ART CITIES:Los Angeles-Pipilotti Rist
Pipilotti Rist is known for her provocative, often humorous, but always stylish work. She emerged on the International Art scene in the mid-‘80s and ‘90s with famous single channel videos such as “I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much” (1986) and “Pickelporno” (1992), her installations capture the many contradictions and anxieties of modern society. In 2009 she released her first feature film entitled “Pepperminta”, the story of an “Anarchist of the imagination” who lives according to her own rules.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: MOCA Archive
The exhibition “Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor” is the first West Coast survey of Pipilotti Rist. The exhibition includes Rist’s early single-channel videos dating to the mid-1980s, which established her critical appropriation of techniques drawn from popular culture and commercial advertising; her absorptive, architecturally-scaled installations brimming with blasts of color and lush textures, accompanied by hypnotic, lyric musical scores; as well as sculptures which merge everyday objects, video and digital images, and decorative forms. The exhibition also debuts a new large-scale audio-video installation made specifically for The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. Rist expanded video into large-scale installations beginning in the mid-1990s. Equal parts technological and sensual, Rist’s installations explore relationships of the body and technology; exterior environments and interior psychological landscapes; and reason and instinct. In Rist’s audio-video installations, the external, visible world is of equal importance to dreams and that which we see when our eyes are closed. Her work fully realizes and joyfully explores the capaciousness of the video medium—its possibilities for vivid color; sweeping views and extreme close-ups; the expression of emotion and contradiction; introspection and cultural critique; and, importantly, the creation of shared, common experiences within the public space of the museum. Rist often likens museums to “public living rooms” and for this exhibition, The Geffen is imagined as a shared, open backyard, an in-between and semi-public space. The exhibition treats the central 35-foot-tall ceilinged gallery of the museum as an exterior environment, featuring Rist’s “Pixel Forest” (2016), while individual galleries masquerade as civic structures, homes, and pavilions, decorated with foliage and framed windows to further elaborate the premise of a shared backyard. Within those galleries, surfaces of every sort are alive with moving images, manifesting Rist’s aesthetic strategy of freeing video from the constraints of the box monitor and rectangular projection screen in order to disperse it across heterogeneous surfaces. The exhibition is designed to nurture our understanding of the museum as a public space, and key to this are transformations that soften and humanize the hard, geometric surfaces and lines of institutional architecture, through the use of curtains, cushioned seating, and vibrant projections that would seem to dissolve the walls. The installations and sculptural objects offer unconventional, immersive viewing experiences, and often aim to subvert if not eliminate the distance between technology and body. Museum visitors, whom Rist emphatically refers to as guests, are welcome to view the artist’s early works while sitting atop improbably oversized living room furniture in “Das Zimmer” (1994); walk through ripples of color bursting through thousands of LED lights representing individual pixels in “Pixel Forest” (2016); enter a surreal domestic setting known as “The Apartment” wherein dining tables, beds, and desks double as projection screens; peek at the small-scale video “Selfless In The Bath of Lava” (1995) embedded in the floor; and lounge on cushions while bathing in the vivid hues of corner projections “Sip My Ocean” (1996) and “Ever Is Over All” (1997).
Info: Curator: Anna Katz, Assistant Curator: Karlyn Olvido, MOCA Geffen, 152 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA, USA, Duration: 12-9-2021-6/6/2022, Days & Hours: Thu-Sun 11:00-17:00, www.moca.org
