A Swooning We Will Go: On Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Pour Your Body Out’
by CMatlin
A view of MoMA’s second-floor atrium with Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour Your Body Out” installation.
Pour Your Body Out (7345 Cubic Meters), by Pipilotti Rist. At the Museum of Modern Art.
How do we approach Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist’s video installation Pour Your Body Out (7345 Cubic Meters)? The criticism, if it can be called that, up to now says that one should be completely enamored with the visual spectacle of seeing MoMA’s atrium transformed into a psychedelic video experience. The wall text encourages visitors to “feel as liberated as possible, and move as freely as you can or want to! Watch the videos and listen to the sound in any position or movement. Practice stretching: pour your body out of your hips or watch through your legs. Rolling around and singing is also allowed.” So people lounge about, leaning against the walls, lying on the floor, sitting or lying on/in the massive round blue couch (modeled after the eye’s iris) in the center of the atrium. In a video interview at moma.org, Rist explains that she is always concerned with the comfort of the viewers and how they are able to move. By providing pillows for one to sit or rest one’s head on, the experience becomes focused on the viewer’s comfort as the video is taken in.
And what of the video? There’s no denying it as visual spectacle. Rist’s sixteen-minute video loop is shown on three sides of the atrium, creating an almost completely immersive experience as ripe strawberries, a pot bellied pig, earthworms, red tulips moving in the wind and naked girls floating in water and crawling along the ground, are projected twenty-five feet high in color so rich and saturated that it becomes slightly overwhelming. One cannot help but be taken with the whole thing. Yet the fawning praise for Pour Your Body Out is odd and perhaps a little desperate.
Art critics seem always to want either to praise or condemn, not to take a balanced approach and measure the moment of their feeling. It is for this reason that we are now inundated with gushing about Rist. But how does it compare to her past work? Is it better than Ever Is Over All from 1997, an oddly moving meditation on the beauty in violence? Or worse than Pickleporno (1992)? The answer, in both cases, is no. There is a sweetness to Rist’s work, a playfulness and whimsy that makes it compelling. She produces fantastical environments that have an inviting quality; they want to share themselves with the viewer. This is not mean-spirited art, not something that seeks to teach us of our own failings but is, as Peter Schjeldahl asserts in the New Yorker, “art and, also, in its sumptuously and modestly passing way, something other and better than art?” What does this mean? Could anyone possibly know this, and would knowing this make any difference? No, it is not better than art, it is simply art. That Schjeldahl would make such a declaration succeeds in placing on Rist a burden that is far too heavy to bear.
Pour Your Body Out is not the “best thing to happen so far in the Museum of Modern Art’s space-splurging, pompous atrium,” as Schjeldahl would have his readers believe. That honor goes to Martin Puryear and his 2007 retrospective, an exhibition so awe-inspiring and magical that it came much closer to the vaunted status of being “better than art” than Rist’s installation does. Puryear’s monumental sculptures succeeded in making the atrium seem even bigger than it is and by doing so made the viewer feel like a child again, returning to a world where enormous things regained the quality of the extraordinary. Nor is it an “exorcism,” “impregnation,” or “incantation” as Jerry Saltz argued in his New York magazine review. Yes, MoMA is a bastion to maleness, specifically the white kind that was born between 1903 and 1945, but Pour Your Body Out is not the first real assault on it and one cannot lump in Marlene Dumas’ underwhelming and boringly dour survey into the conversation. Saltz would do well to remember the four Joan Mitchell paintings that hung in the atrium a couple of years ago. Those paintings, like most of Mitchell’s work, possess real power that isn’t limited by the confines of the picture plane. Nor do they need sound and movement to register that power to the viewer. If anything it was those paintings that put a serious dent in the masculine armor and signaled that the big boys are not the best artists in that most Faulknerian mausoleum of hope and desire.
That dark pink drapes hang on the wall or a woman is submerged in water and blood pours from her body shouldn’t be a cause for excitement nor a testament to MoMA’s coming of age, as Saltz declares. How can this be praiseworthy? Haven’t we moved beyond this sort of blatant message sending? There is absolutely no question that MoMA should feature more women artists but the fault is as much the rest of the art world’s as it is MoMA’s. Critics should write about, and galleries should show, more women. Collectors should buy more art by women and curators should stop being enamored with clever men. But Pour Your Body Out is not the vehicle by which the art world is to be transformed.
Critics want it to be more, something institution altering, but really Rist could have put anything inoffensive up on the walls and the reaction would be the same (though if she had covered the walls in silver and made a video with sports cars and hardcore pornography she probably would have been condemned). It seems that at base critics like it for no good reason, or perhaps the better way of framing it is that they like its ease. One need only look at it and be entertained. If one is going to find fault with the atrium at least find fault with the fact that the installation fails because it is not truly immersive. Its three-wall projection is incapable of creating an environment deserving of the praise it has received. One never really gets lost in the experience, in direct contrast to the feeling one has in James Turrell’s Meeting at P.S. 1, which completely consumes the viewer’s sense of self and place. Instead, the experience of Pour Your Body Out is one of continually trying to find the right angle to take it all in.
I do not want, however, for the reader to feel that I am in some way indicting Rist. She has managed to make a work of video/installation art that has the wonderful feeling of shared experience. This is no easy task, for as by dint of the performative nature of this type of art the individual making the work is placed at the center of the experience, thereby putting the pressure on the viewers to figure out what it is they are witnessing. The experience is not one of sharing, the chance for connection hinges on the vagaries of the artist’s intent. The art is still about, as Barnett Newman once said, the handling of chaos. But it seems that it is the handling of the chaos of the self, not the chaos of the problem of what it means to live in the world with others, which Newman maintained was central to the creation of art. Perhaps the best thing that I can say for Rist is that she manages not to position herself as the focal point for experience. Instead she allows her viewers to make of the piece what they will. Stand, sit in or on the circle, lie down, run around, fall asleep, daydream, talk to a friend. All of these are viable and necessary options in a work like Pour Your Body Out. There is, oddly enough, a sense of connection with the rest of the viewers and this resides in the experience of looking at the video. By allowing for myriad modes of watching, Rist fosters a community of viewers. We look together and we look at each other as we watch, and it is this that makes the work valuable. We experience those around us and are thereby released from the solitary act of looking that so often goes hand-in-hand with viewing art.
But is that enough? Sure, but unfortunately it has been made into so much more, and that more is why Pour Your Body Out collapses. It is a perfectly pleasurable way to while-away sixteen minutes, but the blind and overzealous praise is ill founded. Instead it’s a place for the weary, somewhere to lounge, for tourists to take a break and relax. Usually one is not able to relax at a museum, the pace is a deliberate march towards specific things, but with Pour Your Body Out the viewers are allowed to take a moment to breathe, listen to the droning score by Anders Guggisberg, and sit. Students who don’t care for art and tourists who are making all the stops will be delighted to see that big blue couch, but critics, always desperate for bigger and better things, are best served to keep looking. Or perhaps not look so hard. Let Pour Your Body Out be what it is: a typically pleasant experience in a typically pleasant institution. It succeeds because of its sweetness and charm and fails because of the desire to praise it. Though, perhaps the best way to look at it is a conversation between two teenagers who were sitting behind me:
Girl (hovering over the edge): My shoes are a struggle to take off. Boy: Ah, take ‘em off. That’s the point of all this.
Yes, it certainly is.
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