Pipilotti Rist Embraces her Calling as Galactic Landscape Gardener

Pipilotti Rist is not a feminist. Or rather, as she told the Guardian in 2011, she is ‘politically’, but not ‘personally’ – a bold blurring of the 1970s maxim that the personal is always political. Rist would prefer other adjectives like ‘wild and friendly.’ The kind of utopia she builds is a pre-political one; more Garden of Eden than militant commune.

Culture critic Aruna D’Souza has described how unsettling it is to rewatch Rist’s Ever is All Over (1997), in which a woman dressed like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz (1939) breaks a car window with a large prop flower and a female cop walks by and nods. Perhaps her most famous work, the video has since been referenced in a Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade (2016), driving up attendance to her New Museum retrospective later that same year. ‘I would have preferred that Beyoncé did it with a flower and not a baseball bat, because it changes the meaning,’ Rist told The New Yorker in 2020. ‘But, no, I was very flattered’. Few video artists have had such reach in the popular consciousness.

Rist’s new exhibition, ‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon’ features windows named after activists like Sojourner Truth and Amaranta Gómez Regalado, a wink to the political realm without offering explicit commentary. She was also inspired by other avant-garde women artists like Yoko Ono. Rist’s work can certainly come across as innocent, with a similar whimsical affect to that of Icelandic popstar Björk. Both women have used art to gesture towards powerful new worlds, ones that captivate us with their vast reimagining of the damaged one we live in.

Across two galleries in Chelsea, New York, the exhibition welcomes the public into Rist’s backyard and living room. Hauser & Wirth’s first floor features a massive living room with numerous couches bathed in immersive, colourful light, alongside a mantelpiece stacked with household ephemera and a miniature horse stable. Above one installation Rist has hung a still from her short video Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava, 1994). Though inviting strangers into your living room implies intimacy, this still is one of the show’s only overt citations of Rist’s body as she has moved away from featuring herself and other people in her artwork over the past few decades. Long gone are the days of Sip My Ocean (1996) and I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), early inspirations for women video artists like Joan Jonas and Tumblr girls alike.

Rist is a landscape artist now. The show at Luhring Augustine features an extensive facade mimicking the back of a house, cacti scattered around fences and a large picnic table in the middle of the room. (Rist’s ideal settings always have seating. Her New Museum retrospective featured plenty of bean bag chairs.) Neighbors with Fences (Apollomatmember, 2021) is projected across two perpendicular walls. In a looped three-channel projection, the camera crawls along a scratchy grass landscape as a flashlight illuminates the immediate surroundings. Like all of Rist’s recent turns towards projections, it’s hypnotic. The spellbinding video looks almost aquatic, recalling Rist’s fascination with the Dead Sea, but here what is familiar is made alien rather than the other way around.

It feels like navigating through an asteroid field in Star Wars, though Rist’s work is more meditative than imperial.

It is difficult to consider these exhibitions piece by piece – they function primarily as immersive installations. Like Yayoi Kusama’s 'Infinity Mirrored Rooms' series (1996–ongoing), Rist’s work bathes the gallery-goer in brilliant hues and makes for shimmering Instagrammable moments. Paradise floats over us in a tie-dyed cosmos. It’s always impressive – and a welcome change – when a gallery’s white walls are altered. Heavy black curtains divide rooms in both galleries and Luhring Augustine’s entryway has been repainted pink. Across both galleries’ front windows, Rist has installed new site-specific works. While once naked bodies constituted a large part of her work, she now uses clothes to suggest the corporeal: Hauser & Wirth’s front window is covered with white underwear, shirts and plastic goods. Inside, two mannequins in bright red and white clothing have silky pools of light projected onto their bodies. 

Rist has often been chastised for her playful use of nudity, as in her film Pickleporno (1992). The video treats sex as a scenic landscape from the inside out, rather than putting the viewer into the passive position, recalling film theorist Laura Mulvey’s essay on narrative pleasure and feminist viewership (Visual Pleasures and Narrative Cinema, 1975). Many of the installations in ‘Prickling Goosebumps’ have aching names despite their outer warmth, suggesting absence as much as the imagined presence of the artist. A bed is entitled Do Not Abandon Me Again (2015); a mantelpiece is titled I burn for you (2018). More cryptic are the numerous boulders with light projections. The final room in Luhring Augustine, Big Skin (2022), features rocks hanging from the ceiling bathed in galactic light. It feels like navigating through an asteroid field in Star Wars, though Rist’s work is more meditative than imperial.

Pleasure is the goal. So many art exhibitions focus on the four, sour white walls and the regal importance of the art world, but Rist is a hedonist rather than a political artist. She seeks to welcome the viewer, not castigate her. It’s blissful to enter a secret cove, to bathe under cerulean and vegetal light. Work is activated by play and rest, sound baths and ambient music, oceans and gardens. Rist has befriended the natural world and wants to bring it into the walls of the gallery. In this way, she is purely utopian, ever-reaching toward oceanic feeling.

Pipilotti Rist's ‘Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon’ is on view at Hauser & Wirth 22nd street until 13 January 2024, and Luhring Augustine West 24th street until 3 February 2024.

_{Main image: Pipilotti Rist, Ich Brenne für dich (I burn for you), 2023, installation view, 'Prickling Goosebumps & a Humming Horizon', Hauser & Wirth. Courtesy: Courtesy: Hauser & Wirth}