44 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
was still there. Working with Rist is an
unpredictable adventure. “She’s well
organized, but she always needs a cer-
tain 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 Contem-
porary 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. exhi-
bition. “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 sell-
ing, 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 in-
vestment 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 under-
water world where two swimmers, Rist
and Pierre Mennel, her friend and col-
laborator, 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 yearn-
ing 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 gui-
tar, 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 nor-
mal “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 boy-
friend,” Rist confided. They stayed to-
gether 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 god-
mother 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 mar-
ket. “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 differ-
ent 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 prac-
tice,” Klaus Biesenbach, a former direc-
tor of MOMA PS1, who now directs the
Los Angeles Museum of Contempo-
rary 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, mo-
tion, 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.G
rowing 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 arrange-
ments 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 hero-
ine of Astrid Lindgren’s children’s book
series, which had been reborn as a pop-
ular 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 first-
born, 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 stu-
dent 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 recog-
nize that she had become an inter-
nationally known artist. As a lifelong
stamp collector, however, he was deeply
impressed when she was asked to de-
sign a stamp for the Swiss postal service.
Both her parents were from work-
ing-class families in St. Gallen, and both
had broken precedent by choosing pro-
fessions. 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 sta-
tions. His wife, Anna, was the only
teacher in a one-room school for forty- © P. RIST. COURTESY THE ARTIST, HAUSER & WIRTH AND LUHRING AUGUSTINE