November 19, 2008 - February 2, 2009
Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist manufactures what she refers to as "spiritual vitamins". Except in her world of immersive projected landscapes--most recently the MoMA's four-story-high Marron Atrium, where she was commissioned to create the monumental, site-specific installation, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)--this pretty little pill swallows you. And so it goes--if one pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small, Pipi's ambrosial lozenge is apparently the latter, and its hallucinatory effects are instantaneous.
Though the actual narrative of the ten-minute, looped video is both visually and psychologically fractured--as Carroll's proverbial rabbit hole odyssey--the most palpable theme can be described as that of ostentatious femininity, engendered by the saccharinely licentious escapades of a naked redhead and a pot belly pig, scored with both an ambient, experimental melody and ambiguous 'body' noises, and featuring cameo appearances by a few wayward earthworms and snails. Pour Your Body Out transports us to the rapturous Shangri-La of plump pink tulips and forbidden fruits, where its colossal starlets engage in grubby mastication, flowers-up-noses, and blithe puddle-splashing. Along the way there is no shortage of vital fluids- lubricious exploits culminate with a quite literal coming of age that soaks the space--and our protagonist's white bathing suit--in heavy crimson.
Perhaps it's just a fad, but in the face of this decidedly feminine overhaul, one is quick to note other Manhattan museums that have recently made available their prodigious interiors for enveloping installations, to quite different ends. Take for instance Cai Guo-Qiang’s red-blooded cock assault to the Guggenheim last February. While Rist's installation of only three walls and a plush settee provides a philanthropic thinkspace--the artist says it's meant to relax and prepare patrons for their forthcoming excursion through MoMA's other galleries--Cai brashly infiltrates every cubic meter of the Guggenheim's atrium, ramps, and galleries, confronting patrons with rabid wolves, airborne sedans, poached tigers and flashy laser beams, scarcely leaving room to breathe, let alone think idyllic thoughts.
The overall effects of Rist's deluge are quite a pleasure ride for those who wish to pour out and be poured onto. However, the eye-couch-of-Providence beckoning repose in the center of the space borders on kitsch. What's more, with such a vast expanse of absorbent surfaces--surrealistic pillows, the all-seeing sofa, wall-to-wall carpeting (dyed to match the drapes)--the hordes of entranced visitors (encouraged by foregoing wall text to remove their shoes before) padding and tumbling around Rist's conceptually moist milieu may easily morph the strange Relational aesthetic into a bad trip for any mysophobe.
Collective hygiene aside, Pour Your Body Out (7354 cubic meters) presents a welcome digression--a breath of fragrant air--from the hitherto indelible canonical reticence of such an institution. If the contemporary art world is her garden, Pipilotti Rist has officially painted the roses red. Here's to hoping other art establishments follow suit.
Shots and sequences from the installation form part of a narrative feature film that Rist plans to release later this year.
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