Soft Rebellion

Pipilotti Rist’s exhibition Pixel Forest opened on October 26, 2016 at the New Museum. As the Swiss artist’s first major retrospective exhibition in the US, Pixel Forest showcases the artist’s video works since the 1980s, including her early single channel videos, and her recent video installations integrated with projectors as well as with the museum space. While presenting the artist’s recurrent exploration of feminist themes, the exhibition also shows Rist’s maneuvers with light and shadow in her video works, which deepen her expression of the body, femininity, and feminist sensitivity. Creating a dreamlike atmosphere, the artist inserts her sentiments and creates intimacy for audiences to gently and softly enter into the surreal exhibition space.  

^{Pipilotti Rist. Nothing, machine for soap bubbles and white fog, 2011. Photo: Rui Tang}

The exhibition begins with Rist’s 1997 work Nothing, a machine that generates soap bubbles. Sitting at the entrance to the museum, the silver futuristic cuboid continuously pumps misty bubbles. As the title suggests, the bubbles float transiently before disappearing into nothingness. The ethereal work sets the tone of the exhibition as a whole, which carries on into the gallery on the second floor, and begins with Rist’s classic video work Ever of Over All  (1997). In this work, a woman holding a long-stemmed flower happily walks along a street full of parked cars. After a police officer pleasantly gives her consent, the woman smashes the car windows one after another. The joyfulness on the woman’s face, her floating skyblue skirt, and her brisk leap, all give the protagonist an innocent and vivacious character, which romanticizes and even “legitimizes” her aggressive and destructive act. The flower imagery, which typically symbolizes beauty and embodies the notion of femininity, is subverted here; its associations also extend to the protagonist’s accomplice who breaks the law.

^{Pipilotti Rist. Ever Is Over All, two-channel video and sound installation, color; 4:07; dimensions variable, 1997. Sound by Anders Guggisberg and Rist. Photo: Rui Tang}

In Ever of Over All, the artist places the protagonist in a feminine setting, yet expresses and advocates the opposite of femininity: the aggressive, the undaunted, the egotistical, and even the violent. The idea of femininity in this work no longer speaks to conventional ideals of beauty, gentleness, sensitivity, and empathy; instead it responds to antagonism, instability, and insensitivity. Although subversive, the work is not confrontational; Pipilotti approaches it in a peaceable and delightful way, with a seemingly feminine tone. Creating an apparently beautiful scene, Ever of Over All expresses a contradictory romanticized expression that further complicates the exhibition as a whole.  

^{Installation view. Includes single-channel video installations. Installation photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio, courtesy New Museum.}

^{Installation view.  Installation photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio, courtesy New Museum.}

 ^{Pipilotti Rist. Vorstadthirn (Suburb Brain), 3 projections onto a miniaturised model of a suburb residential area, various objects, with sound, 2011.Photo: Rui Tang}

The artist’s expression as such is only achieved through adopting kaleidoscopic light and lithe fabric; it is also conveyed through the theme of family life. Vorstadthirn (Suburb Brain) (2011) is a work in the exhibition that thematizes family life. Displayed on the second floor, Vorstadthirn is a miniature suburban house, which integrates a projector, module, and video. On the wall behind the “house,” a video plays the artist’s monologue, in which she contemplates and questions relationships, parenthood, and the search for love, disclosing a dubious and uneasy attitude towards the ideal of family life. Under simulated twilight, family dinner begins: a miniature video projected onto the “house” shows the dinner scene where children sit around the table. In the outwardly content atmosphere, the dinner plates full of food prepared by the mother are set on fire, while the father seems to be pleased to see the burning dinner, as if this is normal family life. At the same time, the collage of pink, orange, and yellow hues illuminate the house, as the shadows of the trees contribute to a sense of tranquility. However, the serenity is juxtaposed with burning plates, corresponding to the anxiety expressed in the artist’s monologue. Crisis in the suburban family quietly rises up under the contrived calm and harmony. Vorstadthirn reveals how Pipilotti merges reality with its representation to achieve an illusionary beauty, through which she heightens the discord between the real and the fictional. At the same time, the artist also reinterprets and interrogates the role of femininity and domesticity through the different perspectives of a woman, wife, and mother.

^{Installation view.  Installation photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio, courtesy New Museum.} 

The artist also expresses a gentleness and intimacy in the exhibition which peaks in the work 4th Floor to Mildness (2016), displayed on the fourth floor of the gallery. Inviting the viewers to lay in bed, the work consists of petal-shaped screens on a ceiling, through which one sees the artist’s body saturated in water and her distorted face. The uncanniness of the video is intensified by the soundtrack, in which a woman sings: “When I was a child / I threw with dung as I fought / As a child / I killed all thugs.” Unfolding in kaleidoscopic fashion, Pixel Forest “gently” invites audiences into its illusionary scene. Upon entering the exhibition, viewers notice that underneath the seemingly beautiful work, there is an undercurrent of rebelliousness that is “gently” released by the artist. —[SCR]

^{Pipilotti Rist. 4th Floor to Mildness, video and sound installation, single and double beds with pillows and covers, 2016. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.}

^{Installation view.  Installation photo: Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio, courtesy New Museum.}