“Fourth Floor To Mildness,” 2016.
Beyoncé has Pipilotti Rist to thank for the image of her striding down a street smashing car windows with a baseball bat in the video for “Hold Up”. The sequence is drawn from the Swiss artist’s 1997 video “Ever Is Over All”, in which a woman does the same with a plastic flower while a policewoman looks on approvingly. Seen from the vantage point of the present in this three-floor retrospective at the New Museum, Rist’s work is disarmingly timeless. Her references move between genres via the media, and vie for attention with commentary on issues pertaining to the body and gender. It speaks to the culture we inhabit. Immersion is paramount.
Rist’s other offerings at this retrospective also stand up. In “Mutaflor” (1996), she wheels about naked on the ground while the camera zooms into her mouth and out again from her anus. Projected at our feet – a playful nod to the perception of film’s supposedly ‘lofty’ ideals – the video is startling in its pre-empting of selfie culture and contemporary forms of sexual expression. Similarly enduring is the strange six minute video “Selbstlos im Lavabad” (Selfless in the Bath of Lava, 1994), in which Rist, again naked, shouts incomprehensibly at the viewer against a backdrop of digital flames. These idiosyncratic early works possess a sense of narrative; in many, it feels like the private interior world of the “characters” – perhaps exaggerated versions of the artist – are being offered up to the exposure of the camera.
“Pickelporno (Pimple Porno)”, 1992
Met with so much positive attention for her big installations, Rist thinks her best work is “I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much”, also part of the current retrospective. In this blurred, glitchy video (made while she was studying in Basel in 1986), Rist dances erratically in a wig and low cut black dress that her breasts mostly spill out of while a squeaky voice sings the first line from The Beatles song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun” – ”I’m not the girl who misses much” – over and over. It’s a video sparked with powerful feminism, mania and pathos, and as her work has grown increasingly popular, Rist has also suggested it has “replaced” her individual personality, coming to represent her entirely. As if mirroring the current condition of human culture, she has been absorbed by media of her own making.
For its innate equality, social fluency and sheer, zeitgeist-ready temptation, Pipilotti Rist’s work has a universal appeal. Critics over the years have rehearsed the same adjectives: “immersive”, “kaleidoscopic”, “mesmerising” – almost as if it would be difficult (or dreary) to break the cycle. But while Rist’s oeuvre appears uniquely open and visible on the surface, it contains an element of hiding in plain sight: where is Rist herself, and where are we as individuals in this immersive media world? These are works that signal the real ambiguity at the heart of contemporary experience.
“Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000
“Open My Glade (Flatten)” by Pipilotti Rist is on display in Times Square from 11:57 to midnight every evening throughout January 2017