Björk review – a strangely unambitious hotchpotch

The least interesting question you could ask about the Björk retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art is whether she deserves one. The last 30 years in art history are in large part a story of collaborative enterprises, of collapsed boundaries between high art and low, and of the end of divisions between media. Few cultural figures have made the distinctions seem as meaningless as the Icelandic singer who combined trip-hop with 12-tone, and who brought the avant garde to MTV just before both those things disappeared. When even Rihanna is now photographed by the Dutch duo Inez & Vinoodh wearing an Alexander McQueen mask, who can doubt that Björk – who made both the photographers’ and the late designer’s careers – is the master of today’s cultural terrain?

Maybe some time in the future we will get an exhibition that tells the story of how a softly spoken woman from one of the world’s smallest countries nurtured an entire generation of designers, film-makers and musicians, and in the process made the boundary between fine art and pop culture meaningless. But Björk – that’s the title of the show, which opens to the public this weekend and has been curated by the museum’s chief curator at large, Klaus Biesenbach – does not tell that story, or much of any other. It is a weirdly unambitious show, with definitely, definitely, definitely no logic.

It’s not a show of material culture, like the Victoria & Albert Museum’s shows of Kylie Minogue or David Bowie. But it also isn’t a “mid-career retrospective”, as MoMA has eagerly billed it, and any ostensible effort to give music the same consideration as painting or sculpture seems not to have taken place. It’s one part Rock and Roll Hall of Fame exercise, one part science lab, one part synesthesia experiment, one part Madame Tussaud’s parody – but it is not two parts anything. What are its aims? I spent hours in it, and more besides with the catalogue, and I still don’t know.

The bulk of the exhibition is staged in an a maze of narrow temporary galleries, each devoted to one of the seven solo albums she released between 1993 and 2011. (Her soundtrack for Lars von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark is omitted; so too, more glaringly, is the soundtrack of Drawing Restraint 9, by her ex-partner Matthew Barney.) Visitors, once they make it through the queue, navigate these galleries wearing headphones and listening to a mandatory audio guide, and motion sensors cue up songs related to the objects on display. In front of Björk’s handwritten lyrics for Venus As a Boy, you hear the song’s familiar Indian strings and tabla beats. Pass by Michel Gondry’s lo-fi lighting design for the video Hyperballad, and you’ll hear its charging beats and trilling strings.

Technically the sound design works well, but the songs are not all you hear. Overlaying Björk’s music is a kitschy narration, written by the Icelandic poet Sjón and read by the actor Margrét Vilhjálmsdóttir, that spins Björk’s career not as an artist or a musician, but as a “girl” on a fanciful journey through “erupting volcanoes” and other such silliness. For an ambitious, innovative female musician who has too long been stereotyped as an “elf” or “pixie”, it’s especially disappointing to see Björk wrench herself right back into fairytale land.

Why did Björk quit the Sugarcubes, and leave Iceland? What was the nature of her collaborations with Gondry and other directors, or with musicians like Matmos and Evelyn Glennie? How did she craft the microbeats of Vespertine, or compose the a cappella arrangements of Medúlla? These questions go not just unanswered but unasked, and all we get are airy-fairy ejaculations about “the mother-girl challenging the world’s order”. (The narrative is reproduced in the show’s curious five-volume catalogue, which also includes a by-the-numbers essay on Björk’s classical influences by Alex Ross, plus an email conversation between the singer and a crypto-philosopher who offers such leaden bons mots as “Art comes from the future” and “We’re carving out new hope spaces.”)

In the struggle to adapt a musician’s career into an artist’s retrospective, the eyes and the ears frequently end up in competition. That was probably inevitable, but her music is usually more interesting than her props. Björk’s lyrics, written in her idiosyncratic lowercase scrawl, will be of interest to completists; the same book where she wrote Hyperballad has a verse from Unison, released two albums later. Total obsessives will plotz, as the Jews of Iceland say, to see a 1984 self-published poetry volume. The white porcelain robots Chris Cunningham designed for All is Full of Love, her greatest visual achievement, are pretty nifty up close: one scuffed and half-assembled, the other fuller and more feminine.

But Nick Knight’s extraordinary cover art for Homogenic, for which Björk wears a kimono and Ndebele neck rings, has for no especial reason been animated so that she blinks. The mountainous set of the video Wanderlust looks winningly goofy on screen, but cheap and naive when reproduced on a cyclorama here.

And the dresses, honey, the dresses. Much of the show has been designed around Björk’s clothes, which goes a long way to delegitimising its purported aim to make music a valid medium for an art museum. Hussein Chalayan’s air mail jacket, which she wore on the cover of Post, is displayed under glass like at Hard Rock Reykjavík. Her costume for the video of Pagan Poetry is draped on an acrylic mannequin with pierced nipples, on a rotating platform. (The clear plastic shoes are by Barney, and echo the Lucite pumps he wears in Cremaster 3.) The good old swan dress, in front of which your headphones burst with the choral finale of It’s Not Up to You, is actually on a wax Björk dummy, grinning her Oscar night grin.

Finally, in the atrium of the museum, in a custom-designed black box whose sound-absorbing walls look like rock formations, Björk is premiering her newest video, for the 10-minute breakup ballad Black Lake. Projected on two wide screens that occasionally mirror each other and occasionally go out of sync, the video was commissioned by MoMA. On the plus side, the sound here is great: with booming bass and bright upper tones, Björk’s trilled R’s and prelinguistic keening hit you deep in the chest. (That cannot be said of the shocking ad hoc theatre that is showing her other videos, where the sound is tinny and several clips, notably Spike Jonze’s It’s Oh So Quiet, screen at a resolution barely superior to YouTube.)

But it is my unhappy duty to tell you that the histrionic Black Lake, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, gains nothing from either its black-box projection or its two-channel format. Against a perhaps too minimal string section, Björk kneels on a cave floor, hugging herself, nursing her heartbreak. It doesn’t get subtler from there. “My soul, torn apart/My spirit is broken,” she quavers. Cue the blue lava, coursing down a barren Icelandic landscape. She rends her hair, she falls to the ground; she bangs her chest like Celine Dion circa My Heart Will Go On. Eventually the video cuts from the desolate rock to a lush green sward, and the song closes with the metaphor of a rocket. “As I enter the atmosphere / I burn off layer by layer,” she sings – and then levitates, as her clothes actually burn off layer by layer.

There is a word for this sort of art: melodrama. In Greek the word means “play with music”, and in the early 19th century, with the rise of the European bourgeoisie, melodrama became a wildly popular art form – whose overdrawn emotions, backed by musical interludes, offered the new leisure classes a discount catharsis. But even such melodramatic art would have its place at the Museum of Modern Art, which after all has mounted retrospectives of the films of Douglas Sirk and even of soap operas, if only Biesenbach and Björk herself had placed her music and its pendant images in a robust, transatlantic, collaborative framework that mapped a unique 20-year career. Emotional landscapes are much too easy. Historical ones are what we really need.

But here’s the weirdest thing: it’s still worth seeing. For all its disappointments, here and there you can just about suss out why this show happened in the first place, what it could have been, and how Björk – like no one else in the realm of pop culture – built a cooperative artistic practice that spanned media and registers, high and low, to unprecedented public effect. Watching her enduringly bizarre collaborations with Gondry (in their video for Army of Me, she blows up an art museum), or hearing the footprints in the snow that constitute the opening notes of Aurora, I remembered just how much she really has accomplished, and even this show is not enough to render that accomplishment moot. Bjork at MoMA is a mess, but it didn’t have to be; her new work is not her best, and yet it’s too soon to give up on her. “It takes courage to enjoy it,” Björk once sang from the back of a flatbed truck, glacially making its way down a traffic-snarled Seventh Avenue. It takes courage to enjoy it: that could be my review.

• This article was amended on 4 March 2015. The original said that MoMA had collected Björk’s Black Lake. Though it was commissioned by MoMA, Black Lake has not entered MoMA’s collection.