In her immersive video installations, artist Pipilotti Rist wants you to feel the world around you. From tiny bubbles collecting under aquatic plants to your own digestive tract, she heightens the banal into phantasmagoria. With hallucinogenic colour, echoing sound and a camera that probes microworlds, Rist challenges enervation, shocking and seducing us back into a raw-nerved relationship with our surroundings. Her early works, such as Ever Is Over All (1997), in which a woman walks the streets of Zürich cheerfully smashing car windows with a giant flower stamen, take a jubilant punk attitude to video art and a poetic incursion into music videos.
In Pickelporno (Pimple Porno) (1992), Rist applies her technicolour granular lens to sex and intimacy, proposing an alternative vision to that propagated by the rapidly expanding porn industry, and establishing a new visual language and technique. Her small camera glides intimately across the body, capturing every pore and hair. These images are overlaid in the edit with surreal juxtapositions that evoke an internal landscape of intense desire and passion. The film is typical for Rist, in providing an alternative vision of a narrow realm of image making – here pornography – whilst avoiding didactic critique.
Her latest works are truly operatic, building worlds that consume whole museums. Films, objects, soundscapes and architectural interventions are exactingly staged to create multimedia environments in which we can perhaps reconnect with each other, as tribal beings of sensation. Confronted with her soaring visions of the body and biosphere, the guest is encouraged to lie down or sit in a cocoon of her making, in which we are grounded by an image-world that offers a moment of escape and recalibration. Working through humour, colour and an unapologetically spectacular aesthetic, Rist’s works also offer a now-urgent pathway to connecting our bodies with the natural world.
Natasha Hoare: As a woman in a con-servative country like Switzerland, how hard was it for you to get into making film, and to reject the minimalism that was the dominant aesthetic of the time?
Pipilotti Rist: I studied in Vienna first, where there had already been many different canons of art making. I didn’t feel a particular conservatism there, and I actually did not think that I would be an artist at that point – I was more interested in music. I made stages for bands, which allowed for a wider variety of possible styles. I was always interested in the so-called ‘low culture,’ like pop music, advertisement, graphic design and crafts, so I had already established a certain freedom.
When I attended video classes there was no internet. Our teachers showed us a collection of video art on tapes. Of course, as you say, there were some really minimalistic works such as real-time and closed-circuit videos. One of two teachers in that video class definitely gave us the feeling that we shouldn’t use saturated colours, for instance. But still I made some videos of my own, which I knew that teacher would hate me for, and that made me want to make them even more!
Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Ossip van Duivenbode
Natasha: What made you take up the video course? Did it feel natural to you to pick up a film camera?
Pipilotti: At that time, the technology was not affordable. If you wanted to edit, you needed a big editing table. Even with video, when you wanted to make a transition you had to run two machines simultaneously, and record to a third machine. Cameras were also not generally affordable for a young person. I had previously worked with projecting Super 8 film, and painting with acrylic colours on stages, but I couldn’t create any effects like dissolves. With video, I was given the possibility to ‘cook’ the material.
Natasha: Music has been a really important part of your work. I particularly love your version of ‘Wicked Game’ by Chris Isaak in the work I’m a Victim of This Song (1995). Does music give you different opportunities to visual work?
Pipilotti: Music is a very good tool for bringing our heads together. As if we are together in a bubble. Music allows you an almost direct view into the brain of another person. The inner sounds of a person are emotional, beyond the rational. The base of music is the heartbeat, and the voice is our primary, number one instrument. Music is a construct, and it’s also very seductive. You can change the mood of a room with the right music. I said as a teenager that I was interested in making good stages, or good rooms, where people feel good – and I’m still doing the same thing now. The big difference is there’s no band anymore; it’s people themselves who are at the centre.
Natasha: It’s interesting hearing you say you’re trying to make environments that induce a sense of wellbeing for people. When I’m watching some of the early work, there’s a real edge. It feels like joy is boiling over into something angry or hallucinogenic, or even threatening. Has that anger dissipated in the recent works?
Pipilotti: Yes. As with most people, I have to admit there are many shades of grey. The younger we are, the more we think we have the right to see in black and white, and then as we grow we realise it’s more complicated than that. It is only possible to be really angry if you simplify, because there are so many contradictions in all situations and problems. In my early works, I liked to cultivate hysteria, to create a situation or sense of falling apart. Then I began to want to be more than deconstructive; to not only say what is wrong but also to make propositions. For example, my work Pickelporno (Pimple Porno) was my reaction to all of these big discussions in the 1980s in Germany about pornography. I thought: ‘Why do we use so much effort to always say what we don’t like?’ Instead, I wanted to make an erotic film that I would like. Of course it was a very primitive proposition, but that is what has always driven me. It’s harder to propose what you would like than to say what you don’t like.
Natasha: A polarised, black-and-white vision that produces such anger is a really defining feature of contemporary culture. Some forms of media are trying to continually feed this anger, because it sells.
Pipilotti: Yes, anger sells. It’s an easy trick.
…Sex can look quite stupid from the outside! But when you are in it, it’s not stupid…
Natasha: Staying with Pickelporno, I think it’s such an interesting film in terms of articulating the possibility of an aesthetics of female eroticism. I read it as a feminist gesture. An incursion of a female perspective into a visual form that was dominated by male makers.
Pipilotti: It was conscious research, and my theory was that while I can’t speak for every woman, the female is more interested in what’s going on emotionally between a couple, more so than looking from the outside at the copulation mechanisms. Sex can look quite stupid from the outside! But when you are in it, it’s not stupid. It’s really the sounds, the smells, the touch. I thought we should show more of what is happening. What is the ‘other’ feeling when you kiss? I’m a bit disappointed in myself that I didn’t continue with this project further. Maybe this interview will pose the challenge for me to make version two, now I have many more skills! But now there are also more female filmmakers trying to make erotic films.
Natasha: Yes, there are whole platforms devoted to female-oriented pornography now. However, it seems to me that it’s following the same aesthetic, but it’s just tempered.
Pipilotti: Yes, it’s probably the position of the camera. It’s too objective and stays on the outside of things. The camera is still positioned as a higher power, at a higher level than what is being filmed. I like it when the thing being filmed is in the same – or an even higher – position than the camera.
Natasha: When you’re making a film, do you score it according to the effect of the images? Moving between attraction, happiness, melancholy?
Pipilotti: Yes, I have a dramaturgy. I want to have wild moments and then slower ones, and to incorporate a rhythm into it. But the difference with the work I make now, compared with what I made in the 1990s, is that I used to have a beginning and an end. Now, I am making work that is always looped, because I never know when somebody’s coming into the exhibition space. Of course, this has made it less narrative. There are certainly changes in intensities, but, you know, I don’t believe in narratives. I’m not sure if this is a deformation of my brain, or if it marks a lack of concentration, but stories often seem to me like a crutch. Life is so wild and we often can’t really explain what is happening. If somebody ask us about our life, then we make up a story so that it seems very logical; how one moment came from another. Creating a linear thread makes things easier for us to swallow. In my work, I’m not very interested in bringing life into this linear logic. I’m more interested in certain scenes or moods.
Natasha: Narrative is also a way that we are controlled, because other people or other powers can make narratives for us.
Pipilotti: Yes, that’s a good point. In a way, we think we control reality when we write history into a narrative, when actually what was there was just chaos and miracles.
Natasha: (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler (1988) features you falling repeatedly, as if shot or fainting. It made me think a lot about the falling body in art, especially Yves Klein, the twin towers in Terminal Velocity (2001–5) by Carolee Schneemann, and Andy Warhol’s suicides. Why was this action important for the work?
Pipilotti: Entlastungen, in German, means ‘absolutions,’ or, more literally, ‘taking the weight from you.’ In the video, I created a poetic speech about my shortcomings as a person, and also made a field test of how I could disturb an analogue machine. In those disruptions, I found so many images that seemed very similar to my subconscious. My theory was that if you disturb machines, they bring solutions. It’s similar to when we have a psychosomatic problem; this often pushes us to make a decision. It shows you that suffering from a situation that disturbs you can bring you to your truth. To fall is to surrender to gravity. I was thinking about how people fall and get up again. I was always very much surprised by how everyone can be hurt and humiliated, but they can get up all over again.
Natasha: Do you see those early works as a kind of critique of music videos?
Pipilotti: I hadn’t seen many music videos around the time I’d made the early works. MTV came later to us in Switzerland, but there were music videos long before MTV, like The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour (1967), which I was familiar with.
My work was an addition, or a reaction, not a critique. I would never have said say then, or now, ‘I’m a fine artist and I have come to tell you how to do this.’ I was making those videos without a client, without a band to sell. I was my own client in a way, and maybe that’s already a critique in itself, to create another structure. But I always loved the combination of music and films.
Natasha: Moving to some of the more recent works, do you think sensuality is a way for us to get past the division between ourselves and nature? And has that become ever more important with the climate emergency?
Pipilotti: That’s nicely said. I couldn’t say it better. Sensuality shows us that we are really part of nature. We are a mammal with very strong tools: our hands. I always wonder what would have happened if dolphins had hands. Because of our hands, we became the dominant species.
Natasha: Where does your relationship to nature come from? This idea that we aren’t separate from it?
Pipilotti: Now we are again making a history! I will tell you something, and then it will become truth! I grew up in a very green family. We always had to go to construction sites and save frogspawn. We’d travel on the bus with buckets of it to bring it somewhere safe. We went to the mountains a lot, too, and our parents would tell us the names of the flowers we would see. Nature was always very close to me. Also, I’m very short-sighted, so when I get really super close to something, what I see is extremely sharp. I use nature as a tool to show inner pictures, starting with video. Nature is raw; raw and resolute. I see no reason why I should only try to copy the world. The world is always much more detailed to the human eye than to a camera, even with the 4K camera technology available now. I use the images in my works to transport the viewers to the images that I see when I close my eyes. Actually, that’s the effect of all culture; an attempt to bring out an inner world so that we can understand each other. Even if you are writing a book or a story, in a way you invite the other into your complex brain.
Natasha: I like that sentiment; it has a humanism at the heart of it. We lose a lot of that now in terms of creating all these separate categories of human experience. That is important if we are to create political change and engage in activism. But somehow, it’s a lot to lose that humanistic sense that we are all made of complex internal worlds, and we’re all just trying to communicate them to each other.
Pipilotti: Of course, the political fight is important. Otherwise you are not able to feel your sensuality, because you have so many other problems to contend with. Seeing divisions everywhere, that’s also the function of our brains. We try to see the divisions and the differences more than the commonalities. Actually, our bodies are very similar. When we sit here now, there is blood going through us, and our hearts are pumping. All the big basics allow us to function, like a plant without roots.
Natasha: Do you think joy can be a radical act?
Pipilotti: We are still very influenced by religious history telling us that we had to suffer to be a good human. This idea moved fluently over to, ‘If somebody’s suffering, they must be a deep person.’ I don’t agree with the idea of joy as superficial – that comes directly from religious dogma. With my work, I like to speak emotionally and directly to all people, and engage them joyously with my art. Colour is a very powerful tool with which to do so.
Speaking of colour, there’s this lovely book called Chromophobia (2000) by David Batchelor, where he says that if something is colourful, then it’s linked with the working class and notions of taste. Of course, one big thing is that advertising has ‘claimed’ colour in relation to joy, and we have to fight to get it back. Joy is not a product. Don’t let colour be the tool of advertising – that is what I would add to Batchelor. To dare to make something joyful can be more radical than making something to point out what’s wrong.
Natasha: Your works have become larger and more immersive, and the scenarios suggest that people lie down or take time inside them, and leave their tired bodies. How important has it become to transport people out of reality?
Pipilotti: It is part of my agenda. As a video artist, you have to ask what is different in the work to what somebody could watch at home on the TV. If you bring your ass to the museum, then I want to welcome the whole body, the whole person. There is so much possibility in these common rooms, so I just want to really use them. I like that people also get to watch each other. Normally, with pictures hanging on the wall, people stand in front of them and ignore each other, as if there’s nobody else there. I want to break that. If you make the room a little bit darker and add sound, you open up so many possibilities for engagement. I’m very picky about the details of each installation – for instance the sound should not bleed too much between spaces. I’m convinced that if people feel that the details are taken care of, then they feel welcomed.
Let Your Hair Down, 2009. Courtesy of Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam. Photo: Maarten Laupman
Natasha: We can reconnect in your installations. As a viewer, you don’t have a sense of the screen anymore, there is no more surface separating you from the image.
Pipilotti: If that happens, then I’m very pleased. We squeeze everything into the form of screens, but it’s not because squares are the most beautiful, it’s just because that form and shape are economical for quickly switching between content and for producing machines. It’s the same in architecture. They want us to believe that the box is the most beautiful architectural form, especially in Switzerland, but actually it’s just that we can’t afford anything wilder. All the amorphous ornamentation is just not economically ‘sensible.’
Natasha: I used to work in Rotterdam, and was able to repeatedly visit your installation Let Your Hair Down (2019) at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen. It was a regular part of my week; I could just step in from the street, and it meant that the work was woven into the fabric of the everyday. It’s a vision that has stayed with me as an idea for what a museum could be. I wonder, if you could build your own museum, what would your vision for it be?
Pipilotti: That’s funny – my studio manager told me just this morning that she dreamed we had made a museum, and it was full of plants! What I’ve realised over time is that the most important element is always the people who are running it. They keep an institution alive. You should feel that the museum guards, the hosts and all of the other people you meet there are really proud of the place. Another important element is having space where people can really do something with their hands. A museum should be rooted in the community, so that people would feel comfortable saying, ‘it’s our house.’