Pipi’s Big Adventure

Pipilotti Rist embraces the second floor of the MOMA as her own by enhancing the surrounding windows with pink tint and plopping a round couch in the middle of the room. Seated comfortably a viewer can blissfully look at the rest of MOMA through rose-colored glasses. This marks the beginning of a feminization of the space. Though at first glance the psychedelia is overwhelming. The couches made for reclining, dope-smoking or making-out create a den atmosphere enlivened by a sock waft and the disproportionate amount of squirmy teenagers. But though the images are brilliant with colors, trippy transitions and unstable camera angles, this hippy facade is just a way of directing you into Rist’s trip of feminine exploration, where tasteful restraint is banished and sensual indulgences rule.

Rist’s roots as a punk musician are obvious in her older videos where she utilizes a sexual female aggression unique in live rock music. In Pour Your Body Out, Rist still channels this energy though more subtly through the pop sensibility of MTV music videos. Strong colors (blue strawberries - didn’t Smashing Pumpkins have those in one of their videos?) and flashy transitions are visually seductive in sophisticated MTV speak, a language the majority unavoidably know. But a definite diversion from the MTV aesthetic is the pace, which moves in slow motion helped along by the soundtrack of a haunting drone. This slowness emphasizes a dreamlike haze that floats the viewer through a techno-natural landscape where life is best experienced with the senses not the brains. The images are centered around the female body, with menstrual blood, orifices and skin all in a slobbery and tactile relation to nature. By using MTV as her weapon to beat out sentimentality Rist is able to refresh the historically burdened woman/nature connection.

Categorizing work as feminist is usually limiting because it binds the meaning in stagnant clichés. But artwork by female artists like Rist (I hope) are exposing the multifaceted meaning of feminism. Rist reflects a particular angle of feminism that Vera Chytilova encased in the film Daisies (which unsurprisingly is a huge influence on Rist). The women in the movie, or girls rather, misbehave without fear of what is proper or moral. They are totally self-sufficient (as prostitutes) and consumed in their own fantastical world which they shape in unconventional ways. Because of their unexpected behavior it is unclear where their dream ends and reality begins. These women are admirable because they escape entrapment of objectification. The attention their outside appearance attracts inspires their actions rather than stifles them. In Pour Your Body Out Rist also escapes entrapment by allowing a female experience from the inside and the view of her from the outside to intertwine. Rist creates a rich dreamland where Eve thrives in the Garden of Eden and the apple she eats with gusto does not imprison her but frees her.

Q

"Style is the man when the man himself is a stylus - as in geomancy, when one's body becomes a seismic needle for registering, in ink or sand or some other substance, the signals of the cosmos. If the man is the instrument, then the figures he makes are both by him and not by him."
-Alexander Nagel, Questions of Style, Artforum, Sept 2010

Georgia O’Keefe, The Calendar Girl

Georgia O’Keefe has become an artist reduced to cliché, her images repetitively reproduced on postcards and calendars to a visually numbing effect. Her symbolic imagery of flowers reduced to a shallow sexual quip. Our eyes have become accustomed to repetitive viewing in banal contexts, sucking the juicy and complex content of O’Keefe’s work dry.

Luckily the exhibition of O’Keefe’s work at the Whitney last September
attempted to revive her, breathing fresh life into her images. The format of the show emphasized the artist’s intention by way of the interior and exterior. Her paintings were interspersed between portraits taken of her by Stieglitz, her lover at the time. Perhaps because he was privy to an intimate angle of her he was able to take arresting portraits. In his photographs her exterior demanded attention, exuding strength and character and a stubborn temperament.

Alternatively though not in contradiction her interior was made present through the energetic abstractions. Art, whether abstraction or otherwise is the intangible made tangible. The invisible visible. O’Keefe articulated frankly through shapes and color, her (though these words don’t suffice) feelings, desires and internal energies. Abstraction was simply the only kind of art, she said, that let her express her deepest feelings.1

Although secretly I curse whoever introduced her to oil. Her early watercolor paintings flowed with a freedom lost in the muddy stiffness of the oil paintings. She struggled with color and value in the oil medium when she may have breezed through shading with water-based washes. I shudder to imagine what easy power she may have released had she stuck to watercolor. Though a second thought wonders if the rigidity with which she handled oil was better suited to a stubborn, rock/bone-like character? Did her freedom of form lie in the rigid structure of line?

Articulation is courageous both if everyone understands and if no one understands. Because O’Keefe did not explain in words the origins of her artistic instigations, Stieglitz and others located meaning in sexual cliché’s of generic womanness. No doubt sexuality in a woman is fierce, but in speaking of energies in the body, it is one of many. Referred to as chakras in yoga or as spiritual reservoirs of energy which are all tangled together. There is something scarily minimizing about relating O’Keefe’s paintings to mere genitalia or singular sexual pleasure.

But how then does one address in words that interior world without sounding like a sappy fool? Is this interior world of unconscious instincts, fantasized nuances and spiritual swinging colliding with sensory information coming from outside and in, even worth talking about? The most brazen articulation of this inner sense is in O’Keefe’s paintings, as long as the viewer doesn’t think it out but rather feels it out, painting by painting.

1 Holland Cutter, In Full Flower, Before the Desert, The New York Times, September 17, 2009