For over thirty years Swiss artist Pipilotti
Rist has been breaking conventions of perception and representation of a human body through her video
art practice. The body in her work becomes a malleable video object, a
functioning mechanism, an environmental eco system, connected to micro and
macro cosmos of the universe, a liquid vessel pouring its molecules in and out
of itself. The feeling of bodily liberation, sensual joy and primordial
innocence proliferates in her work. Her videos evoke awakening of the power of
the feminine infused with technological mutations and innocent in their
overpowering desire and joyful rage.
1. Escaping the Video
Frame
For me it is
possible to depict hysteria in a positive light. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.
It harbors
something ritualistic and explosive.[i]
a.
Rist considers her early video
works from the 80s “hysterical”. They are full of jerky movements and exploding
colors. She embraces the medium of magnetic tape and consumer video and takes
the manipulation of the footage beyond the limits of color and movement.
b.
c.
in her 2016 interview for the
Louisiana Channel “Color is Dangerous” Rist talks about her love of the painterly
quality that video acquires with color saturation. It becomes “a pointillist
painting that constantly moves”.[i]
Color is also a powerful stylistic
device. It is dangerous because it is loud, and has political connotations of
proletarian and pop cultural gestures.
Color is dangerous and liberating fighting the
“chromophobia”[ii] that
prevails in conventional forms of image
production. Rist is enjoying the danger and is fighting for color liberation. She is fighting joyfully for her own utopia of
color/ feminine disrupting both the male-dominated media and simultaneously
subverting the feminist agenda.
…The question still remains whether
we can envisage non-totalitarian utopias, whether utopias always have to be
bound to narrow ideologies .[iii]
Rist’s 1992 work “Pickelporno” is
her own version of pornography[iv]
in response to the pornographic image overflow on European TV in the late
80s-early 90s. Instead of protesting the pornography, she embraces the medium
and proposes her own version of it. Her version follows the pornographic genre
framework, however does not just show mindless surface of sex, but goes under the
viewer’s skin, aiming to explore the core of desire and take the viewer into
the depth of erotic pleasure. She reveals the magnitude of the erotic power
through her macro/micro cosmic references, muses with art historical tropes and
provides overall shockingly beautiful and yet amusing visual exploratory journey
into the depth of desire.
d.
e.
Within the powerful feminine
gesture and pulsating rhythms of her video surfaces and environments, Rist
reveals her thorough research of ever evolving video technology that is an
integral part of her expression. “Pickelporno” is filmed with the tiny
“lipstic” Panasonic spy camera, that has a very wide angle lens and does not lose
focus even in extreme close-ups and, which makes it ideal to film the surface
of the body despite its low image resolution.
…. I think that technology,
especially audio or video technology is a complete copy of our senses. For example, the RGB system tries to
replicate how the cones and sticks in our eyes work: it is a very primitive
copy of the eye and I feel sympathy for
it. ..Cameras and projectors look like anti-bodies, but they are actually
complete copies of the body.[i]
Rist constantly experiments with
technology through her video formats and outputs, her editing techniques,
effects of green screen and superimpositions. What is remarkable is that her
electronic experimentation has acquired its own heart beat and her highly
processed electronic images look extremely organic. Her videos are digital glowing
orifices containing the abundance of bodily fluids and organic matter.
f.
g.
Rist’s primary aesthetic concern is corporeal cosmos: the
body inside out, primordial state of innocence and infinite multitude of the
surfaces of living matter, surface of the skin, flesh of the fruit, bodily entrails and underwater glow. Physical dimension of the living matter: lush
and expansive processed through technological sublime. Rists’s earlier work is musing with actual body
matter where as her latest work is dissecting that matter further deeper and
with more visual and electronic precision.
I feel that electronic art exists
at the intersection of information technology, neuroscience, biotechnology and
nanotechnology- and not only I profit from their developments, I am also caught
in the contradictions that go hand in hand with these developments in which we
are all implicated. I believe in the technological sublime.[i]
She muses with bodies within
bodies, within themselves and molecules of micro and macro cosmic modalities.
I have always been convinced that
we can find philosophical truth in the organic substance of the body, which
also includes our amphibian brain.[ii]
1999 Through her
life-long experimental video explorations
Rist is attempting:
To redirect poetry back to
metaphysics, physics and ethics.. return theology back to physics even logic
technology, epistemology and even psychology.
Yes, even psychology belongs to physics. I mean psychology is also
physics. Ethics is politics. [iii]
Throughout the years Rists’ work
has evolved from small scale one channel videos where she would usually act as
a primary performer into a multi-faceted
living organisms of glowing matter,
actively interacting with the viewer.
Her installations have become complex video environments spatially
choreographed, performing videos and orchestrating the movements of its
spectators experiencing the work in place. The shift in scale from the monitor
to majestic projections brought a shift in the speed of the videos. The jerky
camera movements have been replaced with slow
and subtle transitions. The loose
format of projected image, its shimmering reflectivity acquired a quality of a
living organic skin, propagating pattern, alive, multiplying and mirroring
itself. Rist’s 1996 installation Sip My Ocean
is designed to be projected on adjacent walls. Mirrored images are in constant
contact with each other. Pouring and spilling, exploding into one another. The
video is accompanied with an audio track of a song about love, its shifting nature
and unattainability. This particular piece turned out to be a groundbreaking
milestone in Rist’s career. It brought the new dimension into her video scape
and has become her fist video installation to be acquired by a museum: the work
had first been purchased by the Louisiana Museum of Modern art in Denmark and subsequently
editions of this piece have been added to the permanent collections of the Guggenheim
museum in New York and Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.
h.
i.
From this work on Rist’s video
bodies have expanded and exploded into physical space flooding the walls of
galleries, museums and Churches. Her experimentation with her own body in her
earlier videos expands into experimentation with the body of the space, and
bodies of her audience experiencing her work.
If in her earlier works, her body is entranced, the videos past Sip My Ocean are working to put the
viewer into the space of trance. Into her utopian paradise. Into her own ”Administrating
Eternity”.[i]
In her later works verses her
earlier ones:
The viewer is not consuming the
body of the artist, it is the artist that somehow is consuming the viewer… [ii]
j.
k.
2. Paradise
Reinvented:
Pipilotti Rist Homo Sapiens Sapiens, audio video installation in San Stae church
Venice, 2005
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/120/
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/images-clips-view/?artist_id=25&a=pipilotti-rist&p=122
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/images-clips-view/?artist_id=25&a=pipilotti-rist&p=121
o.
p.
Pipilotti
Rist: Pixel Forest Edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton.
Published by Phaidon Press Inc. and New Museum, New York, 2016
Pipilotti
Rist Interview at ACCA, I Packed the
Postcard in My Suitcase , 2011-2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKR-QhjOz-o
Pipilotti’s Pleasure
Dome by Robert Storr
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/120/
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/images-clips-view/?artist_id=25&a=pipilotti-rist&p=122
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/images-clips-view/?artist_id=25&a=pipilotti-rist&p=121
Lush vegetation, sky, water, fluidity
of movement, nude bodies intertwined and
floating in space, rendered through magnificent perspectives and extreme
distorted close-ups. Pipilotti Rist
brings us into the world of intimacy and innocence, human body integrated into
nature, overjoyed and mute, that might be speaking the initial language of
undisrupted paradise, complex in its micro and macro cosmic fluid integrity.
This is the world that exists beyond good and evil, projecting the mute magic
of nature.
..the whole of nature, too, is imbued
with a nameless, unspoken language, the residue of the creative word of God,
which is preserved in man as the
cognizing name and above man as the
judgment suspended over him.[i]
Innocent and lush forms and
textures are pouring down from the heavenly ceiling of the church, equally lush
in its baroque curvatures and folds. These
images simultaneously please and shock the viewer by their seductive
hyper-reality. Extreme and distorted
close ups that feel like the flesh is turning inside out under the merciless
camera are alternated by the
ornamental kaleidoscopic vignettes resonating
with architectural symmetry of the
space, creating constant interplay of
proximity and distance, immersing the viewer into the world of primordial
paradise and spilling the glow of paradise into the space of the church, thus
animating it and making it a living, breathing and loving organism.
In the paradise created by Rist,
landscape is melted by the sky, its curves are flowing into the earth and are fading into intertwined female
bodies. The female form is omnipresent, multiplied. Pipilotti Rist spills out and, immerses us
into her liquid femininity, time and space disappear as we enter the primordial
zone of desire and pleasure. The
landscape and the bodies are rhythmically engaged in continuous and infinite
movement of Mobius strip. Micro and macro perspectives constantly alternate: a
shot of extreme close-up of an opened mouth takes the viewer into the kaleidoscopic
depth representing both the interior of the body and the core of the universe.
The fabric of flesh is woven into the tapestry of the video projection, zooming
in and out of the glowing crystal of the ceiling we see various body parts,
close up of limbs formed into constantly moving ornamental formations. Cinematic montage is beautifully interacting
with surrounding space. The temporal image of the projection is perfectly
contained with the spatial arrangement of the installation on the ceiling of
the majestic baroque church of Santa Stae.
Pipilotti’s Rist visual language is
very open, reminiscent of her direct address: published in
Visual Essay of the Pipilotti Rist eyeball massage monograph:
please let go / fall
into me / melt with my liquid crystals / dissolve with
your synapses / fall in. yes. now../..[ii]
o.
p.
"I’m celebrating pure innocence, which is something good,"...
"I don’t want to be provocative. I’d like to show how things might have
been if we had not had to feel permanently guilty."[i]
Speaking through the visual mute
language of nature, Pipilotti Rist constructs a utopian temporal space that
transcends into a physical space of a catholic church, thus deconstructing a
myth that is being cultivated by this very church as a social institution.
She is creating her own utopia.
Administering her own eternity. Where all the “Worry will Vanish”.[ii]
In my work I imagine a lot of new
possible ways of being: I imagine that the life would be better if we did not
have only two genders, but perhaps twenty different ones, so that they would
not be so important or the source of so much pain. I imagine that women could
have the same space and authority as men. I imagine women as Vitruvian men: I
imagine that they could be themselves and also represent humanity. And I think
my work is an attempt at making visible the way we feel and exist with
ourselves. I think somehow Pixelwald (Pixelforest)
2016 The new Piece that was shown in Zurich and will be presented in the New
Museum- replicates the way in which our synapses work; my work often takes the
inside outside and vice versa.[i]
Pipilotti
Rist’s life-time endeavor of liberating
video image of the body from the formal constrains
of the screen has culminated in her
latest work Pixelforest. I this
2016 piece she is
finally able to merge her micro-macro
form of the body and encapsulate her image into the micro/macro
mechanism of led lights that also act as a projection surface.
Through her
artistic research into the means of
production and perception of the image of the body Pipilotti Rist is aiming to
expand our possibilities for understanding and experiencing the world.
I want
them to spit onto their mobiles so that they can see through their
saliva how pixels are fragmented and understand how the technology is composed.
I want them not to be afraid of technology and I want them to break away from
the idea of the screen as a square, a cage. I think there are different forms
of empowerment, and I want to give them power but on their terms. With my exhibitions I want to provide a stage
and let the visitors become the actors. Oftentimes I only slightly change their
body positions, free them of the permanent fight against gravity , or invite
them to take their shoes off or hide
their bodies in front of other visitors. Such fine alterations have enormous
influence on our capacity for contemplation.[i]
With her electronic immersion into
the of exploded body Pipilotti Rist is attempting to heal the soul of the
postmodern human.
Like with homeopathic remedy, for
you to heal you need he same thing that makes you crazy. That’s what I’m trying
to do. [i]
Bibliography
David Batchelor Chromophobia
Focus on Contemporary Issues Series
Published by Reaktion Books London, 2000.
Walter Benjamin Selected
Writings 1996; Second Printing 1997. Belcamp Press of Harvard University
Press, Harvard Massachusetts, London, England
Pipilotti Rist: Apricots
along the street Lars Muller Published
by Scalo Zurich-Berlin-New York 2001
Pipilotti Rist: Congratulations.
Lars Muller Publishers Baden Switzerland. And Magazin3 Stockholm Konsthall, 2007
Pipilotti Rist:
Eyeball Massage Edited by Stephanie Rosenthal. Hayward Publishing. London,
2011.
Pipilotti Rist: Friendly
Game Fundacio Joan Miro. Barcelona, Spain, 2010
Pipilotti Rist: Komm
Schatz, Wir Stellen die Medien um & Fangen Nochmals von Vorne an by
Stephanie Damianitsch. Published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig (1684) 2015
Pipilotti
Rist: Pixel Forest Edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Margot Norton.
Published by Phaidon Press Inc. and New Museum, New York, 2016
Online Resources
Pipilotti
Rist Interview at ACCA, I Packed the
Postcard in My Suitcase , 2011-2012
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKR-QhjOz-o
Pipilotti’s Pleasure
Dome by Robert Storr
http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-artist-restores-paradise-at-the-biennale/4536712
(Adapted from German by Kathleen
Peters), swissinfo.ch
Images Reference
a. Pipilotti Rist I’m not a girl who misses much, 1986
http://artmag.saatchigallery.com/better-than-the-rist/
b. Still from Pipilotti Rist’s (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes, 1988 Electronic Arts
Intermix (EAI)/Hauser & Wirth/Luhring Augustine http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/26/pipilotti-rist-pleasure-dome/
c. Still from Pipilotti Rist’s (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes, 1988 https://mubi.com/films/absolutions-pipilottis-mistakes
d.
Still from Pipilotti
Rist’s Pickelporno,1992
http://www.dschointventschr.ch/en/movies/experimental/pickelporno
e.
Ibid
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlq4iyv7Kdc
j. Still
from Pipilotti Rist’s Stillsmoking, 1998 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VwzJhSKf9kA&list=RDFb6fVfDYy_o&index=3
k. Pipilotti Rist Administering Eternity, 2011 http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/pipilotti-rist-sublime-pants
l. Pipilotti Rist Homo Sapiens Sapiens, 2005 http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/120/
m. Pipilotti
Rist Homo Sapiens Sapiens,
2005 http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/122/
o. Pipilotti Rist Eyeball Massage
Edited by Stephanie Rosenthal
(2011.Hayward Publishing. London) p. 14
p. Pipilotti Rist Eyeball Massage Edited
by Stephanie Rosenthal (2011.Hayward
Publishing. London) p. 10
q. Pixel
Forest, in the New Museum https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/28/arts/design/pipilotti-rist-pixel-forest-deep-in-the-wilds-of-video.html
r.
Pixel Forest, in the New Museum
[i]
Pippilotti Rist, in “Body Electric”, interview with Massimiliano Gioni, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, p.71
[i]
Pipilotti Rist in http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-artist-restores-paradise-at-the-biennale/4536712
(Adapted
from German by Kathleen Peters), swissinfo.ch
[ii]
Pipilotti Rist Worry Will Vanish, 2015
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/2302/pipilotti-rist-worry-will-vanish/view/
[i]
Pipilotti Rist in http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/swiss-artist-restores-paradise-at-the-biennale/4536712
(Adapted
from German by Kathleen Peters), swissinfo.ch
[ii]
Pipilotti Rist Worry Will Vanish, 2015
https://www.hauserwirth.com/exhibitions/2302/pipilotti-rist-worry-will-vanish/view/
[i]
Walter Benjamin Selected Writings. On
language as such and on the Language of
Man ( 1996; Second Printing 1997. Belcamp Press of Harvard
University Press, Harvard Massachusetts, London, England) p.74
[ii] Pipilotti Rist Visual Essay in Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage Edited by
Stephanie Rosenthal. Hayward Publishing. London, 2011. p.7-14
[i] Pipilotti Rist Administrating Eternity, 2011 https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/14/
[ii] Pippilotti
Rist, in “Body Electric”, interview with Massimiliano Gioni, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, p.70
[i]
Ibid, p.69
[ii]
Ibid, p.70
[iii]
Pippilotti Rist, quoted by Juliana
Engberg “A Bee Flew in the Window”, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, p.15
[i] Pipilotti Rist: Color is Dangerous.
[ii]
Chromophobia
[iii]
Pippilotti Rist, Quoted by Gloria Sutton in “Reception Theory: Difficulty,
Dropouts, and Interference in the Moving Images
of Pipilotti Rist “, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, p.115
[iv] Pippilotti
Rist, in “Body Electric”, interview with
Massimiliano Gioni, Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, p.64
https://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/120/
[i] Pipilotti Rist: Congratulations. Lars Muller
Publishers Baden Switzerland. And
Magazin3 Stockholm Konsthall, 2007. p.61
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