Elisabeth Charlotte “Pipilotti” Rist (born 1962), is a visual artist who works with video, film, and moving images which are often displayed as projections. Rist is a leading figure in contemporary video art. Her installations create environments that give home feelings of content yet also deep thought; environments that call for interaction and induce dreamlike experiences. Dreams in which your awareness of yourself and the world around surrounding you are heightened. Rist as a filmmaker shows immense ability to convey a story using the abstract images that she creates. Her works are inspirational in terms of the way she deals with her subject matter, her presentation of video and her use of sound. Anyone interested in the creation of atmosphere in a gallery should study Rist’s work in depth and entirely.
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Figure 1: Installation view of ‘Administrating Eternity’ Audio video installation, ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, ‘I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase’, Melbourne, Australia, 2011 Photo: Andrew Curtis
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Since emerging in the late 1980’s Pipilotti Rist has been central to the development of video installation as an art form and how it has emerged into one of contemporary art’s most predominate and innovative formats. She has created video works that are identifiable for their bold colourful imagery, cinematic verve and visceral poetics. Rist tries to create different perspectives for the viewer and “one of her main priorities is to raise viewers’ awareness of the significance of their individual take on the world, mediated through their own bodies.” (Rosenthal, 2011, p. 20). Key to her work is how she uses the physical space to manipulate the body and in turn create an alternate mindset within the viewer. In an especially apt interview, Pipilotti Rist exclaims:
“I try to explode the screen […] I want to reconquer the space in and around the viewer that we forget about when we’re watching a two-dimensional computer, television, or cinema screen.” (Rist, 2006, p. 226).
Responding to the conventions in the way that we watch, in the cinema and at home, her installations create space that calls for the viewer to think about their own situation, to consider their physicality while watching, in their singular form but also as one in the many of the collective audience.
Rist’s art comprises an interaction with the physicality and fragility of our presence; with the corporal sculptural aspects of her work echoing the artist’s desire to forge a close relationship between the work and the spectator. Installations such as Administrating Eternity (2011) (figure 1) and Gravity Be My Friend (2004) transform the gallery space, providing the viewer with spatial opportunities in which they decide how they will physically interact and interpret. Gravity Be My Friend (figure 2) consists of an open space with large-scale projections on the ceiling and landscape style mounds in the centre of the room that call for the viewer to lie down and form their experience in an alternative physical position. The installation provides a space and an environment for the viewer to relax and explore their own viewing state. Rist’s aim is for the viewer to use the physicality of the installation so “they can find out if they reflect differently when their muscles are relaxed, to use the three dimensionality as much as possible” (Rist, 2011). The piece puts an importance on the way the viewer experiences, placing the body’s role and the way it can effect the mentality of the mind central to it’s concept. This phenomenological aspect, with the assertion that the physical relaxation affects the cognitive state, is key to the installation and how the process of the viewer creating their own perception and thus experience becomes the piece’s conceptual focus. Rist wants this process of how we are actually perceiving to be continued away from the confines of the her installations: “All the installations are always a manual for the people to do themselves, and I hope they go home and will lay on their backs and put their flat screens up on the ceiling” (Rist, 2011). She wants the viewers to consider the conventional ways that they watch, to question the conventional and easy way that watching experiences such as the television have made us disregard the actually act of watching, by instilling this she is urging the viewer to use their physicality and affect their mentality when they watch.
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Figure 2: Installation view of ‘Gravity Be My Friend’ (2004), Audio Video Installation. ACCA Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, ‘I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase’, Melbourne, Australia, 2011 Photo: Andrew Curtis
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Rist’s first sculpturally based video installation A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East (or E-W) (Eine Spitze in den Westen – ein Blick in den Osten (bzw. O-W)) (1992/2001) (figure 3) marked her first attempts to choreograph the viewer’s physical response to her work. Cutting, like some kind of wall mounted horizontal pyramid, in to the gallery space, E-W is a sculpture that physically intrudes on the viewer’s physical experience of moving about the space. Resembling the structure of a projection beam, E-W is a hollow wooden structure that ‘hangs’ on one wall of the gallery space. Holes in the bottom of the sculpture allow only a small number of viewers at a time to approach the piece, edge underneath it and then emerge their heads into the space within. The inside space created by the structure evokes the similar viewing conditions of the cinema or watching television in a small group. The screen is on the wall in front of the viewer with projector and projection beam behind and over the viewer’s heads. The heads of the other audience members become obstacles and objects and with in the intimate space a small but communal audience is created. The structure creates a physical and literal separation of the viewer’s body and mind, with the body acting only as a force to get the mind inside the viewing space.
Through the space created, E-W enhances the viewing of the video focusing the viewer on the screen. The structure creates a surrounding darkness that traps the viewer within the confines of the space and close to the image in front of them. It’s only other the other members of the audience that invade this space, with the head holes staggered each audience member becomes part of the sight that other members watch. “Rist transforms us into self-conscious members of a community, forced to watch the video together, in a very confined space, with the result that we observe others watching. (Rosenthal, 2011, p. 21) Rist is using the conventions of an audience, the audience’s ‘energy’ and how the individual feels in part of a larger consciousness. “I think there’s a ritual that takes place between the audience members. Everyone’s looking and concentrating in one direction and it creates this energy in the room.” (Rist, 2006, p. 234). Within such groups the individual viewer can feel safer and concentration levels increase as all observe the image, a connection exists between the members that can effect the watching of the film. It’s the physical presence of everyone and their reactions to the film that can influence other viewers and change their perception, thus a phenomenological connection exists with the surroundings effecting the creation of the experience for the individual. Similarly to Le Grice’s Castle 1, the awareness of the specific position with in the audience that the viewer holds and the visual presence of the other audience members is integral to the creation of the experience. However, E-W differs from Castle 1 in that the audience is always present and not just visible intermittently (with the flashing of the light bulb); the whole experience of watching is inseparably linked with being watched and watching others watch. The viewer of E-W watches with the audience visible and their bodies made use of, with the occupants of the structure continually operating in this state. Importantly the viewer is able to remove their head, to step away for the film and seeing just the bodies of the participators they are able to then be on the other side and now be the a free body not restrained by a head hole.
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Figure 3: Installation view of ‘A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East ’ (1992/2001)
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The physical act of the viewer emerging their head into this space is an important aspect of the piece, if the structure inside is directly evoking cinema then this evokes emerging into the cinema space.
“The wooden construction containing the video projections serves as a metaphor for the ‘other mind’ that we gain access to through the work. […] Eine Spitze… creates the impression that we are watching a film running in someone else’s mind.” (Rosenthal, 2011, p. 21).
Through placing their head though the hole the viewer is quite literally cutting off their head from their body. The two become separated, one (the body) lies outside the space and is not privy to the environment inside while the other (the head) is the receptor to all and becomes the part of the viewer that directly experiences. This dualistic treatment of the two mirrors the way that cinema targets only the mind (or head if you like) with it’s aims of creating an illusion and cuts the use of the body by placing it in a restricted place where it cannot move and can not be involved in the space or environment. Simply by doing this Rist is using the body to create the viewers experience and is making the body’s position in space an important aspect of the work. It is though a deconstruction of the spaces of interaction that we take for granted are actually constructed, a reveal of the elements that make the cinema, that similarities are drawn between this space and the cinema and the piece makes a spectacle out of what appears on screen. So in this way the physicality of the piece directly affects the mental state of the viewer watching and how they interpret the image on screen. The space “acts as a remedy; it helps to open up your principal space: your mind and body. You may wish to imagine as many ‘real’ spaces as you can, but you can also open up your own primary space and expand it” (Rist, 2001, p. 26). The outer space of the physical installation lets you reflect upon your inner space. It is through the outer space, the physical restriction and the cutting off of the viewer’s body, that the piece evokes for the viewer’s inner space the cinema and with Rist taking the cinematic dispositif to an extreme.
Within Rist’s intentions and works the viewer’s awareness of their presence and their own understanding of what they are and what they are doing with their body is paramount to experience of the work. They intrude on the viewer, importantly they have contrasting elements, in and out, that purposefully show the audience the viewing space they are in. This importance placed on the awareness of the viewer strikes closely to tones within the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty’s.
“True reflection presents me to myself not as idle and inaccessible subjectivity, but as identical with my presence in the world and to others, as I am now realizing it: I am all that I see, I am an intersubjective field, not despite my body and historical situation, but, on the contrary, by being this body and this situation, and though them, all the rest.” (Merleau-Ponty, 2002 [1945], p. 452)
Yet in direct contrast, the process of alienating the viewer with the aim to force them to consider there situation points to a divide between the mind and the body and suggests that the viewers mind is separate from the body and is unaware of it until this Brechtian device is used and the process requires the viewers mind to then connect with the body and understand its being. Rist actively uses the physical body of the viewer and their presence in the installation space to gain further access to the mind.
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Eyeball Massage Hayward Gallery Review
Pipilotti Rist (Contemporary Artists Series)
Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage
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Merleau-Ponty, M. (2002 [1945]). Phenomenology of Perception. (C. Smith, Trans.) London: Routledge Classics.
Rist, P. (2001). I rist, you rist, she rists, he rists, we rist, you rist, they rist, tourist: Hans Ulrich Obrist in Conversation with Pipilotti Rist. Pipilotti Rist. (H. U. Obrist, Interviewer) London: Phaidon.
Rist, P. (2006). Pipilotti Rist. Broken Screen: 26 Conversations with Doug Aitken: Expanding The Image Breaking The Narrative. (D. Aitken, Interviewer) New York: Distributed Art Publishers.
Rist, P. (2011). Pipilotti Rist Interview at ACCA, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011-2012. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_-ofYzkqE. (E. Sullivan, Interviewer)
Rosenthal, S. (2011). Be My Friend! In S. Rosenthal (Ed.), Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage (pp. 18-29). London: Hayward Publishing.
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