(Absolutions) Pipilotti's Mistakes

Pepperminta is an anarchist of the imagination. She lives in a futuristic rainbow villa and according to her own rules. Colors are the young woman's best friends and strawberries are her pets. She knows the most amazing remedies to free people of their fears. Pepperminta's wish is for everyone to see the world in her favorite colors. Werwen, a young plump and shy man yet whose sex appeal Pepperminta finds highly attractive, and the beautiful Edna, who talks to tulips, join her on her passionate mission. These three musketeers of a different kind set out to fight for a more humane world. Wherever the gang appears, everything is turned upside down and people's lives are transformed in the most miraculous and wondrous of ways.

With I'm a Victim of this Song, Rist takes up the concept of the "cover" version, in which one performer does a version of another's song, and gives it her own twist. Starting with music from Chris Isaak's hit single Wicked Game, she adds her own sung and screamed versions of the lyrics, accompanied by effects-manipulated, diaristic video images. The result is an art-world "cover" of a popular artifact, with a woman's voice reinterpreting the male original, and a vivid illustration of the consumer's claim to own and interpret media images.

This video work was made while Rist was still an art student at the School of Design in Basel, Switzerland. It was produced in an unlimited edition and is intended to be shown on a domestic-style monitor, although it may also be displayed as a projection with special permission from the artist. The video depicts the artist, an attractive young woman dancing manically around the room while repeatedly singing ‘I’m not the girl who misses much’. The phrase is an adaptation of the first line of the Beatles song ‘Happiness is a Warm Gun'. Referring to her childhood Rist has said, ‘In my village in Switzerland I had a small window on the art world through the mass media; through John Lennon/Yoko Ono I moved from pop music to contemporary art. In return, I will always be grateful to popular culture’ (quoted in ‘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, p.16).

20 short films about human rights.

Rist's body is the canvas in this surreal montage. Unflinching displays of the artist's own menstrual blood are juxtaposed with images of gemstones, while swooping, close-up shots of Rist's arms and legs are followed by archival footage of lunar fly-bys, suggesting the ease with which visual culture has abstracted the female body into a beautiful but alien natural phenomenon.

In this détourned music video, Rist trains her camera on the nude male body, challenging the tropes of the form and of pop culture in general. Her anonymous male subject is more puppet than star player as he flails helplessly, chasing a receding camera, accompanied by a cut-and-paste remix of The Beatles' Sexy Sadie. Supersaturated colors and a woodland setting further serve to naturalize the surreal scenario.

The video drifts between reason and dream and, like the installation, floats between earth and sky. Rist tries to give answers to such questions as ‘How much of what you see and hear comes from outside and how much is constructed by your brain? Why does your hair grow out of your head as if your skull was a cornfield?’.

Ever Is Over All envelops viewers in two slow-motion projections on adjacent walls. In one a roving camera focuses on red flowers in a field of lush vegetation. The spellbinding lull this imagery creates harmonizes with the projection to its left, which features a woman in sparkling ruby slippers promenading down a car-lined street. The fluidity of both scenes is disrupted when the woman violently smashes a row of car windshields with the long-stemmed flower she carries. As the vandal gains momentum with each gleeful strike of her wand, an approaching police officer smiles in approval, introducing comic tension into this whimsical and anarchistic scene. –MoMA

Sight and sex viewed through a window.

During the party offered for Halloween at the Nobel Laureate, Murray Gell-Mann in Santa Fe, Michele and Pipilotti enter a back room...

Love, memory, nature, and intimacy collide.

This sensual, slow-motion video installation shows the artist, with her shocking-pink hair, lying naked on the rain-soaked earth.

‘It’s springtime’, a little bird stealing the filaments of my window screen reminded me this morning. ‘The sun in shining, the sky is blue, the trees are blossoming pink flowers and there is a wide world to be explored…what are you doing indoors?’ This 2002 video by artist Pipilotti Rist seems to be proposing a similar criticism in her reframing of concepts of time, season and the human lifespan.

Patterns swirl and melt, a woman falls backwards into a galaxy, a naked giant does yoga over us.

Each pixel is separated like an exploded screen, set in a chaotic way into the space. The video has a whole movement in the room, as one three dimensional image. The experience resembles the brain, working with electromagnetic waves and low voltage information.

Supersubjektiv traces Rist’s longing for connection in an increasingly digital and globalized world.