46 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
maintained well-equipped labs where
they made promotional videos. This put
her in contact with current technolo-
gies. 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 proph-
ecy,” Rist recalls. In her video, wearing
a low-cut black dress and dancing so
maniacally that her breasts keep spill-
ing 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, build-
ing to a kind of out-of-control hyste-
ria 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 re-
alized, 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 Festi-
val, in Switzerland, where it was ac-
cepted, “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? Ristsaid that one of her teachers “had re-
corded me saying, ‘I want to make rooms
full of light, where people find and un-
derstand 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 Zu-
rich that she shared with another art-
ist. Interest in her work was growing.
In Basel, Galerie Stampa, whose main
focus was selling art books, showed sev-
eral 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 galler-
ies 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 Lon-
don. 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 min-
utes. 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 exagger-
ated 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 cam-“And in this corner, still undefeated, Frank’s long-held beliefs!”