Once in a great while, an artist comes along who pushes boundaries, gives viewers opportunities to rethink their paradigms, and creates bold, brave art that’s sometimes not fully appreciated in its time. Occasionally, that artist is honored with a retrospective, and given a chance to participate, bringing their beautiful creations to a larger, more mainstream audience. That artist was Marina Abramovic.
But now, we have been graced with the Björk retrospective at the Museum Of Modern Art. This quirky singer, originally the lead singer of The Pixies The Treaclies The Sugarcubes, debuted her solo album in 1993. It was called Debut. She’s known for her unconventional style and eclectic production design of her music videos. She’s also known by basics-at-large mostly for wearing a dress that looks like a swan to the Academy Awards in 2001 (seriously, people can’t let that go). I visited New York last month in balmy February, and was given early access to what is by all accounts definitely a retrospective.
I took the escalator up to the second floor of MOMA and was immediately greeted by the sounds of people in distress, and the muffled whimper of a crying baby. It was dim, but from what I could see, I was in a large room filled with hair. From the ceiling down to the ground, packed tight enough to make the room dim, hung dark brown hair. Ah yes, I mused as a distressed and disoriented Japanese tour group stumbled past me, the Hair Room. In anticipation of the retrospective, Björk started systematically growing and harvesting her own hair back when she was a child, specifically for this installation. Another person stumbled by, a mother, crying as she struggled with a stroller whose wheels were caught in the hairscape. “Please,” she wept, Björk’s hair getting in her mouth and muffling her words, “which way is the exit?” Strollers aren’t even allowed in the galleries, I thought. I shrugged and pushed my way through to the entrance of the retrospective.
I was surprised to find the entrance cordoned and roped like an amusement park queue, but then I saw why: at the head of the line there were roller coaster-like cars that the museum goers were getting into, shaped like the bison from the “Wanderlust” music video. The cars seemed to follow a rail-path, much like the Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride attraction. Luckily I had a MOMA Fastpass© and got to the head of the line quickly. The attendant was dressed as the robot character in “All Is Full Of Love”, but I found the casting a bit off: under the sleek white robot suit was an acne-faced teenager, whose voice cracked as he meekly muttered for me to lower the bar over my lap, and then gave the bar a halfhearted tug before he moved on to the next bison.
As I belted myself in, the bison-car jerked forward and the ride began. Speakers hidden in the headrest crackled to life, the song “I Miss You” started playing, and then continued in the background as Björk’s voice started narrating. “Thank you for joining me on this journey,” she began, her Icelandic accent thick with humility and fairy wings. “Each part of this exhibit will represent a different part of meeeee…”, she started singing a long, high, warbling note at the end and it faded out as the car passed a large window, looking into the children’s play area. It was designed to be a holding area for the kids deemed too young to go on the ride, which in theory was a good idea. Unfortunately, the execution was terrifying to children: the playroom adult attendants were all dressed as the antagonist from the Michel Gondry-directed “Human Behaviour”, a hulking teddy bear. As I passed the window, I saw a half-dozen terror-stricken young faces in one corner. The mass of clueless attendants loomed over them, waving their fingerless gloves, their button-eyed teddy-bear faces expressionless.
The car turned a corner and I was confronted by a huge wall, painted like the cover of the Homogenic album cover: 
The car slowly approached the gargantuan image, and the mouth started moving as the speakers in the headrest crackled to life again with Björk’s voice. She singsong-spoke the script in a hushed, excited whisper: “Mortals, enter at your own risk. Tremble before meeeee…” The eyes of the image lit up with strobes as her last note rose into a shriek, and the mouth of the image opened wide, wider; the bison-car suddenly rocketed forward, plunged into the mouth and into darkness. This retrospective resembled Mr. Toad less and less, I mused, and more resembled the Indiana Jones attraction at Disneyland.
The crazy, playful horns and syncopated drums of the song playing from the speakers faded away, and the hard, industrial sounds of “Army Of Me” took over. A few spotlights appeared up ahead as the car picked up speed in the dim warehouse-sized room. It was at this point I realized that it was logically impossible for me to be inside the confines of the museum, with the apparent velocity I was going. Did MOMA drill under the street level and utilize the extra space? Had I traveled through a singularity? The spotlights got close and they revealed a few of the costumes, the dresses that the artist had worn over the years. The car rocketed past them, continued towards a large stage set, flew by as I saw the “Bachelorette” video being reenacted live, its set-within-a-set-within-a-set concept acted out by increasingly shorter and shorter actors.
Impossibly, the bison-car picked up speed. It was difficult to take in a breath comfortably since the speed was forcing the air into my lungs. My eyes watered, my heart pounded as I saw the set from “Triumph Of The Heart”, the dress from “Who Is It?”, the magical tears from “Hidden Place” pass by in a blur. The song crescendoed as the car braked, shuddered to a slow crawl, and suddenly turned a corner into the disembarking area for the retrospective. I blinked in the harsh light of the gallery space of MOMA.
The other disoriented museum-goers and I then made our way out of the gallery into the gift shop. There, we wandered past Björk Monopoly, replicas of the Selma’s glasses and noose from Dancer In The Dark, and a DIY-acupuncture kit with needles that resembled the artist’s new Vulnicura album cover.
In summary, I would recommend the retrospective to anyone who possesses a MOMA Annual Pass, and a strong heart. The exhibit runs through June 7th, 2015, after which the attraction will be retired. It will be replaced by a permanent attraction, Cindy Sherman’s Funhouse Of Horror.
I want to sit in a bison-car.