THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 47
era,” Rist explained. Female vulnerabil-
ity gets a workout in “(Absolutions)
Pipilotti’s Mistakes” (1988, eleven min-
utes), in which Pipi—I’m tired of call-
ing her Rist—in a number of unflatter-
ing 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 innova-
tions. The out-of-focus look and scroll-
ing lines of static in Rist’s early videos
are Paik trademarks. Although she never
met him, Paik’s attitude toward the me-
dium influenced her deeply. “He used
the screen as an eyeball massage and a
light thrower—not deconstructing the
medium but using it without unneces-
sary respect,” she said. When Iwan
Wirth asked her to write the catalogue
note for a 1993 Paik show he was put-
ting 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 nine-
teen-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 cam-
era designed to be hidden in walls, she
worked very close, filming random mo-
ments 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 bub-
bling water and ardent moaning. “Pick-
elporno” offended no one—it even ap-
peared on Swiss television—but copious
flows of menstrual blood (simulated) in
“Blood Clip” (1993) made some view-
ers 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 over-
whelmed her. She joined a Bible-read-
ing 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 burningforever,” she said. “When I got rid of
the need to believe in God, I felt
so liberated.”T
he 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 Men-
nel’s left eye. Mennel, a strapping middle-
aged man who was the male swimmer
in “Sip My Ocean,” sat on a chair be-
tween two floodlights while Rist, wield-
ing a video camera with a two-foot-longlens, moved it around and uncomfort-
ably 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 cor-
rected the focus. “The left eye is defi-
nitely better,” Mennel père said. “It’s my
better side.” (Laughter. They were speak-
ing English for our benefit, instead of
Swiss-German.) On the monitor, every-
thing was in extreme closeup. I could see
rows and patches of facial hair by Men-
nel’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 sys-
tem. 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 fore-
ground. “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 Hit-
ler 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 can-
vas in waves and veils of changing com-
puter colors; she will also project colors
onto a group of modern Japanese ceram-
ics. “In the Western world, color is un-
derestimated,” she said. “Color is bor-
derless, 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,