Pipilotti Rist
Sip My Ocean and other videos
Arizona State University Art Museum
at the Nelson Fine Arts Center
Tempe, Arizona
August 31 through October 27, 2002
Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean and other videos
It was in 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland, that video artist Pipilotti Rist was born. Her given name was Elisabeth Charlotte, though she was lovingly called "Lotti" from early on. Rist spent her youth riveted by a series of popular Swedish children’s books and films about Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren's* fairytale girl-heroine with fiery red pigtails and striped stockings who - as every real fan can tell you - was an orphan raised on pirate ships. The artist was also profoundly influenced by a young British musical group known as the Beatles. Both the fanciful pirate princess and the Fab Four would have significant impact on the artist's future work.
These youthful inspirations began to surface in Rist's work during her years in art school. In the early 1980s, she studied Graphic Design and Photography at the Academy of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria (1982-86), and video at the School for Design in Basel, Switzerland (1986-88). It was during school that Rist decided to blend her own pet name of "Lotti" with that of Lindgren’s swashbuckling Pippi Longstocking, creating her now famous first name, Pipilotti.
The artist was particularly enamoured of Longstocking who, besides living parent-free on pirate ships, possessed fantastical powers, a sense of crazy optimism and a devotion to playfulness - qualities evident in Rist’s often whimsical, larger-than-life video installations. However, Rist's love for Lindgren's character, created in the 1940s, goes much deeper than her attraction to the fictional heroine's sense of the madcap and magical. Pippi Longstocking strength of character and alligiance only to her own heart makes her one of feminism's earliest role models, a rarity in children’s literature published in the 40s. In addition, the work of feminist artists such as Cindy Sherman (see her work on display in the ASU Art Museum from September 21 - January 5 as part of the "Subjectivity" exhibition), Judy Chicago, Adrian Piper, Mary Kelly and Suzanne Lacy, to which Rist was exposed during her formal arts education, made their marks on themes that would be critical to Rist's work. Concern with remaining true to the value and worth of women in a largely patriarchal society has become one of the artist's recurrent themes.
In 1986 this feminist influence first manifested itself in what is now considered one of Rist's most important early works, the single channel video entitled I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much. In this video, the artist repetitively uses the opening line from a 1968 Beatles' song, Happiness Is A Warm Gun, as lyrics for the performance-based work, in which she dances, apparently bare-breasted, around an empty room with pure abandon. The line Rist appropriates from the original song sung by John Lennon is "She’s not the girl who misses much…." The artist alters it slightly, changing the line in only one particular: from "She’s" to "I’m." Rist sings this line repeatedly in her own voice throughout the piece, changing from a feverishly fast, almost cartoonish tempo to a lethargically slow one, her exhausted body eventually sliding down a wall to the floor in what appears to be a moment of breakdown.
Rist's alteration of the third person word "she" to the first person word "I" slyly twists the song's meaning from a male observing a female's actions to a female taking self-control and assuming responsibility for her actions. Both audio and video are flawed by incorrect speed, lack of focus and loss of horizontal and vertical holds visually. Because of these apparent technical mistakes, the viewer is unable to focus fully on the image of the artist dancing around the room; yet because of these technical aberrations, we are unconsciously led to find wonderment and meaning in obliterated or marred areas of the screen.
Just as the video itself appears to be faulty, the work graphically demonstrates our own deeply flawed natures, both physical and psychological. Rist as frenzied protagonist is still only human and eventually winds down like a mechanical toy losing momentum, unable to keep up with the pace of her own manic intensity.
Rist’s 1992 single channel video Pickelporno takes these same basic themes to new levels. As the video's title suggests, the roots of the video are in pornography, a field normally dominated by male directors, publishers and audiences. Traditionally, in western society it has been almost taboo for a woman to as much as mention the word, let alone admit to viewing pornographic material or being part of pornographic enterprises. Rist challenges this notion by creating a work devoid of the animalistic and voyeuristic qualities that stereotypically characterize the genre, presenting the human body and the ultimate sex act as objects of overwhelming beauty.
Using a tiny camera mounted on the end of a stick, the artist captures close-ups of the human figure. Once again, the viewer is exposed not to a cleaned-up, gauzily airbrushed version of the nude male and female featured in the video, but instead is privy to the most intimate flaws of the actors' bodies ? wrinkled skin, ungroomed toe nails, ragged scars, out-of-place hair. Extreme close-ups of body parts are intertwined with those of flowers, fruit and molten lava, familiar parts of the natural world, so that the viewer has no choice but to draw comparisons between human form and functions with those found in a state of unblemished nature. Through lushly poetic imagery, Rist transforms back-bedroom antics usually portrayed in pornography as brutishly base into playful ones set within an Arcadian, garden-like environment. Her skillful editing once again opens our eyes to so-called imperfections, which, because of the unusual perspective she employs, become beautiful and worthy of admiration.
Like the vastness of the sea itself, Pipilotti Rist's third video installation, Sip My Ocean, engulfs the entire room with lulling sound and mesmerizing imagery. Her video subtly, yet inextricably, lures us into a world of sensual pleasure with its elegant shots of underwater landscapes, submerging and re-emerging figures and everyday household objects slowly drifting to the ocean floor. Once again Rist appropriates a male singer's song; her whispery version of Chris Isaak’s pop song, "Wicked Game," soothes with its haunting melody, though the song's lyrics speak of the fact that sometimes paradise, love and desire may not be all that they promise.
Through images of sinking objects such as a toy trailer home, plates and cups, coupled with Isaak's razor-sharp words, Rist’s video suggests that, while most relationships begin with euphoria and wonderment, they soon become grounded, sinking and dissolving into domesticity. Like the figures floating through Rist's video, lovers rise and sink within their relationship, often becoming completely engulfed by it. They experience moments of intense feeling like the sweep of a deadly undertow dragging its victims just barely above an ocean floor filled with jagged coral. Only when they feel as though they are drowning do they surface for breaths of fresh air. Presenting a corollary to her usual theme of beauty inherent in defect, Rist insinuates that the seemingly ideal, the most highly prized and sought after, is usually fatally flawed.
Pipilotti Rist lives and works in Switzerland and is currently on a one-year residence at UCLA. Her work was exhibited at the Louisiana Museum for Modern Art in Denmark and Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, in 1996; the Venice Bienniale, Kwangju Biennial, SITE Santa Fe, and Kunsthalle, Vienna in 1997; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Kunstwerke Berlin in 1998; Museum Ludwig and Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1999; ZKM Karlsruhe, Hirshhorn Museum, Istanbul Biennial and Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, in 2000; Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Luhring Augustine, and Galeria Hauser & Wirth, Zurich, in 2001.
* Ms. Lindgren passed away in January of this year.
John D. Spiak
Curatorial Museum Specialist
Arizona State University Art Museum
SOURCES:
Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist: Apricots Along the Street
Zurich: SCALO, 2001
Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Elisabeth Bronfen
Pipilotti Rist
New York: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001
Britta Schmitz, Gerald Matt, Alessandra Galasso, Bernhard Bürgi,
Immo Wagner-Douglas
Remake of the Weekend: Pipilotti Rist
Köln: Oktagon, 1998
Nancy Spector, Philip Ursprung, Marius Babias, Pablo Colombo, Laurie
Anderson
Multiple Essays
PARKETT, #48, 1997
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