Week 3: Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist was born on June 21, 1962 in Rheintal, Switzerland.

Her focus is video/audio installations because there is room in them for everything (painting, technology, language, music, movement). Her opinion on art is to contribute to evolution, to encourage the mind, to guarantee a detached view of social changes, to conjure up positive energies, to create sensuousness, to reconcile reason and instinct, to research possibilities and to destroy clichés and prejudices. 

Rist's works have been exhibited widely at museums and festivals throughout Europe, Japan and the US, including the biennials in Sao Paulo, Venice, Istanbul, the Caribbean and Santa Fe. In 2000 the Public Art fund NY commission Open My Glade, was shown on the screen in Times Square. Pipilotti Rist's multimedia video works such as, I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986)‚ Yoghurt on Skin, Velvet on TV (1995)‚ Sip My Ocean (1996), and Remake of the Weekend (1998), blur the boundaries between visual art and popular culture and explore the unfamiliar in the everyday. Her lush, seductive images recruit the idiom of commercial advertising and music videos to create a highly individual artistic language informed by her past in a music band and as a set designer.

Pipilotti Rist
Herbstzeitlose: (Saffron Flower or Fall Time Less)
Installation view
Luhring Augustine, 2003

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Pipilotti Rist, "Ever is Over All," 1997

My initial impression of Rist's work was that it gave off an impression of dancing on the scarcely finely line between what is art and what is definitely not. A decent segment of her art is hard to comprehend – In I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, for example, Rist moves around half nude singing "I'm not the young lady who misses much" at an earsplitting pitch. In the wake of perusing the depiction of what she endeavors to accomplish in her art, in any case, her work turned out to be much clearer to me. I believe Rist's treatment of this line amongst workmanship and not craftsmanship is the thing that makes it compelling. The message is not promptly obvious, yet the provocative visual and sound segments make the work difficult to disregard – I wound up attempting to determine importance long after I had seen the video. Rist's MoMA establishment, Ever Is All Over, was particularly powerful in doing this. The video highlights a lady strolling down a city road, ceasing to crush in the windows of autos now and then. At a certain point a police lady stops to welcome her, then passes on. I found the cheerful state of mind of the lady to be the most fascinating part.

References:

http://www.hauserwirth.com/artists/25/pipilotti-rist/images-clips/