THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 43
PROFILES
THE ADVENTURES OF PIPI
Pipilotti Rist’s hedonistic expansion of video art.BY CALVINTOMKINS
orderless, it’s dangerous, it’s emotional, like music.”
PHOTOGRAPH BY PIPILOTTI RISTA
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 ec-
statically. Behind her, a block away, a
uniformed policewoman turns the cor-
ner, 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 over-
taken her, smiles and salutes as she
passes. One more jubilant demolition
brings the video to a close. Shown pub-
licly for the first time at the 1997 Ven-
ice Biennale, the eight-minute work,
called “Ever Is Over All,” won the Pre-
mio 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 Chi-
cago, and the National Museum of
Modern Art in Kyoto acquired copies.
(Rist’s video installations come in edi-
tions of three, with one artist’s proof.)
It is one of those rare works whose el-
ements—hilarity, suspense, timing,
comic violence, anarchy, and a lovely
musical score—fit together with irre-
sistible 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 de-
veloped a completely new video lan-
guage that warms this cool medium
up.” Burckhardt and her business part-ner, 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, mul-
tichannel 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 hand-
bags, with “room in them for every-
thing: painting, technology, language,
music, lousy flowing pictures, poetry,
commotion, premonitions of death, sex,
and friendliness.” If Paik is the found-
ing father of video as an art form, Rist
is the disciple who has done the most
to bring it into the mainstream of con-
temporary art.
In late January, before the corona-
virus shut down the world, my wife and
I spent some time with Rist in her Zu-
rich 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 laugh-
ing. “No, really twenty-five years. Prob-
ably the place I have been most in my
life.” Her English is idiomatic, eccen-
tric, 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 bend-
ing dramatically. It was late afternoon
when we arrived, and most of her stu-
dio team (two full-time assistants, three
part-timers, and one intern) had left
for the day, but Nike Dreyer, her thir-
ty-year-old deputy and studio manager,