2008-09-03 at 1:28 a.m.
from http://www.muar.ru/eng/exhibitions/2007/rist_exib_en.htm:Pipilotti Rist. Sip My Ocean
2 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Special guest
With the support of the Embassy of Switherland in Russia
Pro Helvetia Foundation
Swiss International Air Lines
March 3 — April 29, 2007
The Ruined Annex
Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland) is a classic figure in the world of video art. Elizabeth Charlotte Rist borrowed her Pipilotti stage-name from Pippy Longstocking, combining the name of this character with her childhood nickname: Lotty. Rist’s works are a triumph of unrestrained fantasy and naïve childish optimism, much like the acts of her favorite fairytale personage. In her video works, Pipilotti is simultaneously a screenplay author, a director, a cameraman, and quite often the main character, since Rist believes that the sound component makes up half of her films and, indeed, she composes music for them herself. In Moscow, Pipilotti Rist is going to present a spatial video installation in the most intriguing and striking venue of Moscow, in the ruins of The A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture.
The Mechanics of Fluids
<…> Rist’s saturated, ever-mutating imagery imparts a polymorphous pleasure in the physical. The pervasive sensuality of Sip My Ocean, with its multiple screens and hallucinogenic mirroring effects, suggests the elusive state of jouissance — unadulterated, boundless, pre-Oedipal pleasure. Associated with the female, this metaphoric realm imagines a body with no boundaries, a body with multiple and autonomous erotic zones, a body in full possession of its own desire. However, Rist’s erratic vocals — which range from sweetly lyrical to maniacal screaming — disrupt these Utopian dreams of total gratification. For desire always demands an “other,” one who may or may not yield to the seduction, one who may or may not return the favour. As the soundtrack to this deliriously enchanting waterworld, Rist’s version of Isaac’s tune expresses the dangers (and pleasures) of desire; it also suggests a person trying to maintain control against the rising tides of passion. “Sip my ocean” is Rist’s invitation to participate in this game of desire and fulfilment; yet it is also a dare to survive its perilous undertow.
Nancy Spector
(From: Parkett, Zürich / New York, 1996, no. 48, pp. 83–91).
The Blooms
<…> For Rist, then, art’s power stems primarily from its access to the unconscious. Her best work has the quality of a dream. The strongest of these dream-like pieces is Sip My Ocean (1996), which is composed almost entirely of footage shot underwater. A mirror projection folded into the corner pleat of a room, Sip My Ocean captures with poetic precision the kaleidoscopic double-view of falling in love and surviving it. Covering Chris Isaac’s Wicked Game, Rist's version of the song moves from the whispered adolescent longing of' “I never thought I’d fall in love with someone like you,” to the emotional devastation of the adult recognition, “I never thought I’d lose someone like you.” The most affecting moment in the song occurs when Rist, who performs the vocals with Anders Guggisberg, intones, “I never want to fall in love,” and his background vocals agree, “No, it’s only gonna break your heart,” before she finishes the line, “with you, with you.” The duality of emotional desire is doubled both by the mirrored projection and by the “double take” the viewer does upon seeing the accoutrements of domestic life turned into sinking children’s toys — a caravan, a plate, a cup, all float — to the bottom of the sea.
Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Elisabeth Bronfen
(From: Pipilotti Rist, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001.
Sinking and Surfacing
In Sip My Ocean, Rist uses not only the wall surface but also innovatively employs the corner of the room for her purposes, mirroring the moving pictures into it. The effect of this technique has been described as a “kaleidoscopic Op-Art effect, in which the images seem to disappear behind the corner, as if sucked away, ‘highlighting’ the fragmentation of the gaze as a motif of the perception of every day life almost pedagogically.” Before viewers can become at all conscious of the “fragmentation of the gaze,” however, they are impressed by images of a light-coloured sandy sea bottom illuminated by the sun, of shimmering coral, fish and jellyfish, a sea in which swimming bodies move almost trance-like and objects slowly sink to the bottom. Cups with colourful 1970s patterns, milk canisters, a black and yellow record, an embroidered plastic heart and an orange toy mobile home: All land among the coral on the soft sea floor. The lighter pieces float slowly to the surface. A woman and a man take turns splashing around in the water. Reflections from the water’s surface dance across their bodies. From the perspective of a fish, we see chiefly their arms and legs paddling around in the water.
Sip My Ocean, however, consists not only of images from the sea, but incorporates elements of the video Pimple Porno, a sky sequence, and a brief glance into an enlarged eye. Right after the first sequence of an underwater whirlpool, the green-blue eye fills both walls, its surface shining in the sunlight. The mirroring of the eye creates the Op-Art effect described earlier in the corner of the room. On the one hand, viewers lose themselves briefly in the depths of the projection, as if in the depth of the sea; on the other, the gaze and the flatness of the reflected eye impede complete immersion in the “nirvana” of the underwater world. Thus, for a fraction of a second the large projection no longer appears as an enticing water surface, but as a surface that makes diving in impossible. Instead of losing themselves in the endless depths of the ocean, viewers are confronted with the surface of the very organ that makes illusion possible.
Anne Soll
(From: Pipilotti Rist, Artists Monographs, Vol. 3, Dumont; Köln: Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, 2005)
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SLIT SCAN
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http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_3_28/ai_68660257
If this is so, it is because of Rist's insightful understanding of fantasy not as a site for the fulfillment of desire but as what Slavoj Zizek calls the scene of desire--the very scenario through which "the subject is constituted as desiring," insofar as desire is understood as something that is always in process and continuously reconstructed.
PR: I glorify hysterical actions. They are powerful gestures, a form of resistance when one is in a weak position. Hysteria is at the same time a falling apart into many pieces, an ecstasy, and a personal exorcism. You can see this with children: I try to honor their movements because, in the end, this is how one gets to know them. Sometimes it is better to say things with movements than with words.
> the problem with art writing/theory and art and visceral enjoyment:
CR: The beauty of mistakes, floating bodies, sexuality, relaxation, child-like irresponsibility: could we not say that you exploit images and sound to enchant and seduce the spectator, so as to disrupt stereotyped expectations?
PR: Yes, my installations are seductive. But I don't want to fool the spectators. I want spectators to relax and enjoy the images so that they can suspend their problems for a while, and concentrate. Seduction is there to help them concentrate. But as I said, even if the images are seducing and enchanting, I hope that I can achieve a balance between the camera and the object. I do not want to possess the object. The viewer is not above or below the object. The viewer is the camera, he or she should have the same perspective as the camera.
>what the hell right. stupid interviewer. anyway, from this interview i now know that she worked in a video studio for 8 years, so effects are closed to me.
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this kinda describes the interview before this http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0425/is_4_59/ai_69294352/pg_5?tag=artBody;col1
Harris: That's sad.
Rist: It is. I just have to eat it and say okay it's like this, but it's not true that if you have attention as an artist, that you can bring your personal things and people will be interested. They are not interested in you.
Harris: But with celebrity culture, which unfortunately the art world sometimes mirrors, people tend to get more obsessed with a "star's" personal life, and start to read their work in these terms.
Rist: They start to read the work as a description of my personality. When I talk with them, I'm not there anymore. They don't need me. When they start to talk to me, they have a picture. They want me to be like this, and I hardly can break that.
Harris: What do you think the picture is?
Rist: I'm somebody that does only what she wants [laughs].
Harris: Is that bad?
Rist: No, but that's ridiculous, because life is for everybody, and also for me, a big balance between what you want and what's possible. And it's full of logistics, administration, and transportation. Very practical things. There is this idea of the artist as somebody who is free, who can get up at 12 o'clock and work one hour until 1 o'clock, and then get drunk at 2 o'clock. I would also like to ask you what you thought I am or should be? Or what kind of a person I am?
Harris: You want to really know what I thought? Well, see this is very revealing of me, which is only fair, since you're sharing your feelings with me. When I saw you lecture at the Public Art Fund, I was impressed with your decision to fill the allotted two hours with a continuous screening of your works. You showed so much, and I thought it was really generous. And also you talked about the work technically. I think for me just sitting and seeing this progression of your work, the variation, I became enamored with it. And I didn't expect to, I guess. I had been interested in it prior to that, but it had been so contextualized as pop culture, with all the music video connotations, I hadn't realized how much more there was to it.
Rist: Often my work is treated more like fashion. Maybe it's my name, my first name. It's also a political and social question. Fifty years ago, the spoken word reigned, but during the last fifty years, the power has gone over to pictures. Everybody is now well educated visually, and yet there is still this Klassenkampf, this class fight between the word people and the picture people.
Harris: Which brings me to characterizations of your work. Nancy Spector described your work as being simultaneously coquettish and rebellious. She referred specifically to I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much--this work that put you on the map--as a satire on the commodified eroticism of MTV.
Rist: It's actually the best work I ever made [laughs]. Where did she say that? In Parkett?
Harris: Yes. Why I bring it up is that I think a lot of people share this interpretation.
Rist: Okay, when I made this piece, I had never seen MTV [laughs]. And I hate cynicism.
...
Harris: There are a lot of aspects to your work--saturated color fields, mutating forms, kaleidoscopic imagery, and ambient sound tracks--that conjure associations with psychedelia.
Rist: But I would say the world is psychedelic. And I think that the world is even more colorful than I have ever been. After the sixties, we have tried to ignore that. Look at this object. It's totally red. We have this yellow daylight, which creates this intensity. But if I were to photograph it, the red wouldn't seem as intense. So I would have to push it up to bring it back to reality.
Harris: So again you're talking about re-creating that primary, sensorial relationship to imagery.
Rist: Yes.
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apparantly (absolutions) features her reading "barefoot" by anne sexton (my lovely asylum lawn poetess) among other things. like richard brautigan (http://www.brautigan.net/) whose works i shall endeavour to read after As. all that weird foreign chanting in the background.
Barefoot
Loving me with my shows off
means loving my long brown legs,
sweet dears, as good as spoons;
and my feet, those two children
let out to play naked. Intricate nubs,
my toes. No longer bound.
And what's more, see toenails and
all ten stages, root by root.
All spirited and wild, this little
piggy went to market and this little piggy
stayed. Long brown legs and long brown toes.
Further up, my darling, the woman
is calling her secrets, little houses,
little tongues that tell you.
There is no one else but us
in this house on the land spit.
The sea wears a bell in its navel.
And I'm your barefoot wench for a
whole week. Do you care for salami?
No. You'd rather not have a scotch?
No. You don't really drink. You do
drink me. The gulls kill fish,
crying out like three-year-olds.
The surf's a narcotic, calling out,
I am, I am, I am
all night long. Barefoot,
I drum up and down your back.
In the morning I run from door to door
of the cabin playing chase me.
Now you grab me by the ankles.
Now you work your way up the legs
and come to pierce me at my hunger mark
Anne Sexton
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ooohhkay. i like asylum lawn better. i feel like buying ljs' fish when i collect my photos later. damn it. i'm like effing fat and swollen now cause i haven't had the time and mental energy to run. it's going to be like this till As are over ): which really sucks, i should do sth about it. cause not running makes me more upset with the -ve energy i accumulate in these bowels.
mum's been nagging me non stop about how i'm the most (in a bad sense) relaxed A level student she's ever seen. oh-ho. i'm stressed alright. it manifests itself in insanity that's all. i'm a perennial failure (i'm sure i've said so before) and living is like wanting to die. i can only want to sleep to escape it all.
everything i face now that gives me interest, tells me that i CAN never touch it with my existance cause i have proven incapable too perfectly. i was looking through the magazine racks in borders yesterday. i-D, isH, wallpaper*, (well the only names i can remember), and whilst before it would have awakened a desire in me that comforted me with a smattering of "i was meant for this", yesterday i saw my spiritual (harkening literal) castration from my own fantasies when my fingers collided their covers.
i'm better dead i'm better dead
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