HUMLEBÆK.- Over the past thirty years Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist (b. 1962) has been a striking and pace-setting figure on the contemporary art scene with her sensuous, colourful and norm-critical audio and video universes. Rist’s dizzyingly intimate gaze at the internal and external world often suffuses both body and mind as a sensory state. The artist’s name is a nod to the Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s rebellious, freethinking, and colourful heroine Pippi Longstocking.
Louisiana’s exhibition Pipilotti Rist – Åbn min lysning [Open My Glade] is the first comprehensive presentation of the artist in Scandinavia and presents a panoply of Rist’s work. The formats range from single-channel videos to large spatial video and audio installations, and the exhibition also gathers together a number of video sculptures, a central category in the artist’s work from the start until the present day. In addition it presents wallpaper and textile works, both as independent works and as important elements in Rist’s installational approach.
Pipilotti Rist is acclaimed for her exploration of the moving image and our sensing and arrangement of the world. Since the mid-1980s she has worked across a broad palette of video technologies whose rules, conventions and limitations she explores and explodes in a both painterly and sculptural approach to the video medium.
Many formats and themes are interwoven in the artist’s oeuvre, which is at one and the same time high-technological and sensual, colourful and critical, weightless and body-bound. The camera is both eye and sense of touch, and external and internal images merge in the often psychedelic, symbol-laden spaces that range from the sensually playful, witty and free to immersions into more oppressive, existential depths.
The exhibition has been created for the Louisiana Museum in close collaboration with the artist and has the character of a site-specific total installation in the South Wing of the museum continuing out in Louisiana’s sculpture park.
Open My Glade
The exhibition title Open My Glade has been borrowed from one of Rist’s iconic works, Open My Glade (Flatten), 2000 – a poetic play on language, like most of Rist’s titles, with a both Symbolist and Dadaist tone.
It is a title which at one and the same time enters the body and the forest – just as Rist’s works often do. It is characteristic of Rist’s work that it opens spaces within spaces and in particular revolves around the intimate spaces. She opens up glades rather than wide vistas.
At home in the museum with Rist
The exhibition has been arranged as a varied sequence of spaces and works. Its structure is not chronological, but is rather inspired by the logic of the home: the home as a total installation where various rooms follow one another each with its own functions, objects and moods – together forming a totality characteristic of the people who live there. No matter where you enter the exhibition, you step into the artist’s universe with its many themes whose continuous strands run and interweave through the exhibition.
Rist – under the pseudonym of ‘The Dog ππlotti Ristorante’ – has written a welcome greeting in the catalogue of the exhibition, where she speaks of the museum institution as “a shared apartment”. That Louisiana started as a private home, and that the museum’s founder, Knud W. Jensen, particularly wanted to create a museum model with a domestic feel, have been one of the exhibition’s starting points.
The home, as a setting for life, an intimate sphere and a metaphor for body and mind – is a recurring theme for the artist, who quite literally draws the furniture of the home into the museum institution and welcomes the body to the museum as a ‘collective living room’. The living room furniture is not least part of the ‘apartment’ that is furnished in one of the spaces of the exhibition. In the ‘apartment’ a number of Rist’s
video sculptures are gathered, often consisting of furniture with built in screens and projectors, and while we are in this rather trippy apartment Rist at the same time places us in a body in a new work created for the exhibition.
Two new works
Two new works have arisen during the work with the exhibition. Rist has created a textile work which as a Reversed Eyelid – the title of the work – covers the walls as soft, brilliantly coloured membranes in the ‘apartment’ in the large space at the top of the South Wing. The 54-metre-long work has been made in collaboration with the Danish textile firm Kvadrat, in their so-called Soft Cell system. The motif sends us in behind the eyelids in an almost ‘solarized’ afterimage of a view which at the same time has the character of a microscopic view inside the body. By placing us behind the eyelid Rist shrinks us into tiny units inside a body – a radical change in proportions that can be seen in several places in the exhibition and is one of the artist’s characteristic devices.
In addition Rist has created a so-called ‘modification’ Kom ind, kom med (Jorn kærtegnet af Rist) [Come in, come on (Jorn caressed by Rist)], 2019, in the form of a video projection on a ceramic plate by Asger Jorn from the Louisiana collection. Jorn himself was a master of modification and painted new motifs over existing paintings bought at fleamarkets. Rist caresses Jorn with her own palette in a video collage of new, ‘intimate banalities’ – a continuation of the earlier video modifications she has made of Venetian so-called veduta paintings of which one is also included in the exhibition.
In the water and in the forest
Two of Rist’s more recent large installations are also included in the exhibition: 4th Floor to Mildness and Pixel Forest. Water is a key motif for the artist, and in 4th Floor to Mildness, which was shown for the first time at the New Museum in New York in 2016, we are in the waters of the Rhine among aquatic plants and natural decomposition processes – enveloped in an evocative, melancholy soundtrack by Soap&Skin. The connection with the earlier work, Sip My Ocean, 1996, is evident, but the colour shade has changed from coral-reef blue to murky green, and the installational approach is different: from Sip My Ocean’s characteristic, Rorschach-like corner projection to amorphous projection surfaces mounted on the ceiling. In the new work we lie on beds as in a dormitory and look up at the water surface from below.
In the other large installation, Pixel Forest, which in the exhibition follows 4th Floor to Mildness, we walk around in a forest of pixels and have thus ourselves become microscopic units. Each light in the many chains is an addressed pixel in a giant video image which we would be able to interpret at a distance of about 200 metres. The individual LED pixels are mounted on chains which hang from the ceiling. Rist has given each pixel an organic shape, and while in the work we are situated in the midst of a video image, at the same time we are perhaps among the cells of the body. Or are they air bubbles rising up through the water?
Here Rist shatters the screen into atoms – quite concretely – and connects body and technology in this technological-organic jungle.
The body-based and the dual gaze
“The eyes are blood-driven cameras,” says Rist in several interviews. And Rist’s cameras are very often ‘blood-driven eyes’, body-based cameras that explore the world in motion. Rist’s gaze goes near-sightedly close and experiences the world in intimate encounters rather than looking at it from a distance and with an overview. We crawl around in the tulip field, we swim, we see bodies close up. Hands that touch the world are a recurring motif, and Rist fuses the senses of touch and vision in the camera, which ‘feels’ the world. At the same time Rist’s gaze is a dual gaze that looks both out and in, and inner and outer images merge in psychedelic, brilliantly coloured syntheses.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art and Pipilotti Rist
For many years the museum has had a commitment to the work of Pipilotti Rist. In 1996 Louisiana was the first museum to acquire one of the artist’s works for a museum collection. Besides this work, Sip My Ocean, 1996, the collection also holds the artist’s first – in her own words – official artwork, the now iconic I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, 1986. In 2010 visitors to the museum could experience the big installation Homo sapiens sapiens, 2005, where they could observe a large projection on the ceiling from reclining furniture. Most recently, in 2016, the artist gave a lecture in Louisiana’s concert hall during the museum’s festival of contemporary art ‘Art Alive’.
Now, in 2019, Pipilotti Rist is once more ‘at home’ and invites us into her sensually saturated universe as it has unfolded since 1986 until today.
The exhibition is curated by Louisiana’s curator Tine Colstrup.
The exhibition architect is Brian Lottenburger.
