A young woman in a blue dress and shiny red shoes sashays along a sidewalk, smashing car windows with a metal wand painted to look like a long-stemmed flower. The smashing is joyful, not angry, a skip step followed by a full-body swing in slow motion. (This is a video.) The red-and-yellow blossom strikes a side window, shattering it with a loud, satisfying crash, and the woman moves on, smiling ecstatically. Behind her, a block away, a uniformed policewoman turns the corner, and a young man in a striped T-shirt crosses the road. While the flower wielder assaults three more parked cars, a small boy on a bicycle rides by her in the opposite direction, followed by a middle-aged woman in a red coat. They pay no attention to the smasher, but the policewoman, who has gradually overtaken her, smiles and salutes as she passes. One more jubilant demolition brings the video to a close. Shown publicly for the first time at the 1997 Venice Biennale, the eight-minute work, called “Ever Is Over All,” won the Premio 2000 award for emerging talents, and made Pipilotti Rist, a thirty-five-year-old Swiss artist, an international star. The Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto acquired copies. (Rist’s video installations come in editions of three, with one artist’s proof.) It is one of those rare works whose elements—hilarity, suspense, timing, comic violence, anarchy, and a lovely musical score—fit together with irresistible perfection.
Now fifty-eight, Rist has the energy and curiosity of an ageless child. “She’s individual and unforgettable,” the critic Jacqueline Burckhardt, one of Rist’s close friends, told me. “And she has developed a completely new video language that warms this cool medium up.” Burckhardt and her business partner, Bice Curiger, documented Rist’s career in the international art magazine Parkett, which they co-founded with others in Zurich in 1984. From the single-channel videos that Rist started making in the eighties, when she was still in college, to the immersive, multichannel installations that she creates today, she has done more to expand the video medium than any artist since the Korean-born visionary Nam June Paik. Rist once wrote that she wanted her video work to be like women’s handbags, with “room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness.” If Paik is the founding father of video as an art form, Rist is the disciple who has done the most to bring it into the mainstream of contemporary art.
In late January, before the coronavirus shut down the world, my wife and I spent some time with Rist in her Zurich studio, a cluster of connected rooms in the basement of an office building. The weather was cold and wet, and Rist had on a riotously colorful sweater with a knitted message at the bottom: “Thank You for Warming.” (She usually wears her sweaters inside out so that the label doesn’t scratch her neck, but not this one.) I asked how long she’d had the studio, and she said, “Two hundred and fifty years, I think,” and burst out laughing. “No, really twenty-five years. Probably the place I have been most in my life.” Her English is idiomatic, eccentric, and flavored by Swiss-German. She has a unique laugh, a sort of rapid panting, and she mimics what she’s describing—arms flailing, torso bending dramatically. It was late afternoon when we arrived, and most of her studio team (two full-time assistants, three part-timers, and one intern) had left for the day, but Nike Dreyer, her thirty-year-old deputy and studio manager, was still there. Working with Rist is an unpredictable adventure. “She’s well organized, but she always needs a certain degree of chaos,” Dreyer explained. “And she’s uncomfortable with success. It embarrasses her when one of her works sells for a lot of money. This is very Swiss.” Rist’s addiction to visual lists (words and drawing combined), often made on the spot to supplement what she is saying, may also be Swiss. “I once made a list of everyone I ever kissed,” she told me. “I was proud that I remembered all the names.”
Rist’s first Los Angeles retrospective was scheduled to open in four months, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, and she was also working on a big show for the National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto. (Both have been postponed, because of COVID-19.) We looked at a detailed scale model of the L.A. exhibition. “It will take a month to install,” Rist said. “One piece has ten different videos, and we are doing a six-channel sound score, so when you walk through you make your own mix.” Most of the works for this exhibition have been shown before, but Rist changes and adds to them for each new installation. “We’re going to build on our exhibition at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen last year,” she said. The Louisiana was the first museum to buy her work. That was in 1996, and the video was “Sip My Ocean,” which she says is about “the wish to be loving.” She can’t remember the price, but thinks it was around six thousand dollars. “I was shocked,” she said. “I didn’t know that what I did was collectible. I never thought about selling, and this gave me a lot of freedom.” Her works go for a lot more now, but not nearly as much as those of leading artists in more traditional mediums. “With video, you never become an investment artist,” she said.
“Sip My Ocean” is the work in which Rist breaks out of the stationary TV monitor. Projected into a corner on two walls, it bathes the viewer in an underwater world where two swimmers, Rist and Pierre Mennel, her friend and collaborator, appear and reappear, double themselves in kaleidoscopic patterns, and drift through waving seaweed and undulating, shifting colors while Rist’s voice on the soundtrack sings, “I don’t want to fall in love with you,” the yearning refrain of Chris Isaak’s 1989 pop hit “Wicked Game.” The soundtrack is co-composed by Anders Guggisberg, a musician who lived in the building where Rist did her editing. They met when she heard him playing his guitar, and asked him on the spot to work with her on a cover version of the Isaak song, which he knew from the movie “Wild at Heart.” Rist wanted to sing it in two different voices, one normal “and then this really embarrassing” screaming, as she described it. The screaming gives the video another dimension, a harsh, edgy quality that reappears fairly often in her work. “Anders became my boyfriend,” Rist confided. They stayed together for three years, until 1998, but the collaboration continued for nearly two decades. “She’s still my best friend,” Guggisberg told me. “Pipi is the godmother of my daughter.”
It took more than two years to make “Sip My Ocean.” The underwater scenes were filmed in the Red Sea, in Egypt, with a waterproof wide-angle camera that had only recently come on the market. “I longed to film coral reefs, and the first time we snorkeled in the Red Sea I had to come up quickly because I couldn’t stop laughing,” she remembers. “What an abundance of endlessly different forms and colors!” (They’re partly gone now, owing to climate change.) Although the video preceded “Ever Is Over All” by a year, it showed more clearly where Rist’s work was headed, and its impact has been greater. “ ‘Sip My Ocean’ changed my curatorial practice,” Klaus Biesenbach, a former director of MOMA PS1, who now directs the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, told me. “I looked at videos differently after seeing it, and I looked at color differently.” Joan Jonas, an older video artist whose work Rist reveres, often showed the video to students when she taught at M.I.T. “The lightness, motion, weightlessness, gravity, melancholy, and levitation reminded them perhaps of flying carpets, winged horses, genies, carousels, or, in Rist’s words, ‘the glory of life,’ where ‘worry will vanish,’ ” Jonas wrote, in a catalogue essay.
Growing up in a small village in the canton of St. Gallen, close to the borders of Austria and Liechtenstein, Rist preferred to make her own arrangements with the world. Her given names, Elisabeth Charlotte, didn’t suit her. She longed to be a boy, and in primary school, where she was often nicknamed Lotti, she called herself Elisabeth John for a while, and then Pierre. A few of her classmates took to calling her Pipi, after Pippi Longstocking, the mythically strong and fiercely independent heroine of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book series, which had been reborn as a popular Swedish television series. “That of course made me proud,” she said. (It also increased the number of mothers who wouldn’t let their children play with her.) Born in 1962, Rist was the second of five children (older sister, younger brother, and younger twin sisters, all of whom still live in Switzerland and see one another often). She was the only one to attend high school and college. “The others went to apprenticeships instead,” she explained. Ursula, the firstborn, takes care of elderly people in their homes; Tom worked as a waiter and a cook, and now owns and runs a bar in Zurich called Helsinki; one of her twin sisters, Andrea, is a photographer, and the other, Tamara, is a seamstress, who often helps on Pipi’s video projects. “For me, it was very clear,” Rist said. “I was a good student, and being a good student was the one thing that could make my father pay attention.” Not a lot of attention, though. Her father, who died six years ago, never seemed to recognize that she had become an internationally known artist. As a lifelong stamp collector, however, he was deeply impressed when she was asked to design a stamp for the Swiss postal service.
Both her parents were from working-class families in St. Gallen, and both had broken precedent by choosing professions. Walter Pius Rist was a doctor. For the first six years of Pipi’s life, they lived in the mountains, where Walter’s patients were mainly Italian laborers, building dams for electric-power stations. His wife, Anna, was the only teacher in a one-room school for forty-five students. Pipi remembers “endless green-brown alpine fields with manifold flowers and vivid little brooks melting holes in snow blocks—also skiing between my parents’ legs.” When Tom was born, they moved from the mountains to the village of Grabs, in the Rhine Valley, where her mother had grown up, and then to neighboring Buchs. “My mother was such a strong lion, very generous and giving,” Rist said. “She brought us up to look after others, and she always said if someone did something we liked we should go quickly and make a compliment. On holidays, she had us bring bread and butter and honey to all the neighbors. I thought that was a cool thing. My father was a depressed person, who always had a new partner”—that is, a mistress. “My parents’ marriage made me swear I would never marry,” she said. Both her parents were freethinkers. “My father liked outsiders better than Swiss people, and considered Africans more beautiful and intelligent than we are,” she said. He was also a dedicated environmentalist, who stopped heating the family swimming pool because it used too much energy. One summer, Pipi, feeling unhappy and misunderstood, spent several nights sleeping in the empty pool, and going to her grandparents’ house for meals.
Her parents separated, amicably, when she was sixteen—her father moved to the house next door, where he had his medical practice and received his mistresses, and Anna and the children remained in the family home. That year, Pipi fell in love with a boy in her school named Thomas Rhyner. “Pipi was one class behind me, and the only other person in the village who admired John Lennon and Yoko Ono,” Rhyner recalls. Music was their shared introduction to popular culture. Second-string English rock bands (never the Beatles) used to come and play at a hall just over the border in Liechtenstein, and Anna, newly released from her marriage, would often let the musicians stay overnight at her house. “To this day,” Rist told me, “if my mother sees a backpacker who looks a bit lost, she will say, ‘Do you want to stay with us?’ ”
Rist left home in 1982, and spent four years at the University of Applied Arts, in Vienna. Swiss artists have traditionally gone elsewhere to learn and practice their craft—Paul Klee to Munich, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely to Paris, Urs Fischer to Amsterdam and New York. But Rist had no intention of becoming an artist, commercial or otherwise. She wanted to get out of Switzerland and to study physics, which had been her strongest subject in high school, and she wanted to do so in a German-speaking country. The university in Vienna, whose program was heavily influenced by Bauhaus inclusiveness, offered a wide variety of courses in the sciences and the humanities. She took theoretical physics and philosophy, studied illustration, photography, and commercial art, and became fascinated with experimental cinema—the poetic, highly personal films of Norman McLaren, Stan VanDerBeek, John Waters, and others. Rist made a few short films in Super 8, and eventually decided that she wanted to work with moving pictures and sound and language.
After graduating, in 1986, she returned to Switzerland and registered for video classes at the School of Design, in Basel. She chose video because it allowed her to do everything herself, from camerawork to editing. To pay for her studies, she took part-time jobs with Ciba-Geigy and Hoffmann-La Roche, the big Swiss chemical firms, which maintained well-equipped labs where they made promotional videos. This put her in contact with current technologies. Every new technology seemed to come equipped with a guy, a male techie who knew how to use it and kept the knowledge to himself, but at the Ciba-Geigy lab Rist worked for an older man named Erhard Hauswirt, who had been a filmmaker. He sensed her ambition and talent, and let her use the lab at night. She more or less taught herself how to operate the equipment, and in 1986 she made a seven-minute video that launched her career. It was called “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much.”
The title is a slightly altered version of the opening line in John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s song “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” which was inspired by Yoko Ono and released on the Beatles’ “White Album,” in 1968. “Lennon sings, ‘She’s not a girl who misses much,’ and I used to walk on the street singing that like a mantra, like a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Rist recalls. In her video, wearing a low-cut black dress and dancing so maniacally that her breasts keep spilling out of it, she turns the line into a first-person anthem of gutsiness. She sings it again and again, in a soft, little-girl voice that shifts to falsetto, building to a kind of out-of-control hysteria that’s hilarious and disturbing. Rist knew that it was beyond anything she’d ever done. She said, “When I found how to speed up and slow down, I realized, Wow, this really shows how our lives are sometimes, when you feel like a puppet. I felt I had found something that had a general meaning.” She sent the video to the Solothurn Film Festival, in Switzerland, where it was accepted, “and I guess you can say it was well received.”
The video was picked up by other experimental film groups, and Basel’s Museum of Applied Arts put it in a group exhibition. “I got confidence,” Rist said. But confidence for what? Rist said that one of her teachers “had recorded me saying, ‘I want to make rooms full of light, where people find and understand each other,’ but I didn’t think that art would be where I did it. I was thinking more about discothèques, or concerts.” (MTV, which had been around since 1981, was not on her mind, either—she hadn’t yet watched it.) She became the stage designer for an all-girl band called Les Reines Prochaines, painting backdrops and projecting slides and Super 8 film clips, and for six years, in spite of acute stagefright, she sang and played string bass and flute with the band. She was still working part time for Hoffmann-La Roche, and making short videos in a studio in Zurich that she shared with another artist. Interest in her work was growing. In Basel, Galerie Stampa, whose main focus was selling art books, showed several of her early videos in 1993. When “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much” was presented in solo museum shows in St. Gallen, Graz, and Hamburg, in 1994 and 1995, three New York galleries contacted her. Iwan Wirth, a young Swiss art dealer who loved her work but didn’t yet represent artists, advised her to go with Luhring Augustine, a mid-level gallery that represented Christopher Wool, Rachel Whiteread, and Albert Oehlen. Soon afterward, she also joined the new gallery that Wirth and his wife, Manuela Hauser, were opening in Zurich, Hauser & Wirth—the two galleries now split her representation. “Anthony d’Offay tracked me down on my honeymoon with Manuela, in some tiny Irish inn,” Wirth said, referring to the British dealer. “He wanted to show Pipi in London. I thought, We’d better grow the gallery quickly, or we’ll lose our artists.”
The one- and two-channel videos that Rist made in the first decade of her career are rarely longer than ten minutes. In “Sexy Sad I” (1987, four and a half minutes), a naked young chap in sneakers dances alone, in the woods, to a piano recording of the Beatles song “Sexy Sadie.” We see him from the neck down, advancing and retreating, his skinny legs kicking out with exaggerated moves that keep his genitals aflap. Male vulnerability is on display in all its comic absurdity. “It looks like he’s dancing, but he’s really fighting the camera,” Rist explained. Female vulnerability gets a workout in “(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes” (1988, eleven minutes), in which Pipi—I’m tired of calling her Rist—in a number of unflattering dresses and suburban locations, keeps falling down and getting up. I may be alone in seeing this as a tribute to Nam June Paik, whose distortions of the video signal and other deliberate “mistakes” opened the medium to creative innovations. The out-of-focus look and scrolling lines of static in Rist’s early videos are Paik trademarks. Although she never met him, Paik’s attitude toward the medium influenced her deeply. “He used the screen as an eyeball massage and a light thrower—not deconstructing the medium but using it without unnecessary respect,” she said. When Iwan Wirth asked her to write the catalogue note for a 1993 Paik show he was putting on at a bar in Zurich, her text was a declaration of love. “Nam June Paik is a wild dog,” it reads. “He sees a tree, pees on it and the tree lights up. The leaves become monitor screens that gleam and flicker bewitchingly. . . . The electric cables, which no one but him can toss around so artfully, are the roots. . . . He works with an innocent, child-like, earnest smile. One just has to kiss him.”
Heated discussions in the early nineteen-nineties about pornography and feminism led to “Pickelporno” (1992, twelve minutes), Rist’s attempt to make a porn video that appealed to women. Instead of looking at sexual encounters from the outside, she wanted to convey what the participants were feeling and seeing. Using a tiny surveillance camera designed to be hidden in walls, she worked very close, filming random moments of a nude couple’s imaginative foreplay—fingers exploring body parts, a hand caressing a breast, an erect and friendly penis. She interspersed these with shots of clouds and palm fronds, a lake, a miniature globe of the world resting on a vulva, and extended tongues, set to a soundtrack of rushing and bubbling water and ardent moaning. “Pickelporno” offended no one—it even appeared on Swiss television—but copious flows of menstrual blood (simulated) in “Blood Clip” (1993) made some viewers think that she was taking feminism too far. “That’s ridiculous,” Rist scoffed to one interviewer. “The idea is to get the blood out into the open, to show this red fluid, this marvelous liquid, this flesh-clock.”
To see “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” which has been on view at MOMA PS1 since 1997, you have to crouch down and look into a small hole in the floor, where, on an LCD monitor, Rist reaches up with both arms and cries for help. She is naked, with white-blond hair, and enveloped in orange-red flames. “I am a worm and you are a flower,” she wails, in German, English, and several other languages. “You would have done everything better! Help me. Excuse me.” According to Rist, the video and its sound loop were inspired by an early experience with religion. The church was not a big factor in her family’s life. Her mother is a relaxed Protestant who occasionally goes to church; her father was a lapsed Catholic who became a church-hating atheist. When Rist was nine, though, religion suddenly overwhelmed her. She joined a Bible-reading sect and spent much of her free time studying Biblical texts. “That lasted three years,” she told me. “Until I began asking, ‘What happens with the people who lived before Jesus?,’ and nobody could give me an answer. Also, God never showed up. I would leave pieces of meat outside to honor God.” In “Selfless,” Rist is in Hell. “It’s a really mean story, that you will be burning forever,” she said. “When I got rid of the need to believe in God, I felt so liberated.”
The morning after my wife and I first visited Rist’s studio, she and three members of her team were in the large back room there, shooting Pierre Mennel’s left eye. Mennel, a strapping middle-aged man who was the male swimmer in “Sip My Ocean,” sat on a chair between two floodlights while Rist, wielding a video camera with a two-foot-long lens, moved it around and uncomfortably close to his retina. Mennel’s son, Nicolas, who is Rist’s intern (and the third generation in the family to work for her; his grandfather Jacques appeared as a performer), held a device that corrected the focus. “The left eye is definitely better,” Mennel père said. “It’s my better side.” (Laughter. They were speaking English for our benefit, instead of Swiss-German.) On the monitor, everything was in extreme closeup. I could see rows and patches of facial hair by Mennel’s eye that were barely visible to the naked eye. “There’s hair all over the body that’s mostly invisible,” Rist explained. “It becomes like a landscape. We have so much respect for machines, but the camera is a very bad copy of the eye system. Did you know that the retina is sending signals in two dozen data streams simultaneously? One is for movement from left to right, and another for right to left.” Rist has often used spy cameras and medical cameras that film inside the body. The long lens on the one she was using that day allowed her to come in very close, without making troublesome shadows. It had become available less than six months earlier, and she said that it “was like having a new boyfriend.” She held the camera in both arms, as if it were an AK-47. After a while, Rist and Mennel changed places—she sat and he filmed one of her cerulean eyes.
During a break in the shooting, Rist took us over to look at a painting on a nearby wall—a landscape with jagged mountains and huge stones in the foreground. “Do you know the painter Clara Porges?” she asked. (I did not.) “She was a contemporary of Ferdinand Hodler”—the nineteenth-century Swiss Symbolist painter. “She married a Jewish violinist, and they had to leave Austria when Hitler came. I really love this painting.” Rist had just bought it at auction, in Zurich. “It will be the star of my show in Kyoto,” she said. She demonstrated on a computer what she planned to do, bathing the canvas in waves and veils of changing computer colors; she will also project colors onto a group of modern Japanese ceramics. “In the Western world, color is underestimated,” she said. “Color is borderless, it’s dangerous, it’s emotional, like music. Primary colors—red, yellow, and blue—can look stupid by themselves. I’m interested in broken and dirty colors, natural shades. Painting with light, that’s what I try to do. Paul Klee said he wished he could have a color piano, and I am so lucky—I have a color piano!”
The question now, she said, was “Maybe we take your eye?” (My eyes are a different blue from hers, and four decades older.) I agreed, and sat down in the chair. The floodlights were blinding. Rist said that her team would put the camera on a moving support so that I wouldn’t have to worry about the lens touching my eye. That was good news. The shooting began. Mennel was the cameraman, and Rist was the director, telling me what to do. It was important to keep my eyes moving, she said. “You can think of going over there, and going there. And now look up. Yes! Really nice. Beautiful! O.K., one more. Look around—to Vienna, to New York. Cool! Can you close your eyes and then open? Yes! Once again to Vienna, over there. Once again closing. Open. Wow!” When it was done, the whole team applauded. I looked at a replay on the monitor. My eyeball seemed to lie under several layers of liquid, and the overlapping folds of skin under the eye looked like closeup photographs of a crocodile. “We hide that we are animals,” Rist said.
Lunch at the studio is communal. Everybody cooks, or brings a dish from outside, or cleans up afterward. There were seven of us at the table, and the main course was an assortment of curries, lentils, rice, and vegetables from a nearby Indian restaurant, on plates that didn’t match. When Rist finished eating, she picked up her plate and licked it clean. All the others did the same—there were no napkins. I remembered seeing her do this at a dinner party in New York, a year or so earlier, in the apartment of the dealer Roland Augustine. Was this a Swiss custom, I had asked her. “It comes from my mother, who now denies it,” Rist said. “And in my house it is a duty.” Two other guests at the Augustine dinner had tried to lick their plates, amid general hilarity. Rist tends to cause a stir in public. “Like my father, I’m an introvert disguised as an extrovert,” she said at lunch.
In 1998, to the surprise of nearly everyone in the Swiss art world, Rist was named the artistic director of Expo.02, Switzerland’s first international exposition since the nineteen-sixties, which would take place in four locations around the country. “I have no idea why they invited me,” Rist told me. “I had won the prize at the Venice Biennale the year before, and maybe they thought it would be good for marketing.” Before accepting the post, she consulted several close friends. Expo.02 had been plagued by fund-raising problems and erratic leadership, and its opening date had been delayed—it was originally scheduled for 2001. Iwan Wirth urged her to think carefully about it. “Her career was about to explode,” he told me. “Success is hard on Pipi. She doesn’t trust it. But nobody ever gave an artist this kind of responsibility.” For Rist, who thinks that the purpose of art is to improve people’s lives, the possibilities outweighed the risks. “She said yes, and her friends supported her,” Wirth told me. “And it turned out to be an impossible task. The public loved her. Pipi became a national figure, the goddess Helvetia, but the art world was skeptical, and the press was disastrous.” She spent a year and a half struggling with the bureaucracy and with scathing reports in the press, which ridiculed some of her proposals (such as a marriage bureau for temporary, twelve-hour marriages). Her health also broke down. She’d been having severe stomach pains, and she also learned later that she had hepatitis C. Her friends intervened, and, in 1999, Rist withdrew from the Expo job, and soon slipped into a clinical depression.
“The team of friends then sent me to Los Angeles,” Rist said. “I was one month in Venice Beach, in the house of Lili Tanner, an old friend, whom I cooked for, and who did not allow me to read anything about art.” (Tanner remembers Rist saying that she had walked by a newsstand in Santa Monica, “sniffing the art magazines like someone else sniffing porn.”) Her friends also cut her off from Balz Roth, a Swiss tech consultant she had been living with since 1998. She had become obsessed with the fear that he would leave her. Roth was deeply sympathetic and had no intention of leaving her, but he agreed that he had become part of the problem. Rist, who had always been close to her mother, knew that in some ways she was more like her depressive father, and at the same time determined not to be.
After that month in California, the depression lifted. She returned to Zurich, where Wirth found her a room in a secluded hotel, and then she spent a month in Jacqueline Burckhardt’s family house in the countryside near Basel. (Solzhenitsyn had stayed there for a while, after he left Russia.) Not long afterward, she was reunited with Roth. “I did not choose a man who was similar to my father,” she said. “And when I was able to stop taking medication Balz told me he wanted a child. I had never thought about having a child, never, but I was thirty-eight, so I knew it was probably my last chance. Balz promised that he would take care of the child, and he kept his promise.” Their baby, a boy whom she named Himalaya (“my favorite word”), was born in 2002. Rist took a great interest in the process of pregnancy—all the bodily changes—but the birth itself left her “a bit disappointed,” as she put it. “I had thought that the moment you give birth you realize some great philosophical truth, but not at all. It’s still a big mystery. I didn’t believe so much in the mother feeling, although of course that came.”
Rist’s work expanded dramatically in 2005. She had been invited to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale that year, and was told that she could choose the Swiss pavilion, on the Biennale grounds, or the Baroque Church of San Stae, on the Grand Canal. She chose the church. “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” a twenty-one-minute video projection, with music by Anders Guggisberg, turned the high, vaulted ceiling of San Stae into a sensual paradise, teeming with images and perspectives that evoked the illusionistic ceilings of Tiepolo and Tintoretto. “I tried to do a paradise without the fall of man,” she explained. Nude female figures floated in a blue sky, crushed papayas between their breasts or underfoot, and swam slowly among huge water lilies. Ewelina Guzik, a startlingly beautiful dancer and choreographer with red hair and pale, lightly freckled skin, lay motionless on a bed of green foliage, locking eyes with the viewer. Fingers glided through undergrowth, faces and bodies doubled and tripled, and waves of changing colors flowed over and through it all. Mattresses (made by Rist’s sister Tamara) had been provided so that viewers could lie down, immersing themselves in the prelapsarian choreography. After two months, the Roman Curia, which oversees Biennale exhibitions, ordered this one shut down—why it was allowed to stay up for so long is a mystery.
Rist had achieved what Massimiliano Gioni, the artistic director of the New Museum, calls “the technological sublime, in the sense that the sublime has migrated from landscape to data.” It’s an interesting thought—the monumental, nature-worshipping canvases of Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Caspar David Friedrich, and other nineteenth-century artists reincarnated in pixels and moving images. In the multichannel videos that Rist has made since “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” the technology becomes increasingly complex and inventive. She had learned how to shape video images to fit specific areas, in a process called pixel-mapping, which requires breaking the image down and working with one pixel at a time. For “Parasimpatico,” a show that Gioni invited her to do in 2011, Rist transformed the interior of a huge abandoned movie theatre in Milan into a fantastic world of moving images. The show began in the theatre’s Art Deco lobby, where she hung one of her “underwear chandeliers”—made of female undergarments and a few male ones. Video images were projected on the walls of the grand staircase and on the theatre’s giant screen, which had been one of Europe’s first Cineramas. “Her images were throughout the house,” Gioni remembers. “She wanted them to float away from the screen, flying breasts and mouths and lips and body parts. She said it was a way to caress or stroke the cinema, which had been left empty for so long.”
“Pour Your Body Out,” at the Museum of Modern Art in 2008, brought unexpected new life to the museum’s overlarge second-floor atrium, which was notorious for making even Barnett Newman’s “Broken Obelisk” look puny. It was “arguably the first project to humanize—and feminize—the atrium,” Karen Rosenberg wrote in the Times. Viewers could sit or sprawl on an upholstered mound in the center of the room—it looked like a doughnut, or a giant eye—surrounded by wall projections of eighteen-foot-tall clouds and meadows and tulip fields and underwater bodies and plants and a very large black-and-white pig. Children loved it, and some people came back again and again. “For me, that was a paradigm shift at MOMA,” Klaus Biesenbach told me. “You knew the architecture was at the service of the art.” In the two weeks before the opening, Rist sat in the atrium with a few technicians, reworking and recalculating every detail.
“Pepperminta,” her first attempt at a full-length feature video, fared less well when it screened at the Sundance Film Festival, in 2010. The narrative centered on a young woman (played by Guzik) whose grandmother had assigned her the task of freeing the world from any fears that were not required for our survival. The work, hampered by the absence of a viable script, made little impression, and Rist has not tried this form again. While she was at Sundance, she had several conversations with Robert Redford, and was surprised to find that he had seen “Sip My Ocean” and other works of hers, and knew a lot about video art. “I often think how different it would have been if cinemas had provided places, rooms for videos,” she told me. “For a while, video was floating somewhere between cinema and art, but it was the fine arts that finally embraced it.”
Early in her career, Rist worried that the phenomenal popularity of her work would be held against her. Crowds continue to line up for her museum shows. The Times’ Roberta Smith, writing in 2016 about “Pixel Forest,” at the New Museum, described Rist as “an artist who has effortlessly worked aspects of feminism, the body and performance art into her videos while giving moving images and music an organic unity rare in the art world.” There are critics who assume that work this popular should not be taken seriously, but so far no one has dismissed her on that ground, and there is hope that she will not be punished. It helps that even in her most color-drunk and hedonistic videos there are darker elements—melancholy music, weed-choked water, blood, and muck.
Still, what Rist delivers in abundance is pleasure, something that has been out of bounds in contemporary art since the nineteen-seventies. Tine Colstrup, who curated Rist’s 2019 show at the Louisiana Museum, said recently, “I think Pipi wonders who invented this idea that pleasure cannot be intelligent.” One of the delights in her videos is that she clearly has so much fun making them. In the early years, before she could afford to hire assistants, she enlisted help from her friends and siblings. The Rist Sisters Corporation, an informal resource with a fluctuating number of employees, worked on stage sets for Les Reines Prochaines, as well as on her video productions and anything else that Rist might be doing. Anders Guggisberg, in addition to writing the music for “Ever Is Over All,” painted the metal flower that Silvana Ceschi, a filmmaker, uses to smash the car windows. (It’s modelled on a red-hot poker, a hardy perennial that is native to South Africa.) “We found we could not smash the window unless we scored an ‘X’ on it first,” Rist explained. “I wanted to give Silvana protection glasses, but she said no.” The red-coated woman in the video is Rist’s mother, whose Volkswagen is one of the cars that get smashed. The young man in the striped shirt is her brother, Tom. The idea of breaking car windows with a flower came to Rist during an argument with the editor of the Swiss art magazine DU, when she was guest editing an issue. Rist wanted a photo of an older woman on the cover, the editor refused, and she thought, “I’m going to smash your car!” (The older woman ended up on the cover.)
Nineteen years later, Beyoncé paid her the sincerest form of flattery by stealing the idea, for her 2016 music video “Hold Up,” in which she breaks car windshields with a baseball bat. I asked Rist how she’d felt about that. “Uh, cool homage,” she said, laughing (pant-pant-pant). “Pop music opened a window on Yoko Ono and the art world for me, and I’m glad to give something back. I would have preferred that Beyoncé did it with a flower and not a baseball bat, because it changes the meaning. But, no, I was very flattered.”
Pipi Rist and Balz Roth live on the outskirts of Zurich, in a house they share with three other families. “We were all friends before,” Rist said. “Two of them are the architects who built it. It’s a wooden house that looks like metal because the outer layer is zinc.” My wife, Dodie, and I were going there for dinner, and Rist had picked us up at our hotel in Roth’s Mercedes Wagon, which she rarely drives. (She doesn’t own a car, and commutes to her studio by bike or, on stormy days, by bus.) “My man is a very good cook,” she said. “We’re not married, but we’ve been together for twenty-three years.” The house is on a steep hillside. “We live on the shadow side,” Rist said. “Rich people live on the sunny side.”
Roth arrived a minute or so after we did. He is a year older than Rist; his graying hair is cut short, and he has the tanned, super-fit look of someone who spends a lot of time outdoors. Fourteen pairs of skis, and not a single graceless snowboard, stood against one wall of the communal entrance. (Rist quit skiing when she was ten, after injuring both knees in a mistimed jump from a swimming-pool springboard.) A staircase led to their family room, where big windows at one end overlooked the city. Himalaya, a lanky eighteen-year-old with uncombed dark hair, got up from a sofa-bed combination near the windows, where he had been reading, and came over to shake hands. (It was before people stopped doing this.) We had last seen him in Venice, California, in 2002, when he was two months old and Rist was teaching for a year at U.C.L.A. “He learned to walk there, I learned to drive, and Roth took flying lessons and learned to fly,” Rist said. Nobody calls him Himalaya, we discovered. His full name is Himalaya Yuji Ansgar Rist—Yuji because his mother has a passion for Japanese culture; Ansgar after a close friend of hers, who died before the boy was born—and when he was old enough to choose he picked Yuji. As promised, Roth had taken care of him as he grew up, staying home with him when Rist was installing a show or going to her gallery openings around the world. He and Rist have always led congenial, parallel lives. He takes four or five ski trips every winter. “Balz is very centered,” Nike Dreyer told us. “He knows who he is. I always welcome his opinion because he is so clearheaded.” That night, he was leaving right after dinner to take a ballroom-dancing class. “He’s learning the Lindy Hop—without me,” Rist said.
While Roth cooked dinner, Rist pulled out boxes of black-and-white photographs that her father had taken of his five children at various ages. The images were surprisingly sharp and well composed. (“We used to joke that he spent more time in his darkroom than he did with us,” she said.) Pipi is usually caught in movement, a dishevelled tomboy with a chipped front tooth. There were several shots of the three-story modernist house, designed by her father, that the family had moved into in 1972. When the house was sold, years later, it became (and remains) a brothel. Walter Rist continued to live next door, and “until he died he was the best friend of all the prostitutes,” Rist said. “He and I went together,” Roth called from the kitchen. Rist laughed, and said, “No, really, he talked with them, and had lunch with them on the fire escape. They were not afraid of him.”
Roth’s dinner was a medley of vegetarian dishes, one of which was made of chickpeas and tasted like meat. I asked Rist about her interest in Japan. “As a child, I had a German picture book about Japan, and it was one of my treasures,” she said. “I looked at it so-o-o much. But then my best friend, Ansgar Schnizer, went to Japan to study for an advanced degree in theoretical physics, and was killed when his motorbike was hit by a car. We were never a love couple, but we were very close. Ansgar was wild, unopportunistic, uncalculated, and fearless. The day he died, Les Reines Prochaines gave a concert here, and at that concert I had no fear, no stagefright. Everything seemed so unimportant in relation to that.” Rist visited Japan for the first time in 1996, when she was thirty-four, and she has returned seventeen times. Although her retrospective at the National Museum of Modern Art has been postponed until next spring, she still hopes to spend some time this fall at a small apartment she bought recently in the mountains near Hakone, an hour and a half from Tokyo by bullet train. She likes the feeling of responsibility that Japanese people have for one another. “You’re not only responsible to your own family but also to the society,” she said. “There’s a tenderness toward the life of each person. Japan also has some really bad sides, with all the super-machos, but when I go there I feel like I’m coming home.”
Roth went off to his Lindy Hop class, and we ordered an Uber. During the wait, Dodie asked Pipi about her stylish, blue-gray denim coveralls. They were Japanese, she said, a type of electrician’s uniform that she’s been ordering and wearing since she was thirty-four. This reminded her that once, as a child, she had gone to school in her father’s pajamas. “They looked really good,” she said.
Many of the video installations that Rist has presented in recent years have occupied large spaces and attracted huge audiences, and she is aware that this part of her practice may be becoming obsolete. “The experience of the moving image has progressively migrated from shared consumption on big screens to an individual, lonely consumption on smaller and smaller screens,” she told Massimiliano Gioni, adding, “I still believe in installation works as places for communal gatherings.” But what did she think now, in the era of COVID-19 and social distancing, which began in earnest soon after my wife and I returned to New York? We arranged to talk with Rist about this on Skype. Rist had “inwented” (as she pronounces it) several new visual effects, which she put on the screen to enliven the conversation and to show how her work was developing. In the first, her face and body undulated and stretched out in liquid, flowing contortions, while expanding circles of color invaded the space around her. She was alone in her Zurich studio. “Everyone on my team is working from home, Zooming and Skyping,” she said. “I am here three days a week, and Nike comes in once or twice, and also Antshi von Moos, one of my two video assistants. As you say, bringing people together is hardly in fashion, and that is the big question now. If the museum room goes away, I have to come up with other inventions. For example, I would like to find ways that people can use their iPhone as a light source, like a small mass of light that would be something physically in the room. I’ve also been working with virtual reality, but it’s tricky because when you do that, with the glasses, people lose their balance and they tend to vomit.” A shower of white particles appeared on the screen, flying toward us like a horizontal snowstorm.
“Everyone in the world is now producing content,” Rist said. “Before, only a few had the opportunity to make it public, but now everyone can do that, too, and I think we have to appreciate this.” I asked whether she thought the experience of being part of a live audience was gone for good. “It’s true, there is something indescribable when people are together, and reacting to the energy in the room, and to the collective concentration,” she said. “I think it will come back—perhaps even better. I have always tried to escape the suspicious square form of the TV set, and I am looking for a new escape but haven’t found it yet. Maybe soon.”
On the screen, another new effect: Rist, hideously transformed, a monster with scaly, reptilian features and limbs, laughing her wonderful, panting laugh. ♦
