‘Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest,’ Deep in the Wilds of Video
By ROBERTA SMITH OCT. 27, 2016
The Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist has gone supernova at the New Museum. A 30-year survey, “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest,” traces her ever-expanding journey into the wilds of video, with a rapturous fusion of lights, sights and music that ebbs and flows through the museum’s main gallery floors.
It is also a journey into different kinds of intimacy — with ourselves, with one another and with nature. Naked bodies, and myriad plants and flowers, often seen under water and in immense close-up, drift and mingle amid kaleidoscopic color. And because Ms. Rist began making video in the long ago days of analog and has rarely met a technological breakthrough that she couldn’t use, the 30-year arc of her work also traces much of the medium’s progress, as explored by one of its true naturals.
Arranged mostly chronologically from the bottom to the top of the building, the show has been organized by Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, with Margot Norton and Helga Christoffersen. Its 24 works begin with several single-channel videos from the late 1980s, when Ms. Rist more or less backed into art with the first work she ever exhibited. This is a 1986 video titled “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much,” which is by now nearly canonical. The show culminates in two floors of aqueous, immersive environments, radiant with color, one completed this year. Sometimes comfortable seating — big pillows or actual beds — is provided for viewers to relax on while watching and listening, and perhaps leave with a sense of encountering nature as never before.
From the start, we see an artist who has effortlessly worked aspects of feminism, the body and performance art into her videos while giving moving images and music an organic unity rare in the art world. It may have helped that Ms. Rist, who was born in Grabs, Switzerland, in 1962, approached art from music, specifically the rock scene of Vienna. While studying commercial art, illustration and photography at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, she began concocting video backdrops for bands, using films and slides.
Deciding that video would be easier, she enrolled in video courses at the Basel School of Design. A teacher encouraged Ms. Rist to submit to a juried video exhibition, and “I’m Not the Girl” was accepted.
I remember seeing “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” around 1990 and thinking it among the best videos ever made. Mostly black and white with flashes of color, it features Ms. Rist alone in a studio in the best early 1970s tradition of Bruce Nauman and Joan Jonas but sidesteps that era’s severity. She wears a low-cut dress that almost completely exposes her breasts, like a Minoan snake goddess; she dances energetically, sometimes breathlessly, to a tune she sings herself, a kind of club-scene endurance art piece. She repeatedly sings the work’s title, her personalized, more assertive version of the first verse of the 1968 Beatles song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” which in the original, went, “She’s not a girl who misses much. Do do do do do do, oh yeah.”
And yet true to the ’70s, Ms. Rist also explores her medium by doing it all wrong: The image is out of focus — which lends privacy to her nakedness — and the vertical hold is iffy. Zigzags of static regularly crash through the scene, and the tape is on fast-forward, so Ms. Rist’s voice is very high and her movements very fast. For a girl who doesn’t miss much, this one’s pretty hysterical, but also demonic and a little scary, like the spindly sharp-angled figures of the German Expressionist Leon Ludwig Kirchner.
In the videos that follow, Ms. Rist sometimes descends to student work, although usually with excellent music. In the spirit of full-disclosure that seems inherent in her sensibility, there’s even a tape called “Pipilotti’s Mistakes” (not inaccurate) and a short, starkly realistic scene, inset into a Swiss landscape, of her giving birth to her son. The bookend to the frenetic “I’m Not the Girl” is the equally marvelous but understated “You Called Me Jacky” (1990), a lip-syncing of Kevin Coyne’s yearning torch song “Jackie and Edna.”
Ms. Rist wears a long shirt and slacks for a butch look that fits the androgyny of Mr. Coyne’s tenor — he sounds a bit like Nina Simone. In an early version of her soon- to-be characteristic layering, landscapes shot from a moving train — more of Ms. Rist’s beloved Switzerland — are projected over her. Fluffing her lines, twisting around to better see the projections, she steps in and out of the cosmopolitan, almost Sinatra-like performer she has created with superb, amusing ease.
“Jacky” is delightful and, in its way, perfect. It exemplifies the combination of restraint and honesty that runs through Ms. Rist’s work. Her naked bodies are never sensationalized and her views of nature rarely sentimentalized.
With the euphoric “Sip My Ocean” (1996), Ms. Rist revels in water and its plant life, forsakes the monitor for the walls or objects, or takes to the floor or ceiling, moving toward ever more immersive installations.
Her feminism — wittily evident in her emphasis on pink — is most succinct in “Ever Is Over All” (1997), a two-channel work projected into a corner. It shows a young woman in a Dorothy costume (blue gauzy dress, sparkling red shoes) walking confidently down the street carrying a “Red Hot Poker” plant made of cast iron, rhythmically pulverizing the windows of parked cars under the approving gaze of a policewoman.
On the third floor, Ms. Rist bombards the senses with two alternating 2014 videos, also in a corner, their reflective images setting off intricate patterns that sometimes seem abstract. Recurring veined tunnels gradually emerge as a hollowed-out digitized human body — it’s interior could be Ms. Rist’s next frontier.
Opposite these works hangs “Pixel Forest,” in which the expanding video image finally explodes into real space, breaking apart pixel by pixel. Here, the work consists of 3,000 hanging handmade plastic globes that are rough and irregular, like rocks or crystals; each contains a single pixel from the video. Sometimes images from the two nearby videos can be made out on this shattered screen, although it takes immense concentration. It will be interesting to see what else Ms. Rist does with this astounding technology, but with color flooding in and out of the globes, “Pixel Forest” is already among the most bedazzling pieces of light art you may ever see.
On the fourth floor, you’ll find “4th Floor to Mildness,” with which the artist reinstates a bit of calm after the visual ecstasies on the floors below. The beds are here, all the better to lie down and view the watery action on two large ceiling screens. It’s not without tumult: Clouds of pink (food coloring) alternate with an exploding clod dirt; there are occasional glimpses of a breast or other body parts. The fragility of life is underscored by two slightly plaintive, Cat Power-like songs of the Austrian musician Anja Plaschg, who calls her project Soap&Skin. “When I was a child” is one chorus.
The serenity is tangible, but so is time’s passage: The most memorable image is of light filtering through large, rotting leaves floating near the surface, giving Ms. Rist’s beauty a melancholic undercurrent.