channeling the creative energies of a musical period and galvanizing a mask to reflect the art and artist simultaneously. She made each character a highly detailed, stylized, accomplished, almost sculpted visual construct, being one with the music and acting as its imago. Visual artists have long been preoccupied with masks, characters, and signifiers. In portrait painting, artifacts of personal existence became symbolic objects, often reflecting the subject’s place in life. In recent times, Hiroshi Sugimoto made photographs of historical figures by photographing their Madame Tussaud wax figures, thereby creating the uncanny illusion that people who had been dead for centuries were “undead.” The American artist Cindy Sherman has used her own face, make-up, wigs, and costumes to echo the presence of historical figures for her work. The creation and display of an outward identity is a pronounced characteristic of contemporary life. As 3D scanning and printing become more commonplace, people will have the ability to access their own 3D portraits with ease. In the meantime, the idea of the selfie has produced millions of self-portraits that have found an audience on the internet. With social media such as Facebook and Instagram, the online person and persona are easily blended: document with fiction. Or users can adopt avatars and completely falsify their identity.. björk—globally popular and recognizable, yet at the same time artistically uncompromised and incredibly precise in her practice of finding form—has continued to experiment with identity, simultaneously and often in parallel with the visual arts of her time. In the following thoughts, parallel practices and strategies are exemplified that contextualize her in a productive dialogue with popular culture and the visual arts of her generation. The title of the Buggles’ 1979 hit song “Video Killed the Radio Star” implied that in the future all music would have to be visual, as it would be perceived through television. It took a while for video to become the common “golden” frame of both visual arts and popular music, but it is now one of the most prominent contemporary artistic practices, merging film-making, music, popular culture, fashion, and lifestyle. Music television was one of the identifying mediums for new generations, and there were huge production budgets that made this one of the most fertile art sites and laboratories of the 1990s. Long before iTunes, downloading, and Napster changed the music industry, music television was a dominant force in the cultural landscape. It was also a catalyst in crossing the boundaries of the museum and the pop world. Visual artists were quick to seize upon the territory of the music video, both anticipating it and appropriating it, while musicians and film directors readily embraced the aesthetics of experimental video art and filmmaking. In 1996, Pipilotti Rist, who performed as a member of the feminist punk band Les Reines Prochaines, created her seminal work “Sip My Ocean,” an immersive video and sound installation, which involved the viewer walking into a room filled with colored light and music, and diving into an ocean being projected while listening to a karaoke version of Chris Isaak’s love hymn “Wicked Games,” sung by Rist herself. Claiming the male pop star’s voice and appropriating one of the most romantic tunes of the decade, Rist created a polymorphous whole-body experience in her installation. In her work “Mutaflor,” also from 1996, Rist hungrily looks at the camera then swallows an endoscopic camera, which, after a passage through her body, pops out of her anus, only to be swallowed again. The action is endlessly looped, like playing a single track on auto-repeat. In the 1990s, music audiences were able to hear and see Björk’s work on the hardware that was current at the time of each album’s release, whether that meant watching her on a box TV set or listening to a CD playing on a Discman while jogging or in the bath. The tension between the wet and the dry, the living body and the increasingly mobile prosthetic electronic devices created danger. The panic of electronics potentially falling in the bathtub, harming the body or the electronics, was reflected in Marilouise and Arthur Kroker’s discussion of the phenomenon of male hysteria and angst of bodily liquids in the era when everything seemed to become electric.. In Björk’s work, this motif is perhaps most prominently featured in the video for “All is Full of Love,” in which robots, despite being electrical machines, are having sensual wet intercourse, with bodily liquids flowing voluptuously without causing any visible shortcircuits. The video, a collaboration with director Chris Cunningham, was presented in many art exhibitions of the 1990s, projected and on an auto-repeat loop. The repetitive playing of video art in galleries and listening to a song on a CD in a Discman became like theme songs for certain moments. “All is Full of Love” was widely exhibited in the contemporary art context in the same time period as Doug Aitken’s multi-channel installation “Electric Earth.” While Cunningham and Björk found a sculptural creation in the electronic robot as the point of departure for their video, Aitken searched for sounds and rhythms of nocturnal urban life as music to visualize our world as “electric.” If the music video is the link between the visual arts gallery, music television, and YouTube, there has also been an ongoing use and placement of sound as a sculptural element in contemporary artistic practice. Both space and time can be defined by a sound and by the audience’s perception. For example, in Janet Cardiff’s looped “Forty Piece Motet,” there is a three-minute break between performances of an elevenminute piece of music, sung by a forty-person choir, played on forty speakers installed in the exact spatial configuration of the singers of the choir when the piece was recorded. The singers seem not to know that they are being recorded before and after their singing. They can be heard coughing, clearing their throats, whispering, and so on before they focus on their artistry. They mutate from being individual, private members of the choir carrying out worldly profane actions to embodying perfect artificial singing voices when they each become a persona of the forty-voiced choir singing the motet. Björk’s personal, visceral, and non-artificial singing style also relates to intimacy and a break between the natural voice and the highly trained voice. Her singing goes from intimate whisper into the listener’s ear, as if she were almost touching the recording microphone with her lips, to loud screaming that competes with wind and other forces of nature. Interference of organic human and inorganic technology has been a marker of the times. Standing in a club or at a concert next to the speakers, the body can feel a vibration that resonates, either through sound waves or through direct contact if one is leaning against the box. Even if one steps away, the resonance remains in the body. As a physical phenomenon, this induced the body to dance. The 1990s saw an emerging electro and techno scene in clubs all over the world, as well as nightlife-like levels of sound and dance at daytime raves. The Love Parade was the Woodstock of the ’90s generation. Clubs proved to be an experimental site for music, popular culture, performance, fashion, photography, and moving images to intersect and inspire club kids, the artists themselves, and a wider audience. Sometimes they were simply the location for people to meet and talk and expand horizons and states of mind; at other times they were the occasion for presentation and performance, collaboration, provocation and pioneering creations that couldn’t be ignored, even in the mainstream.. Photo shoot for Volta, 2007, by Bernhard Kristinn.. Björk wearing a wig by Eugene Souleiman and a dress by Iris van Herpen, performing on the Biophilia live tour, 2011.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 4. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction.
(5) Many of Björk’s contemporaries either “met” her on music television or experienced her work as the sound of music that you would dance to, that would be sampled and played over and over again in the ’90s club scene. In parallel to music television, the club scene was a porous membrane and interfaced with popular culture into the visual arts and other practices. Leigh Bowery was a strong presence and fixture on the London scene when Björk moved to the city in the early 1990s. He was one of the most prominent artists of the 1980s and early ’90s whose practice was truly collaborative. Blurring the boundaries between author and muse, fashion designer and model, club kid and performance artist, provocateur and seminal innovator, he became famous for creating costumes that covered his monumental body, including his feet, hands, and most importantly face. He disguised and disfigured himself with Scotch tape, safety pins, experimental make-up, and masks, and he made himself even taller by wearing platform shoes. He turned himself from a recognizable person, a human being, into a sign, an object like a state of being, which would be alienating and disturbing in an everyday environment. During this time he posed for the painter Lucian Freud. He also collaborated with Charles Atlas and Michael Clark on videos and choreography. In a city which—ever since the “Freeze” exhibition of 1988, organized by Damien Hirst—had been at the forefront of the new Young British Artist scene, Leigh Bowery had a potent effect on popular culture and left a highly influential oeuvre.. While the face mask in Wolfson’s kinetic sculpture gives away the view of artificial glass eyes with cameras, in Pierre Huyghe’s recent film work Human Mask (2014), based on a reallife situation, a monkey was trained as a waitress and wore a human mask over its face. The viewer can see the animal’s eyes through the slits in the dead object of the human mask. A wig covers the monkey’s head, but the small dress it is wearing does not cover its hairy body. The lines between the living and the dead body, animal and human, object and subject are blurred in a highly disorienting, disturbing way. The works by Wolfson and Huyghe further the dialogue with Björk’s recognizable robot face mask in “All is Full of Love.” Watching the video allows viewers to see Björk’s own eyes, behind or through the opening of the robot’s mask portrait—a portrait of Björk of herself.. In the 1990s Paris scene, relational aesthetics and post-conceptual approaches gave Björk a different context. In 1999, Philippe Parreno and Pierre Huyghe bought the rights to a Japanese anime character, which they named “Annlee” (a.k.a. Ann Lee). They invited other artists, including Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster and Björk’s longtime collaborators M/M, to devise artworks based around the figure. Videos, works on paper, and even performance pieces were created within this framework. Ann Lee was a fictitious character born out of collaborative imagination; artist Jordan Wolfson’s female figure, on the other hand, was modeled after a real person, Lady Gaga. Wolfson created a cyborg robot wearing a mask, simultaneously portraying and disguising a famous pop star. The robot appears to interact with one person at a time, claiming itself to be not an object but a subject, seducing, and blurring the lines between human being and machine, technology and emotion. Wolfson’s female figure is also an important continuation of Björk’s robots in her “All is Full of Love” video. But here it is not a question of two robots interacting with each other in front of a large TV audience; it is more the embodiment of a live character interacting with an audience. The jump from the 1990s perception of performance as recorded video has materialized into a one-on-one encounter, reflecting the paradigm shift that, today, participation is the proof of performativity.. For the 2015 exhibition at MoMA, Björk created the work “Black Lake,” which was filmed on location in Iceland during the summer of 2014. She conceived the song’s visualization with director Andrew Thomas Huang, with whom she had previously worked on the video for “Mutual Core.” “Black Lake” is an eleven-minute-long looped composition that deals with the expression of the pain that Björk went through during her separation from artist Matthew Barney; a cathartic acknowledgment of this pain, as if only dying to be reborn. For the video she worked with choreographer Erna Ómarsdóttir on expressive, dance-like movements, through which she palpably exorcised her pain, resonating with viewers and listeners, but also making the growth, reincarnation, and rebirth of her character a necessary and natural outcome of the process.. Stills from “Black Lake,” commissioned by The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, 2015.. Marina Abramović and Ulay pioneered new ideas of autobiography as part of an artist’s work. They called their living together in a truck, driving around Europe from performance to performance, “art vital,” claiming that life was art and art was life. The pair merged their personal and love lives with their artistic practice. Until the 1980s and early ’90s many pop stars had a personal life that was completely at odds with their public persona (George Michael, for example, singing heterosexual love songs with a playboy image). Björk, meanwhile, was always very authentic both on and off the stage. While her work contains elements of fiction and poetry, it seems nonetheless— like Abramović’s work—to be essentially true to her real life.. I sat in the prep trailer during the filming of “Black Lake” in the Icelandic landscape. All of a sudden I found myself listening to some music that sounded otherworldly; visceral and at the same time ephemeral; very real and rooted, but nonetheless ethereal. “What’s that?” I asked. “Do you all hear that?” James Merry, Björk’s personal assistant and close collaborator, who was instrumental in the visual identity of the video, answered, “That’s the artist Fatima al Qadiri. She included a Chinese singer interpreting Sinead O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ on her new album.”. Was hearing the famous song translated into Chinese such a displacement that it caught my full attention? No, that was not all I was hearing. In the background, behind a curtain, Björk was tuning her voice, exercising the width and capacity of her vocal spectrum, before leaving the trailer clad in a dress made out of a woven copper wire fabric to sing in a freezing, water-dripping cave. The camera crew and director were covered in layers of coats, but Björk was doing take after take, standing in her bare feet on cold wet sand. For each take there was no lip-synching; she sang live, loud, and real. Outside the cave, the prep trailer, the set, walking through the lava fields of Iceland, you are as a human being by far the tallest living object. There are no trees, no large animals, just moss and very low-growing vegetation. Coming across rocks feels like the only encounter of an equal volume, another object standing across from you, the human being. All of a sudden it becomes clear that for all of her career Björk has created a body of work that could be described within the theory of Object-Oriented Ontology, in which the landscape around her, she herself, and the landscape inside of her—her blood, her organs, the sounds made by her and perceived by her—are all one universe of objects and subjects, subjects and objects, robots and humans, plants and animals, stone and volcanoes and oceans at the same time. According to Nicola Dibben’s 2009 book Björk, the singer’s music “naturalizes technology rather than technologizes nature.” 2 Dibben further notes that “Björk’s music imitates physical sounds of nature…as a unification of the human and the natural.” 3 Yet it is not only about the humanization of technology; it is also its feminization. Björk’s voice sounds at the same time like that of a child and that of a seductive woman: visceral and guttural, a highly personal, easily recognizable voice, with rolling r’s and a heavy accent—practically the opposite of the cleaned-up artifice of a classically trained singer. Often her singing includes inhalations and exhalations and other sounds made by the respiratory tract. She often shouts and screams out into nature or the city, as if she were speaking with and fighting and loving it. In Björk’s world, entities such as rocks and mountains, technology such as factory machinery and running trains, and living beings such as plants, animals, and humans are all objects in the same realm. They are equal to each other, having a duration of existence and a rhythm, and often making sounds. They breathe, pulse, tick, oscillate, hum; she might even include the sound of a compact disk skipping at its final loop. Dibben notes that “the rhythmic regularities of machines and everyday sounds are a means of transition into musical numbers and thereby into a fantasy world.” For the album Medúlla, Björk created the sounds of different instruments purely by using the human voice, thus highlighting the instrumental quality of the voice and its ability to mimic sounds.. 2 Nicola Dibben, Björk (Indiana University Press), 2009, p. 98.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 3 Ibid. p. 99.. 6. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction.
(6) Her singing juxtaposes the pagan and folkloric storytelling and traditional music of her native Iceland with her classical music training. Her music seems to come from an authentic and intimate inner place. It might erupt as a spontaneous urge to sing and express emotions out loud while riding in a friend’s pick-up truck, or while hiking in Iceland near her cottage. It speaks of a primal, unquestioned directness of creating while doing; composing by singing. In Björk’s music, and in her lyrics and videos, there is curiosity and surprise; a sense of wonderment and mystery, both in everyday life and in extreme situations. This sense of immediacy—a touching, a looking, a listening—seems to be present in whatever she encounters, be it the ocean or a landscape, a machine or another human being. All the encounters seem to be equal, whether with a stranger or lover, an animal or mountain, a cloud or the flashing lights of the big city. And everything leads to music: motors run, clocks tick, lungs breathe, a train provides a rhythm, the tide or a waterfall sets the pace. Björk’s attitude to life could perhaps be described as an “oceanic feeling”: the need to get out of the house, to go towards the sea, hike up a mountain, and feel the romantic, unthreatening, pre-religious ecstasy of being at one with the world, in love with the world, part of the world. “Jóga,” “All is Full of Love,” and “Wanderlust” are all odes to the joy of loving the world. “Jóga” is a declaration of love for the wild natural landscape of Björk’s home country. The video opens with her lying on black sand on the seashore and ends with her standing on a peak overlooking everything beneath her. She opens her body and her interior is full of rocks like a cave. The Chilean film-maker and writer Alejandro Jodorowsky notes that all humans are equal on the inside: you cut the human body open and we are all liquid and red, all full of blood. In a way the planet earth is like this, and it is most tangible in a country like Iceland, where the earth’s surface is often heated by the volcanic activity underground. Wherever you cut into the surface, you will end up with a red, liquid bath of lava. Tectonic rifts are like wounds in the body of the planet, where the hot liquid inside can get to the surface. However, the metropolitan city also offers a polymorphous environment that can stimulate. There are city lights, moving traffic, and urban heartbeats. In many videos, Björk is either moving vertically or horizontally through the canyons of the city or the canyons of the countryside. For her, both the city and nature are backgrounds and foregrounds, protagonists and extras, objects and subjects, as part of an artistic practice that tries to touch it all, breathing it in, breathing it out, shouting and screaming and laughing at it, until it screams and laughs back. Certain motifs reappear throughout the work. The embrace of urban life shown by dancing on a moving truck in “Big Time Sensuality” is juxtaposed with the dancing on a train moving through the countryside in “I’ve Seen it All” from Dancer in the Dark. Both “Big Time Sensuality” and “Hyperballad” are welcome songs of the artist greeting the big city.. In Björk’s work, being at one with an expanded, endless world means identifying with the smallest and the biggest objects in existence; with being inverted and catapulted into a weightless universe. In her visualization of her music, the camera, the gaze, becomes an optical instrument—a tool with which to examine the world. It can either be macroscopic or microscopic. It could be a telescope from a satellite from somewhere in the universe that is zooming in and zooming out from the smallest atomic, molecular, cellular structure, to humansized entities, to planetary-sized entities, to the biggest universal order. Sometimes her characters are seen under water or above water, and this draws attention to the scale of objects: sometimes Planet Earth is tiny, sometimes there might be a gigantic worm behind her. In her video “It’s in Our Hands,” she wanders in dark environments as a night-view camera captures images of gigantic flowers, grasshoppers, stingrays, and ferns, and with wide eyes Björk sees what otherwise is hidden at night. Videos are often set in an environment like a doll’s house or a stage set—a little too small or a little too big; somehow displaced, like caricatures or exaggerations of houses. In the video to “Triumph of a Heart,” Björk’s partner is a cat, and their home is a little house in the vast, remote, rural landscape. The matryoshka-like structure of “Bachelorette,” filmed in 1997, could be regarded as a metaphor for, or premonition of, Björk’s further artistic life to come; in a way, as an anticipation of her show at MoMA—a retrospective that unfolded in her work through a script that was a self-fulfilling vision in its artifice and in its character of a vision of a memory in a vision of a memory in a vision of a memory.. The video “Alarm Call,” directed by Alexander McQueen, is also about surfaces, the underwater surface, the forest, the meadow. It is like having sex with the world as a polymorphous perverted character that is stimulated by being in touch with all the surfaces of her body and everything she encounters (interestingly, independent from his collaborations with Björk, McQueen’s work was so much about surfaces that his celebrated exhibition, “Savage Beauty,” had a different surface in each of the exhibition rooms; and it was an almost fetishistic look at the detail that allowed the visitor to get close to his practice). In another motif, drawings on Björk’s face become a veil, and this mask adds a layer of content to her face, making it a work of art. Similarly, her clothing often functions like body armature, like architecture fitted exactly around the body, like a perfectly molded shell; a sometimes porous, sometimes solid membrane between her and the world. In the video “Who Is It?” she wears Alexander McQueen’s bell dress, the bells looking like barnacles; she becomes the bell, while Iceland appears like a moonscape. On the cover of Volta Björk wore a piece by Bernhard Willhelm, which resembled a carved-out empty shell of a cartoon figure, and the dresses designed by Iris van Herpen for Biophilia created a body armor-like shield around the artist. The white coat in “Jóga” almost becomes an astronaut’s moon suit before the vast, tectonic, volcanic, black landscapes of Iceland, and in her first music video, “Human Behaviour,” Björk literally wears a space suit with a clear helmet on her interplanetary journey. Collaborations. In her videos and when photographed, Björk is often depicted as non-human. She can appear like a drawing, or a cartoon, or a manga character, or a wax figure, turning into a sign or symbol. She appears geisha-like on the cover of Homogenic. Her constant morphing between her own shaved head and a digital animation of a polar bear in “Hunter” is a predecessor of her embodying an object, like the robot in “All is Full of Love.” In “The Dull Flame of Desire,” Antony Hegarty and Björk morph into one face: both strong, vulnerable feminists who are superimposed into a single person. In “All is Full of Love” and “Wanderlust,” Björk is doubled: she is her own counterpart robot in “All is Full of Love,” and in “Wanderlust” she carries a clay body double in her backpack. In the video for “Hidden Place,” a small Björk can be seen in her mouth when she opens it. Often there is a fluid transition between two- and three-dimensional images, drawings, photographs, and objects.. when i was first in regular contact with Björk, from the year 2000 on, popular culture and the art world were more disconnected than they are now. In the early 2000s, it would have been almost impossible to create an exhibition that was authentic to her work in the context of an art museum. However, projects such as 1999’s “All is Full of Love” and 2011’s Biophilia have paved the way for a synthetic presentation of Björk’s work.. With differing degrees of obsession, Björk plays with her own being. In “Hidden Place,” there is an extremely magnified shot of her hair, in which every strand can be seen moving, and then every pore in the skin of her face: this is as close as it gets to staying on the surface. In “Pagan Poetry,” there is a shift from an abstract graphic and abstract image to a close-up view of her face, then to parts of her skin and nipples being pierced and bleeding. In the video for “Cocoon,” she wears an asexual white body suit, and red strings squirt from her breasts.. Ideas were further concretized at a workshop meeting between myself, Björk, James Merry, and Michael Amzalag and Mathias Augustyniak of M/M. Ongoing work was inspired by Björk’s interest in Timothy Morton’s ideas about Object-Oriented Ontology, which broadly speaking proposes the abandonment of differentiation between objects and subjects, taking humans out of an anthropocentric world and equalizing them with animals, plants, dead material, poems, songs, magnetic forces, telepathy, energies, and images. In an email conversation between Morton and Björk included later in this publication, they playfully come up with expressions to describe the fact that, in Björk’s work and Morton’s philosophy, sometimes the relationships between objects are more important than the objects themselves.. From the album cover shoot for Volta, 2007, photographed by Nick Knight, with a costume inspired by Luigi Ontani and designed by Bernhard Willhelm.. As the idea of a collaboration progressed, it became clear that Björk likes to work organically, with ideas being discussed, revisited, and researched on a daily basis, in a very exploratory way, incorporating life and work, reading, writing, talking, and listening. When we began seriously to discuss an exhibition proposal, one of the first things she did was send me short descriptions of the defining character traits of the seven characters of the seven albums that she had produced.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 8. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction. Artwork painted by Isaiah Saxon for the production of the video to “Wanderlust,” 2008..
(7) Still from the video for “Isobel,” directed by Michel Gondry, 1995.. Still from “Army of Me,” 1995, a song co-written by Graham Massey.. The finished exhibition sought to highlight the groundbreaking importance and innovation of Björk’s music. At the same time the focus was on the unique collaborative nature of her body of work. The exhibition also aimed to broaden the canon of what contemporary museums exhibit and collect, while also raising questions about the longevity of pop music, a genre that is evolving and has not proven its classic timelessness. Can a work of popular culture achieve “eternal truth and beauty” when it is independent and removed from its broader cultural context? How relevant will the concept of multiple and collaborative authorship be, especially after relational aesthetics in the 1990s? When it comes to her music, Björk is very much a solo artist. She even considers herself to be “like a tyrant” at times, and only involves collaborators to add to, vary and on occasion work with her to write lyrics for her own existing compositions. She works by herself until she has something refined enough to share and to be given context, colors, images and shapes. On the other hand, she is extremely collaborative when it comes to visualizing the characters that inhabit her albums and singles. Through her thoughtful, coherent, tightly woven concepts and experimental forms, she motivates those around her. Her openness with collaborators, in terms of personality and dialogue, helps push co-creators to go further and further into a direction that she has envisioned but which they might not have come up with by themselves. She is a muse, but also a midwife; a co-artist/catalyst who is clear in her vision and yet invitingly vague as to the exact visual form it will take. While the music carries her signature alone, collaborations with designers, photographers, and film-makers are signed by multiple co-authors, a notion that Björk embraced early on. Her music videos have become some of the most creative ways for her to visualize each album’s characters, and have also been the site for some of her most notable collaborations. For each video she works closely with the director on the concept and execution, and over the course of her career she has often worked with the same collaborators on multiple projects. Though Björk’s music is much more a solo act than her visual manifestations of each album, she also works with musicians, composers, writers, and artists to explore and expand the scope of her music. Many of these musical collaborations have resulted in long-term partnerships over several albums. When Björk moved to London in 1992, during the early stages of Debut, she teamed up with composer and producer Nellee Hooper whose lifestyle, social and work spheres were a definitive force in the Bristol and London scenes of that time, centered around Tricky and Massive Attack and bands like Rip Rig + Panic. He nurtured and brought confidence to the artists he worked with. Hooper went on to produce nine songs on the album and worked with Björk on Post. Björk notes that he “mirrored back to me what I was at the time and what you could become.” 4. Graham Massey was another early musical partner, remixing “Violently Happy” from Debut, and co-writing “Army of Me” and “Modern Things” on Post. The musician Talvin Singh contributed to Debut, playing the tabla and directing the string compositions on the album. The Iranian-born recording artist, producer, and DJ Leila Arab and Björk started their close collaboration in 1993, when Arab worked on the Debut tour as keyboard player. Arab recounts that she wanted to learn live mixing and Björk hired her for the Post tour in 1995 to do just that on stage. Arab, Aphex Twin, Björk, and Chris Cunningham were at the heart of a circle of friends in London in the mid- to late ’90s that created some of their generation’s most inspiring music and video work.. In order to visualize her characters, Björk has worked with many different photographers throughout her career, creating portraits that appear on album covers and liners, as well as other images that appear in magazines, books, and promotional materials. Juergen Teller, who was starting out in London at the same time as Björk, was an important early collaborator. Together they worked on the image for the cover of the single “Big Time Sensuality.” The video for the single was directed by Stéphane Sédnaoui, who at the time worked very closely with Björk, and also on later videos and photo shoots, including the image that appears on the cover of her second album, Post. During her years in London, Björk also worked with Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki, who photographed her for the cover and inner sleeve of her 1997 remix album, Telegram. Since the early 1990s Björk has had an ongoing dialogue with Jefferson Hack. He asked Björk to interview Karlheinz Stockhausen, and she was featured in Hack’s publication Dazed & Confused. He introduced her to many contacts from his sphere, including Alexander McQueen, Katy England, and Marjan Pejoski. In Hack’s own words, Björk is like a “live wire” and an open source who absorbs, connects and provides “leaps of thoughts to bring forward new ideas.” 5 Since her time in London, Björk has embraced fashion as a manifestation of her expressions. She has worked closely with designers and stylists on each of her albums and for magazine shoots and public appearances. On the cover of Post, she wore a jacket made by Hussein Chalayan, one of her first close fashion friends, who, like her, had come to London as an immigrant. Together the pair would brainstorm. Post’s “Airmail” jacket, made of washable, malleable synthetic paper, reflected her character’s embrace of a cosmopolitan urbanity. Jeremy Scott would later create outfits for Björk’s Homogenic tour in 1997–98, and has created other garments she has worn at events and in public.. One of Björk’s first video collaborators was film director Michel Gondry. He has directed more videos with Björk than any other director, and their important and prolific collaborations have been both popular and critically successful. His video for “Human Behaviour” (1993), the first single and video from Debut, along with “Isobel” (1995) and “Bachelorette” (1997), comprise a trilogy of related videos that Björk and Gondry created, telling the story of the character Isobel and her journey from the forest to the city and back. The figure of “Isobel” is Björk’s way of introducing herself as the singer/ songwriter character telling her tale. As Timothy Morton points out in his conversation with Björk, making herself into this character is her way of making herself a third person, an object among other equally important objects. Björk had long wanted to do a video or project that took on the idea of a classic musical, a genre she had loved as a child. In her first collaboration with director Spike Jonze, they took inspiration from musicals of the 1960s for the hugely successful video for “It’s Oh So Quiet” (1995). Jonze went on to direct two other music videos, “It’s in our Hands” (2002) and “Triumph of a Heart” (2005). While their original idea of working on a feature-length musical was later realized by another director, Lars von Trier, Jonze and Björk continue a very vivid, productive discussion and exchange ideas on an ongoing basis. Björk has collaborated with producer and mixing engineer Mike “Spike” Stent since his work on Post’s “Army of Me” in 1995. They worked together on several albums, and Stent did the mix for both the 2000 album Selmasongs and 2007’s Medúlla. Electronic musician Matthew Herbert has been an important collaborator with Björk since he began working on songs for Vespertine in 2001. Matmos, the electronic duo of M. C. (Martin) Schmidt and Drew Daniel have done official remixes of several singles; they also worked closely on Vespertine. Guy Sigsworth, a keyboard player, has worked with Björk since Post. He played the clavichord and organ on several songs and has also done remixes of “Venus as a Boy” and “All is Full of Love.” The Icelandic String Octet that Björk began working with on Homogenic continued to work with the artist in live performances and on tours. In 2001, Björk began working with Zeena Parkins, a harp and accordion player. Parkins contributed to both the Vespertine album and tour, and to Biophilia. Björk and pianist Jónas Sen have worked together since 2007, when he joined her world tour to play keyboard; for Biophilia he also played the pipe organ and gameleste. Founder of the pioneering electronic group LFO, Mark Bell was another longtime music producer, writer, and close friend working with Björk from Homogenic on. He contributed to Selmasongs, Medúlla, Volta, and Biophilia, and was part of the tours for both Homogenic and Volta.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY Björk performing with music producer Mark Bell on the Volta tour, 2007.. 10. Klaus Biesenbach. 4 Author interview with the artist, May, 2014.. Introduction. 5 Author interview with Jefferson Hack, October, 2014..
(8) Alexander McQueen was one of Björk’s most important collaborators. Starting with his art direction for the cover of Homogenic, he went on to work with Björk on numerous pieces. He directed the video for “Alarm Call,” in which Björk wore a dress custom-designed by him. They were more than just collaborators: like many others who work with Björk repeatedly, they were also close friends, and Björk performed at his memorial service in London in 2011, wearing an angelwinged dress by the late designer. The music video for “All is Full of Love” was directed by Björk’s dear friend Chris Cunningham in 1999 and is their only music video collaboration to date, although it was a landmark in her practice and marked an important shift in her work. The video shows the naturalization of technology: the robots in the video are both machine-like and highly emotional beings. The video’s sci-fi setting reflects Cunningham’s past work in the genre, as well as his ongoing interest in robotics and computer graphics. New technology, software, and special effects are also featured in the video, seen in the seamless projection of Björk’s facial features onto the robots—another example of her identification with objects, machines, and all manner of non-humans. One of the most important, innovative and influential collaborations in Björk’s artistic practice has been her longstanding relationship with M/M, the Paris-based art and design partnership founded by Mathias Augustyniak and Michael Amzalag, renowned for their use of signs and images. M/M started working with Björk in 1999 and have continued their collaboration to the present day. Their first collaboration, for Björk’s compilation of videos, Volumen, was composed of a cover for pictures, black and white characters, good and evil, creating characters that were in between album characters. According to M/M, the conversation was like “reading tarot cards together,” while creating a set of their signature multifaceted signifiers. Their next collaborative project was working with Björk on her first comprehensive artist book. This was released in 2001, at the same time as her album Vespertine. M/M have gone on to create, visualize, and help form the characters in Björk’s subsequent albums. M/M have also worked on videos with Björk, notably “Hidden Place,” for which they collaborated with the Dutch fashion photographers Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin. Their work on “Hidden Place” was influenced by a conversation the designers had with artist François Curlet, who described a kind of sexual trick from nineteenth-century French brothels called “Poisson Nageur,” in which a woman enjoys oral sex and remits the man’s bodily fluids through her nose. This was the inspiration for the substance flowing into and out of Björk’s body, creating an incredible sense of intimacy; the untouchable icon getting wet and dirty, while remaining beautiful.. Working with Björk, M/M would spend a lot of time getting to know her moodboards and compositions, and would then externalize her visions on a more conceptual and poetrybased level. For the cover of Vespertine, for example, Björk brought Marjan Pejoski’s infamous “Swan” dress to the shoot, and as a result the cover of the album was inspired by a drawing of Sigmund Freud’s, in which a swan was portrayed on top of a Madonna. One of M/M’s images for Vespertine was plastered all over the streets of Paris. Whenever she toured, Björk’s poster campaigns made her face a sign in the urban fabric. Since the release of Vespertine, Björk has continued to work closely with Van Lamsweerde and Matadin. They have helped to create some of the most recognizable visualizations of her characters, collaborating on album artwork for Vespertine, Medúlla, Volta, and Biophilia, as well as editorials and books. “Pagan Poetry” (2001), from Vespertine, was the first music video collaboration between Björk and photographer Nick Knight, although the two had previously worked together on photo shoots, notably for the cover image of Homogenic, and also for the cover of the Vespertine Live album and for the Volta image of Björk wearing the large Bernhard Willhelm costume. The video, which was controversial at the time of its release, embraces themes of the physical body, union, and sexuality. It incorporates three different sections: a video of piercings, a private video shot on a handheld camera by Björk, and a film shoot of Björk performing the song. Björk collaborated with Japanese artist, art director, and costume and graphic designer Eiko Ishioka on the music video for “Cocoon” (2002), a work which, like “Pagan Poetry” before it, was met with some controversy for its evocative imagery. Wearing a nude body suit, Björk performs the song as red threads emit from her breasts, slowly enveloping her entire body, from foot to face, until she is completely cocooned. For Dancer in the Dark (released in 2000), director Lars von Trier approached Björk about acting in and composing music for the film—a story he had written with her in mind. She initially resisted composing and in addition taking on the lead role. However, she eventually agreed to compose, and afterwards to play the main character, Selma. She fought for artistic control, so that her part and her music could not be cut or changed without her agreement. Through her compositions Björk made the story of Selma a true portrayal and the film more of a true collaboration. Björk’s song from the film, “I’ve Seen it All,” was nominated for the 2001 Academy Award for Best Original Song. That year she famously wore the “Swan” dress to the Oscar award ceremony, walking down the runway dropping “eggs” as she went. The swan motif was an important element of Vespertine, and Björk wore the dress again on the cover of the album. During the Vespertine tour, she wore at least two other versions of the dress, both made with crystals. Although her appearance at the Oscars was widely publicized, the swan motif is something that permeated other parts of her work during this time.. Matthew Barney and Björk are two artists who have, in a highly detailed and sophisticated way, created characters in their respective bodies of work. With Barney, those characters seem to be more fictitious and literature-based, whereas the characters Björk expresses are at the same time fictitious and autobiographical. Björk and Barney lived together for thirteen years. In 2002, their daughter Isadora was born, and until 2013 they commuted between Iceland and New York, besides other shorter-term residencies. At times their two artistic practices merged, most notably in the major work Drawing Restraint 9 (2005), a cinematic piece by Barney, for which Björk composed the soundtrack and acted. The film ended with a symbolic mutilation of the two lovers, morphing into sea mammals. For Björk, an important inspiration and friend has been Antony Hegarty. In addition to collaborating vocally, the singer and composer and Björk share concerns about ecological challenges, and they have an ongoing interest in feminism. They first worked together on the 2007 duet “The Dull Flame of Desire,” and Hegarty is prominently featured in the song’s music video. The friends have performed together in London, Iceland, and New York.. Bernhard Willhelm and Björk in Iceland, 2006.. During Björk’s New York years, ASFOUR, who later became ThreeASFOUR, also had an inspiring artistic friendship with her that led to numerous mutual inspirations, as did the ongoing dialogue with her Icelandic friend Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir, also known as Shoplifter, who created the hairpiece featured on the cover of Medúlla. In 2005, Björk collaborated with Icelandic artist Gabríela Friðriksdóttir on her Venice Biennale pavilion work; Friðriksdóttir also directed Björk’s video for “Where is the Line” and designed the album cover art for her Greatest Hits release in 2002. The multitalented German-born designer Bernhard Willhelm worked closely with Björk on designs for Volta. He created the large sculptural costume for the cover of the album—a small-scale piece of architecture like an exterior skeleton that Björk inhabits—based on a work by the Italian artist Luigi Ontani. Willhelm also created other costumes worn by Björk during the Volta tour, many of which were made of brightly colored fabrics. These were complimented by DIY crocheted and knitted activist masks by the Icelandic Love Corporation.. The cover to Selmasongs, released in 2000 as the soundtrack to the film Dancer in the Dark, in which Björk starred.. One of Björk’s more prominent collaborations from Volta was with Encyclopedia Pictura. Their video for “Wanderlust” was shot in stereoscopic 3D, and used a mix of live action, computergenerated graphics, miniatures, and large-scale puppets such as the 3D yak and river god, all crafted by the video directors.. Björk with her friend and collaborator Antony Hegarty on Marina Abramović’s 60th birthday, 2006.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 12. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction.
(9) Björk photographed for Biophilia by Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin, 2011.. The multidisciplinary nature of 2011’s Biophilia led Björk to fresh collaborators, embracing science and technology in innovative ways. Björk worked with the television presenter David Attenborough on the Biophilia education programs, and with James Merry and Scott Snibbe on the development of the Biophilia app. This was worked on by several programmers and designers, including Max Weisel, who was then in his teens. The app was released just after the iPad came out. Björk’s integration of music, design, and digital technology was a landmark, and the app was subsequently acquired by MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design, the first in the museum’s permanent collection. Importantly, the app channels the album’s music and the custom instruments that helped to create the songs. Björk worked with DIY scientists and creatives on the instruments, including gravity harps made by Andy Cavatorta; the gameleste made by Björgvin Tómasson and Matt Nolan; the pipe organ, also made by Tómasson; and the Sharpsichord, made by Henry Dagg. This was not the first time that Björk had utilized new instrument technology. The reactable, an electronic musical instrument, was featured on Volta. Its flat table top is activated with different objects or tangibles which create sounds and music that can be manipulated by the instrument’s player. An Icelandic female choir and their conductor Jon Stefansson joined Björk on her Biophilia tour at this time.. “Black Lake,” which premiered at MoMA, focused above all on the sound and projection of visuals, positioning the work as the basis of the whole exhibition. Definitive traits are the freezes between the verses, which resonate in the body of the listener. The finished work includes motifs from the Icelandic landscape, its flora, and the changes of states of matter from liquid to solid, as well as the ideas of pain, perishing, rebirth, and regenerating new energies. For this groundbreaking piece, filmed in a cave and a ravine during an especially cold period of summer, Icelandic rain is captured in the video’s imagery, illustrating the narrative of going through pain and arriving at a clearing.. For Biophilia, Björk collaborated with Iris van Herpen, who designed the dress she wore on the cover of the album and several pieces that she wore during the tour. These dresses, for which Van Herpen uses plastic, metal, and 3D printing, seem almost impenetrable, a kind of colorful body armor. The collaboration has continued into Björk’s next character, with Van Herpen designing dresses worn in the “Black Lake” installation (a version of the song appears on Björk’s eighth solo studio album). The MoMA exhibition design embraced the ambition to make Björk’s music the Museum visitor’s central experience, while also presenting the broad spectrum of her collaborative and educational work. The final detailed conceptual and practical realization in the physical spaces of the Museum was another collaborative endeavor between Björk, her consultant the producer Sam Gainsbury, myself and an incredible team at MoMA.. Björk was born during the four-year volcanic eruption that caused the formation of the Icelandic island Surtsey. Red-hot flowing lava formed a rocky island that was soon colonized by seeds that were washed ashore. These seeds brought the dead island into the cycles of life. At the end of filming “Black Lake,” the Icelandic volcano Bárðarbunga erupted under a glacier, again bringing together scorching liquid with centuries-old glacier ice and generating new rocks out of the cooling magma.. A still from “Black Lake,” 2015, featuring a dress designed by Iris van Herpen.. This publication and exhibition cement Björk’s singular place in contemporary practice and celebrate her highly original and significant music, compositions, performances and visual presentations. As an artist whose work has been felt across many disciplines, Björk will undoubtedly continue to expand the boundaries of music, art, and our understanding of the world—connecting, influencing, and inspiring. || Details of the groundbreaking Biophilia app, released in 2011 and subsequently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art, New York.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 14. Klaus Biesenbach. Introduction.
(10) Klaus Biesenbach is Chief Curator at Large at The Museum of Modern Art and Director of MoMA PS1, New York. He co-founded Kunst-Werke (KW) Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin in 1991, as well as the Berlin Biennale in 1996. In 2006, he was named founding Chief Curator of MoMA’s newly formed Department of Media, and in 2009 founding Chief of the Department of Media and Performance Art. In 2010, he became Director of MoMA PS1 and Chief Curator at Large at MoMA, where he organized the Björk exhibition.. Page 2 — Photo courtesy of Hildur Hauksdóttir. Page 5, above — Photo courtesy of Bernhard Kristinn. Page 5, below — Photo courtesy of Julieta Cervantes. Page 6 — Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. Page 9, above — Photo courtesy of Nick Knight. Page 9, below — Painting courtesy of Isaiah Saxon of Encyclopedia Pictura. Page 10, above and center — Video stills courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian. Page 10, below — Photo courtesy of Mathias Augustyniak and M/M (Paris). Page 13, above — Photo courtesy of Carmen Freudenthal & Elle Verhagen. Page 13, center — Image courtesy of Paul White / Me Company. Page 13, below — Photo courtesy of Patrick McMullan. Page 14, above — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 14, below — App images courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian; app creative directors Björk and James Merry; software engineer, creative director, and technical director Max Weisel. Page 15 — Video still courtesy of Wellhart and One Little Indian.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY 16.
(11) Page 19, above — Photo courtesy of Stephan Flad. Page 19, below — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 21, left — Photo courtesy of Benni Valsson. Page 21, above right — Photo courtesy of Inez van Lamsweerde & Vinoodh Matadin. Page 21, below right — Photo courtesy of Juergen Teller. Page 23, above and below — Photos courtesy of Hildur Hauksdóttir. Page 25, left — Photo courtesy of Stephanie Pfriender Stylander. Page 25, right — Photo courtesy of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 27, above — Photo courtesy of Petter Oftedal. Page 27, below — Photo courtesy of Mick Hutson. Page 29, above left — Photo courtesy of Warren du Preez and Nick Thornton Jones. Page 29, top right and centre right — Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst. Page 29, below — Photo courtesy of Jói Kjartans. Page 31, above — Photo courtesy of Jói Kjartans. Page 31, centre and below — Photos courtesy of Carsten Windhorst.. PAGAN POETRY || Words & music by Björk || for harpsichord. Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk || Alex Ross. Alex Ross is the music critic of The New Yorker and the author of the books The Rest Is Noise and Listen to This.. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY II. 2 moma_ross_cover.indd 1-5. 14/11/2014 13:49.
(12) Alex Ross. Beyond Delta: The Many Streams of Björk. COPYRIGHT MATERIAL FOR REFERENCE ONLY.
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