Pop art | Bjork in New York

It’s fair to say no-one really knew Björk and Matthew Barney had split up until the announcement of the singer’s new album, Vulnicura, a record which strips away some of the more difficult or alienating subject matter and musical experiments of her last few releases in favour of direct, unambiguous statements on the breakup. It’s at once refreshing and excoriating to hear a singer whose last record tackled everything in the known universe from the micro- to the macrocosmic without much reference to human experience suddenly start singing about divorce, heartbreak, and personal pain.

To tie in with the record’s release, Björk is playing a series of New York shows – thankfully more celebratory than maudlin – and The Museum of Modern Art is courting rentaquote controversy by staging an exhibition devoted to Björk as multimedia artist.

“My soul torn apart, my spirit is broken… Did I love you too much?”

The highlight of MoMA’s show is a new film based on Vulnicura’s 10-minute centrepiece, “Black Lake”, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang. Unusually for a Björk video, the artist appears unencumbered by wigs, elaborate costumes, or conversion to a 3-D cat; instead, she’s seen singing her heart out in a black-walled cave, prances barefoot across the mossy drumlins of an Icelandic landscape, drums her fist to her breast for drama. It’s the purest depiction of her as a performer in many years, appropriately for a song whose lyrics are among her most direct. “My soul torn apart, my spirit is broken… Did I love you too much?” The next room is a videodrome in which viewers can compare “Black Lake’s” directness with a comprehensive run of her varyingly iconic music videos of the last 21 years. The films are incredibly diverse, and lay bare some intriguing continuities: the pulverising low-end beats that emerged on 1997’s Homogenic are a consistent presence right up to 2105, for instance. In addition, at around the point that Björk’s music became intentionally more “challenging” – with 2004’s all-a capella Medúlla – the videos start to acquire a connecting aesthetic; no matter the scale or intricacy of the production or the subject matter, the Clangers-ish stop-motion of “Crystalline”, the shadow puppetry of “Earth Intruders” and the my-first-CGI animation of “Hollow” all have a charmingly homespun look to them, the same aesthetic that’s in the stage sets and oversized theatrical props of earlier videos like “Army of Me” and “Bachelorette”.

Elsewhere in The MoMA show, Songlines purports to be a holistic multimedia wander through Björk’s first seven albums (conveniently forgetting her film soundtracks, for Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark and Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9). A mandatory audioguide presents the story of Björk’s career as a folksy fairytale, a retelling markedly and problematically at odds with the way she has positioned herself as a modern woman in a very modern and unfairytale world: see, for instance, her recent forestalling of any sexist assumptions that her male collaborators on Vulnicura – programmers/producers the Haxan Cloak and Brazilian wunderkind Arca – must be the real geniuses behind the music. You start to wonder, between this and the purposely low-fi videos, if there was a point when Björk decided to play along with those interminable “Icelandic pixie girl” profiles of yore, perhaps to explode the cliché from inside, yet there isn’t much of a sense of any subversive intention here.

twee storytelling, snippets of songs and exhortations to “Listen to this!” made me speed through the selection of artefacts, costumes and designs far faster

The visitor is encouraged to spend 40+ minutes “exploring” Songlines, although the mixture of twee storytelling, snippets of songs and exhortations to “Listen to this!” made me speed through the selection of artefacts, costumes and designs far faster; compared to the V&A’s David Bowie Is last year, in which I could have immersed myself for several hours, this is a sparse show. While it’s nice to see the notorious Marjan Pejoski swan dress that she wore at the Oscars in 2001, Alexander McQueen’s wedding dress for Vespertine, and the freakishly beautiful androids of the “All is Full of Love” video, these are familiar Björkiana, and for me the real gem here are her notebooks, in which familiar songs are seen fascinatingly taking shape. Again, the audioguide does its best to distract you as you read, say, the lyrics to “Mouth’s Cradle”, prattling away in its folktale or playing a different song entirely.

It’s hard to see this show as anything other than the next logical iteration of Björk’s habit of releasing and re-releasing every possible iteration of her work: the CD, the suite of maxi-singles (in the olden days, anyway), the expanded special edition, the vinyl repressing, the bonus DVD, the live show, the DVD of the live show, and now the chance to see the costumes from the live show up close. (A simulator allowing the visitor to don virtual-reality versions of these outfits seems an obvious omission: tell me you wouldn’t like to wear the cheongsam and Wagon Wheel hairpiece of Homogenic for your Facebook profile pic.)

Many listeners will have parted ways with Björk as she’s grown more “difficult”; Vulnicura, much of which is more musically and lyrically direct than her last decade’s work, may lure them back. As the record progresses and the gouging heartbreak turns to cautious optimism (she got her biggest cheer at her first Carnegie Hall show for belting out the line “I am not hurt!”), you are reminded again of an artist always forging forward, forward. From Hussein Chalayan to McQueen to Huang, her best collaborators have always abetted her in this. The MoMA show, a retrospective which fits two decades of musical experimentation into a space the size of a few cupboards, is oddly shy and backward-looking. C