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.