The opening frames of “Karl's Perfect Day” are a preview of what is to come over the next 90 minutes: artist Karl Holmqvist, in contemplation and thought, as he interacts with all that he meets in the course of one day. While such a topic could be freighted by worldly concerns, here, they are captured with a deft and light touch, owing to the filmmaker, Rirkrit Tiravanija, as well as the protagonist himself.
Tiravanija's practice is often regarded as a standard bearer for relational aesthetics, a term—inseparable from art critic and curator Nicolas Bourriaud—to describe the act of constructing and conducting a participatory social environment in which the subjective experience becomes the art. While the film unspools as a slice-of-life documentary, on reflection, one realizes that Holmqvist may be playing "Karl," the character who engages in various social activities throughout his day, culminating in a mildly ecstatic happening of sorts: a poetry performance by Holmqvist, accompanied live by Arto Lindsay on an electric guitar and set to a plinking beat (accurately described by Lindsay, in the film, as "this Chinese water torture that you hear in the background").
At the same time, “Karl’s Perfect Day” serves as a window onto the practice of (no quotes) Holmqvist, an artist who manipulates words as his primary material into works that span a variety of formats, including sculpture, installation, sound, design, and performance. As such, it is not only the social activities in the film that stand out; the day’s meditative moments provide Holmqvist the pauses that seem to be conditional for thoughts that will eventually think themselves into existence. Karl sits at a laptop at his desk, which is made of a door still furnished with its door handle, as though his workspace is a functioning portal. He goes for a jog on the streets of Berlin to the soundtrack of Jay-Z’s “Oceans” (ft. Frank Ocean). He washes up and shaves, and the scrape of a razor over his stubble is amplified to the point that it sounds like he is scratching the inside of his skull. Karl pops out to meet his friend Klara (Liden). They bicycle and make stops to visit with art and nature. They stroll around and peer through a huge Sol LeWitt cube-of-many-cubes. They hang out for a spell on a smaller LeWitt cube, feet dangling between the nodes and into literal interstitial space. But here also is an indirect encounter with the unidentified man over whose shoulder the camera shoots, who may or may not have left a jacket draped on the cube, which Karl swaps for the one he has been wearing.
When Karl-the-character returns to his apartment that afternoon, we get a glimpse of Holmqvist-the-artist as he proceeds to iteratively queer text and language. Holmqvist reads aloud from Paul Chan’s “Phaedrus Pron” (2010) and from the transcript of Martha Rosler’s video “Martha Rosler Reads Vogue” (1982), in an affectless tone reminiscent of an early chatbot, had that chatbot been a Viking. (Sign me up if Holmqvist ever makes this voice commercially available as an option for Apple’s Siri.) Here, we see Holmqvist’s playfulness as he twists and doubles and triples up on words in serial combinations and repetitions. As he warms up his vocal cords, he draws variations on graphic symbols in black marker on his wall—as if warming up his text-making muscle—and eventually composes a poem. The scene ends with Holmqvist singing “Language is power; words are people.”
By now, it is evening and Karl heads to the apartment of Haegue (Yang) to rehearse for the spoken-word piece with Lindsay. Along the way, Karl has a meet-cute in an empty bar: he runs into an acquaintance, Hamid (Amini), with whom he is soon giddily making out. That night’s convivial performance is, at its essence, the product of a collaboration between two artists. What has emerged is Tiravanija’s concept, channeled and embodied by Holmqvist—just as Athena immaculately sprang forth from Zeus’s forehead, complete and fully realized.
By committing Holmqvist’s social encounters to film, Tiravanija seems to memorialize their temporality, in opposition to the precept that relational art works are ephemeral in nature, neither static nor discrete. Look again. Each screening of the film in a new environment has the potential to be a new relational exchange. Tiravanija has created the vessel for his art to generate in perpetuity, every time the film invites a new audience to consider its alternative model of human inspiration and imagination.
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