Pipilotti Rist

I was also told that my spinning video reminded them of Pipilotti Rist's Ever Is Over All (1997). Rist won the Premio 2000 at the Venice Biennale in 1996. Michael Rush in his book Video Art describes this work as follows:

"In this richly coloured two projector installation, Rist juxtaposes the narrative of a smartly dressed young woman walking down the street holding a peculiar looking flower tipped stick on one screen with fluidly filmed shots of a country garden on the other. The two videos, blending into one another across the corner of two walls, are only four minutes long, but Rist puts them on a continuously running loop that suggests a seamless repetition of her compelling ( and funny) central image: the woman, in her blue chiffon dress and red shoes, suddenly wielding that strange looking flower, now revealed to be a meal club, and smashing car windows as she skips (in slow motion) down the street with a delighted grin on her face. A policeman is seen coming toward her from a distance but as he approaches, it turns out that he is a she, and she walks on by giving a 'go-girl!' smile to out protagonist, who continues her rampage. Sweet harmonies, written and sung by Rist herself, emanate from the soundtrack, pierced with the occasional loud bursts of the metal thrust on to the car windows.
Rist's strong sense of composition and sensitivity to colour (blues, oranges, rich reds) are reminiscent of her fellow countryman, Jean-Luc Godard, whose affinity for painterly camera shots Rist clearly shares. Like a petty thief out of a Godard mock gangster movie, Rist's minor fleon is undeniably appealing, but, unlike Godard's heroes, she's a woman. Rist possesses a subversive elegance; a well-controlled craftiness that it equally at home with humour as with biting political commentary."
(Rush, Michael. Video Art. Thames and Hudson: London, 2003)

The MoMA website describes the work as:

"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."
(http://moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=
O%3ATA%3AE%3AT3%7CA%3ATA%3AE%3AT3&page_number=18&template_id=
1&sort_order=1)

I found a video clip on youtube that shows the installation at the MoMA along with a Bill Viola installation.




I especially like this description of Rist's work by Yuko Hasegawa who curated this work into the New York Digital Salon's tenth anniversary show Vectors in 2003:

"Rist positively describes the negative aspects of femininity, which have been rejected by women themselves. She articulates her ideas with weightless images of love, death, everyday life, and fiction. Her unique style is a product of the pliant, sensual relationship between music and video art. Rist is also a band member and has designed the stage sets. Her video installation inspires body awareness in the audience as a totally new experience, different from large video clips shown on a huge screen. In Ever Is Over All, a young woman in a light blue dress merrily walks along the street with a huge, colorful, long-stemmed tropical flower in her hand. She smashes the flower into the windows of parked cars as she passes them. The combination of violent urban fantasy, romantic music, and destructive sound suggests the birth of a sophisticated visual language, expressing the direct, realistic senses of the MTV generation."
(http://www.nydigitalsalon.org/10/artwork.php?artwork=59)

This last quote especially inspired me to reconsider music videos as works of art. I can understand why music videos have not quite made it to the realm of fine art. Just think of all the bad music videos out there. But then there are a few gems that really do cross the line of music video to video art.

"Ever is Over All" (1997)--one of Rist's best-known video installations, first presented at the 1997 Biennale di Venezia--is a crucial work in the understanding of this dialectic. The two-screen video projection stages a young woman walking carelessly down a sidewalk to the sound of soft female humming mixed with sounds of birds singing over a percussive beat. Wearing a light blue dress and a pair of shiny red shoes, smiling and leaping about in slow motion to the rhythm of the music, the female character is a contemporary enactment of the Hollywood musical genre. Everything here is about lightness, girlish femininity, the astonishing ability to walk like a dancer and the use of the screen as a buffer suspending any form of social or psychological contradiction. And yet, she is a hooligan, regularly slowing down her pace as she smashes windshields of parked cars with the metallic flower she holds firmly in her hands. The singularity of this work comes from the unresolved tensions it provokes: femininity is embraced, yet a feminist gesture of empowerment emerges from within; the enchantment of popular culture unfolds through the deployment of the musical score and the lush technical effects of the second screen, yet the video clip does not deliver expected stereotypes. In other words, this may well be a musical fantasy--a blocking out of unwanted conflicts that realizes the subject's desire [1]--but criticality, nevertheless, sets in. 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. [2] When vandalism occurs, fantasy starts to shift into yet another reconstruction. This moment of shift is a moment of redefining femininity.

(http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2479/is_3_28/ai_68660257)

Rist is also a musician and was part of a band called Les Reines Prochaines (The Next Queens) from 1988 to 1994 which is most likely the reason why music is so prominant in her work. In I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986), Rist uses the language of video as well as popular music to talk about the female image in popular culture:
"Rist's classic video takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece's title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis Rist exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the "real" song."
(http://www.eai.org/eai/tape.jsp?itemID=8833)



I was a little annoyed with the video at first but now I think that it is intentionally annoying. It expresses Rist's annoyance of the portrayal of women in popular culture at the time this video was produced. She looks like some kind of weird puppet with her breasts hanging out. Is this how Rist believed women were being portrayed in popular culture at the time of this video? I think so. I think that this is still relevant today but the video itself has become dated and may come off as a little cheesy because of the quality. It's so video-y.

This website is an awesome resource for art videos (it's called the avant garde youtube: www.ubu.com

Here is the link to Rist's work on ubu: http://www.ubu.com/film/rist.html