Politische Ikonographie 4/2015 - 1 Lorena Morales Aparicio Pipilotti Rist’s I’m a Victim of This Song : The Rupture of Masculine (Swiss) Neutrality In her 1995 video I’m a Victim of This Song , Swiss of Switzerland as a self-formed haven of authentic, contemporary video and installation artist Pipilotti Rist natural democracy communicates Switzerland and re-situates the absolute neutrality — the reified, uni- her political ideation as a natural, thus incorruptible, versal value of neutrality understood as non-bias, or power where the figuration of the individual is a paral- as a purely non-quantitative and thus non-hierarchical lel image to that of Switzerland herself. value — of Swissness. Rist interrogates the image The Swiss, thus political icons imaging and communi- and power of Swissness through the staging of her cating natural neutrality — of an unbiased political neutrality, naturalized as absolute by its routinized and social consideration of Switzerland’s individual iconography correlating Switzerland’s constructed and cultural life rooted in nature, whose elements, or political association with the Alps and her incorrupti- qualities, and processes exist independently and in ble bucolic topology with a Rousseauian notion of na- spite of corruptible subjectivity (the subjectivity is the tural, organic unity and identity. Popular imagination process of individual or subjective interpretation of and normative rhetoric processes iconographically fi- factual reality through cognition nuanced by conti- gure Switzerland as a coherent nation founded on its nuous sensual perception, memory, and the related monumental, breathtaking, natural (non-man-made) and new emotions with constructed affects). The thus neutral — or incorruptible, ever pure, sublime in political iconography of Switzerland models a rooted unsparing equanimity — geography, which is accep- functioning with the land through the Alps, agrarian ted as giving Switzerland a national character of neu- production signified by cows and the production of trality based on this political iconography despite her cheese, and the later industry of time precision in pronounced cultural differences, accentuated by geo- watch pieces and clocks. These symbols were confla- graphical differences, between its Swiss German, ted in the eighteenth century with hindsight with the French, and Italian, and Romansch constituencies, equally natural authenticity of the oath between the and the regions where each group tends to be demo- Eidgenossen, social and now political brothers, thus graphically dominant. In challenging the putative ab- creating a masculine Swiss neutrality. The idea of solute neutrality — the putatively incontestable uni- Switzerland as a nation willed into being by its people, versal value of utter parity en face established Swiss enacted in choice by the Eidgenossen for a deliberate political identity, Rist also challenges the association and functional individual and cultural life, was ampli- of political identity with an exclusively male solidarity, fied by how this myth was used in the late eighteenth and so the effacement of gender difference in what century to link the national narrative in Switzerland to Lacan would call a purely phallic — asserted by the the writings of Jean Jacques Rousseau and Johann external, thus visual, material, and penetrative symbo- Gottfried von Herder and distilled by Friedrich Schil- lism of the masculine genitalia indicative physical and ler’s Romantic account of Wilhelm Tell. Hans Kohn abstract power. This phallic signifying economy is writes in Nationalism and Liberty: the Swiss Example, embodied by the Swiss founding myth of the Eidge- Out of the depth of the Swiss thirteenth century, nossen. Literally, the "Oath Comrades,” the Eidgenos- the eighteenth century heirs thought to hear the sen story depicts male citizens united by commitment voice of liberty, d conceived by simple peasants to a natural existence, swears an oath to one another, and hard-working burghers in their struggle according to the story, in the thirteenth century at the against aristocratic society, a voice resounding in Rütli meadow outside of present day Zürich. The idea the majesty of glorious and undefiled nature her- Lorena Morales Aparicio Pipilotti Rist’s I’m a Victim of This Song kunsttexte.de 4/2015 - 2 self. At the origin of Swiss history stood an upris- It is precisely this evident lacuna between city and ing of yeomen against lords and knights, the pro- country that provokes Rist’s critique of the founding tection of a free community of men of patriotic Eidgenossenschaft. Rist considers the Swiss imagi- devotion, leading a life of simplicity and equality, ning of cosmopolitan tourism as another manifestati- which found its symbolic embodiment in Wilhem on of Swiss values, a subtle functioning of abstracted Tell, the hero of liberty. 1 power, to organize her denizens within her topology. Johannes Müller, one of the hallmark intellectuals of The convincing argument to holiday in city as in coun- the eighteenth century Swiss nationalist narrative, try is a re-contextualization of the Swiss political ico- published his first volume of Die Geschichten Sch- nography of neutrality — of unbiased parity between weizerischer Eidgenossenschaft (Stories of the Swiss individuals — based on the natural, to a capitalistic Confederation) for his Swiss compatriots in 1768. formulation of cosmopolitan tourism within Switzer- Müller asserts, land, as opposed to within the irridentist cultures Ger- “We have constitutions according to which the many, France, and Italy. This emphasizes the ideals of free hand and voice of the poorest Alpine shep- Swiss democracy as founded by an oath between far- herd carry the same weight as the authority of the mers —between men — to extend to Swiss cultural patrician who is honored by dignity, wealth, an- and intellectual processes embodied by the vibrant cestry, and age … republics, which are almost cultural life of her cities, comparable to any European alien one to the other [the Swiss German, French, capital. This re-signification of the bucolic values ico- Italian and Romansch cultural and geographic nographic of Swiss political identity, with their convin- demarcations], are held together by a word cing counterpoint to the equally staged escapes to pledged centuries ago … ”2 Switzerland’s cities, is what allows Rist to explore her Swiss nationalism functions on the power of the neut- own Swissness in the video I’m Not a Victim of This ral — the sublime political and social equanimity con- Song . stitutionally devoid of Roman republican martial law, 3 Rist’s blurred, cinematographic scene of the hotel’s distinct from dynastic lineage and property owner- lounge then fades into a cloudscape with liminal, ship. However, the neutral has been staged ideally nearly transparent, vintage photographs of couples and communicated normatively within an exclusively and bikini-clad, single women (the conceit of romantic and prototypically masculine — first in the Middle and adventurous holidays) floating nearly inchoately Ages, and then continuing in the image of an ideal through the clouds. This deliberate dreamwork is in- democracy rooted in an epic topography, a construc- tended to evoke processes of self-formation and in- tion robustly and convincingly maintained well into the terpretation associated culturally, including the Freu- twenty-first century. dian unconscious psyche and the Surrealists’ project In her 1995 video I’m a Victim of This Song , Pipilotti from the early twentieth century. I’m Not a Victim of Rist — who was born in Switzerland’s Rhine valley This Song is a metaphor of Rist as a processual and and lives and works in Zürich and the Swiss moun- signifying subject in her own right. As the work un- tains — alternately pans through a decidedly un-at- folds in time and space from Rist's perspective and mospheric, three-star hotel lounge peopled with seni- agency — the functioning as the first person narrator or citizens and its adjoining dining room occupied by vis-à-vis the cultural staging of the political — the au- young, male staff. The views through the windows si- dience witnesses her psychic processes in space and tuate the hotel in a northern city center, far removed time particular to Rist’s own imaging thus icono- from vistas of the Alps and the surrounding fields and graphy of self-becoming. The world and the object lakes that stage Swiss values of identity and its politi- are known through her interpretative subjectivity. We cal iconography. Rist films a deliberate counterpoint never know an object (which can also be an idea— between the concrete cityscape, the hotel’s yellow such as democracy and political identity) in pure fac- decor that is indirectly evocative of sunlight; with the tuality as it is always filtered through subjectivity. idealized cultural life of the bucolic, Swiss landscape. What occurs is the subject re-objectifying the object Lorena Morales Aparicio Pipilotti Rist’s I’m a Victim of This Song kunsttexte.de 4/2015 - 3 in conjunction with subjectivity with processes such constitutes authentic subjectivity before it is fragmen- as imagination and contextual historicities. The “I” ted into a mimetic subjectivity that mirrors the esta- unifies the various “moments” of consciousness and it blished patriarchal processes codified by Freud. is the synthesis and analysis of these moments that Jacque Lacan, a scholar who extended the field of we see identity operating in space and time. Political psychoanalysis into philosophy, linguistics, literature iconography penetrates a functioning of power in the and mathematics, continues Freud's project by asser- self-imaging of the subject with the objects and ideas ting the trinitarian psyche as self-formation through of the cultural life. language, instituted by its dialogic relations with ex- In her video I’m a Victim of This Song , Rist critiques ternal cultural objects and their processes. Although her experience of Swiss political neutrality as a phallic the subject is primary to the world of constructions, absolutism being the signifier in this Lacanian Symbo- the shared realm of accepted and circulating discour- lic discourse.