Pipilotti Rist. Sip My Ocean

2 Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art
Special guest
With the support of the Embassy of Switherland in Russia
Pro Helvetia Foundation
Swiss International Air Lines
March 3 - April 29, 2007
The Ruined Annex
 

Pipilotti Rist (Switzerland) is a classic figure in the world of video art. Elizabeth Charlotte Rist borrowed her Pipilotti stage-name from Pippy Longstocking, combining the name of this character with her childhood nickname: Lotty. Rist's works are a triumph of unrestrained fantasy and naïve childish optimism, much like the acts of her favorite fairytale personage. In her video works, Pipilotti is simultaneously a screenplay author, a director, a cameraman, and quite often the main character, since Rist believes that the sound component makes up half of her films and, indeed, she composes music for them herself. In Moscow, Pipilotti Rist is going to present a spatial video installation in the most intriguing and striking venue of Moscow, in the ruins of The A. V. Shchusev State Museum of Architecture.

The Mechanics of Fluids

<:> Rist's saturated, ever-mutating imagery imparts a polymorphous pleasure in the physical. The pervasive sensuality of Sip My Ocean, with its multiple screens and hallucinogenic mirroring effects, suggests the elusive state of jouissance - unadulterated, boundless, pre-Oedipal pleasure. Associated with the female, this metaphoric realm imagines a body with no boundaries, a body with multiple and autonomous erotic zones, a body in full possession of its own desire. However, Rist's erratic vocals - which range from sweetly lyrical to maniacal screaming - disrupt these Utopian dreams of total gratification. For desire always demands an 'other,' one who may or may not yield to the seduction, one who may or may not return the favour. As the soundtrack to this deliriously enchanting waterworld, Rist's version of Isaac's tune expresses the dangers (and pleasures) of desire; it also suggests a person trying to maintain control against the rising tides of passion. 'Sip my ocean' is Rist's invitation to participate in this game of desire and fulfilment; yet it is also a dare to survive its perilous undertow.

Nancy Spector
(From: Parkett, Zürich / New York, 1996, no. 48, pp. 83-91).
 

The Blooms

<:> For Rist, then, art's power stems primarily from its access to the unconscious. Her best work has the quality of a dream. The strongest of these dream-like pieces is Sip My Ocean (1996), which is composed almost entirely of footage shot underwater. A mirror projection folded into the corner pleat of a room, Sip My Ocean captures with poetic precision the kaleidoscopic double-view of falling in love and surviving it. Covering Chris Isaac's Wicked Game, Rist's version of the song moves from the whispered adolescent longing of' 'I never thought I'd fall in love with someone like you,' to the emotional devastation of the adult recognition, 'I never thought I'd lose someone like you.' The most affecting moment in the song occurs when Rist, who performs the vocals with Anders Guggisberg, intones, 'I never want to fall in love,' and his background vocals agree, 'No, it's only gonna break your heart,' before she finishes the line, 'with you, with you.' The duality of emotional desire is doubled both by the mirrored projection and by the 'double take' the viewer does upon seeing the accoutrements of domestic life turned into sinking children's toys - a caravan, a plate, a cup, all float - to the bottom of the sea.

Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Elisabeth Bronfen
(From: Pipilotti Rist, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 2001.
 

Sinking and Surfacing

In Sip My Ocean, Rist uses not only the wall surface but also innovatively employs the corner of the room for her purposes, mirroring the moving pictures into it. The effect of this technique has been described as a 'kaleidoscopic Op-Art effect, in which the images seem to disappear behind the corner, as if sucked away, 'highlighting' the fragmentation of the gaze as a motif of the perception of every day life almost pedagogically.' Before viewers can become at all conscious of the 'fragmentation of the gaze,' however, they are impressed by images of a light-coloured sandy sea bottom illuminated by the sun, of shimmering coral, fish and jellyfish, a sea in which swimming bodies move almost trance-like and objects slowly sink to the bottom. Cups with colourful 1970s patterns, milk canisters, a black and yellow record, an embroidered plastic heart and an orange toy mobile home: All land among the coral on the soft sea floor. The lighter pieces float slowly to the surface. A woman and a man take turns splashing around in the water. Reflections from the water's surface dance across their bodies. From the perspective of a fish, we see chiefly their arms and legs paddling around in the water.

Sip My Ocean, however, consists not only of images from the sea, but incorporates elements of the video Pimple Porno, a sky sequence, and a brief glance into an enlarged eye. Right after the first sequence of an underwater whirlpool, the green-blue eye fills both walls, its surface shining in the sunlight. The mirroring of the eye creates the Op-Art effect described earlier in the corner of the room. On the one hand, viewers lose themselves briefly in the depths of the projection, as if in the depth of the sea; on the other, the gaze and the flatness of the reflected eye impede complete immersion in the 'nirvana' of the underwater world. Thus, for a fraction of a second the large projection no longer appears as an enticing water surface, but as a surface that makes diving in impossible. Instead of losing themselves in the endless depths of the ocean, viewers are confronted with the surface of the very organ that makes illusion possible.

Anne Soll
(From: Pipilotti Rist, Artists Monographs, Vol. 3, Dumont; Köln: Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, 2005)
 

Russian version