48 THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020
natural shades. Painting with light, that’s
what I try to do. Paul Klee said he wished
he could have a color piano, and I am so
lucky—I have a color piano!”
The question now, she said, was
“Maybe we take your eye?” (My eyes are
a different blue from hers, and four de-
cades older.) I agreed, and sat down in
the chair. The floodlights were blinding.
Rist said that her team would put the
camera on a moving support so that I
wouldn’t have to worry about the lens
touching my eye. That was good news.
The shooting began. Mennel was the
cameraman, and Rist was the director,
telling me what to do. It was important
to keep my eyes moving, she said. “You
can think of going over there, and going
there. And now look up. Yes! Really
nice. Beautiful! O.K., one more. Look
around—to Vienna, to New York. Cool!
Can you close your eyes and then open?
Yes! Once again to Vienna, over there.
Once again closing. Open. Wow!” When
it was done, the whole team applauded.
I looked at a replay on the monitor. My
eyeball seemed to lie under several lay-
ers of liquid, and the overlapping folds
of skin under the eye looked like closeup
photographs of a crocodile. “We hide
that we are animals,” Rist said.
Lunch at the studio is communal. Ev-
erybody cooks, or brings a dish from out-
side, or cleans up afterward. There were
seven of us at the table, and the main
course was an assortment of curries, len-
tils, rice, and vegetables from a nearby
Indian restaurant, on plates that didn’t
match. When Rist finished eating, she
picked up her plate and licked it clean.
All the others did the same—there were
no napkins. I remembered seeing her do
this at a dinner party in New York, a year
or so earlier, in the apartment of the dealer
Roland Augustine. Was this a Swiss cus-
tom, I had asked her. “It comes from my
mother, who now denies it,” Rist said.
“And in my house it is a duty.” Two other
guests at the Augustine dinner had tried
to lick their plates, amid general hilar-
ity. Rist tends to cause a stir in public.
“Like my father, I’m an introvert dis-
guised as an extrovert,” she said at lunch.
I
n 1998, to the surprise of nearly ev-
eryone in the Swiss art world, Rist
was named the artistic director of
Expo.02, Switzerland’s first international
exposition since the nineteen-sixties,
which would take place in four loca-
tions around the country. “I have no
idea why they invited me,” Rist told
me. “I had won the prize at the Venice
Biennale the year before, and maybe
they thought it would be good for mar-
keting.” Before accepting the post, she
consulted several close friends. Expo.02
had been plagued by fund-raising prob-
lems and erratic leadership, and its open-
ing date had been delayed—it was orig-
inally scheduled for 2001. Iwan Wirth
urged her to think carefully about it.
“Her career was about to explode,” he
told me. “Success is hard on Pipi. She
doesn’t trust it. But nobody ever gave
an artist this kind of responsibility.” For
Rist, who thinks that the purpose of
art is to improve people’s lives, the pos-
sibilities outweighed the risks. “She said
yes, and her friends supported her,”
Wirth told me. “And it turned out to
be an impossible task. The public loved
her. Pipi became a national figure, the
goddess Helvetia, but the art world was
skeptical, and the press was disastrous.”
She spent a year and a half struggling
with the bureaucracy and with scath-
ing reports in the press, which ridiculed
some of her proposals (such as a mar-
riage bureau for temporary, twelve-hour
marriages). Her health also broke down.
She’d been having severe stomach pains,
and she also learned later that she had
hepatitis C. Her friends intervened,
and, in 1999, Rist withdrew from the
Expo job, and soon slipped into a clin-
ical depression.
“The team of friends then sent me
to Los Angeles,” Rist said. “I was one
month in Venice Beach, in the house
of Lili Tanner, an old friend, whom I
cooked for, and who did not allow me
to read anything about art.” (Tanner re-
members Rist saying that she had
walked by a newsstand in Santa Mon-
ica, “sniffing the art magazines like
someone else sniffing porn.”) Her
friends also cut her off from Balz Roth,
a Swiss tech consultant she had been
living with since 1998. She had become
obsessed with the fear that he would
leave her. Roth was deeply sympathetic
and had no intention of leaving her, but
he agreed that he had become part of
the problem. Rist, who had always been
close to her mother, knew that in some
ways she was more like her depressive
father, and at the same time determined
not to be.
After that month in California, the
depression lifted. She returned to Zu-
rich, where Wirth found her a room in
a secluded hotel, and then she spent a
month in Jacqueline Burckhardt’s fam-
ily house in the countryside near Basel.
(Solzhenitsyn had stayed there for a
while, after he left Russia.) Not long
GRENDEL
All lions must lean into something other than a roar:
James Baldwin, for instance, singing “Precious Lord,”
His voice as weary as water broken over his scalp
In a storefront Sanctified Church’s baptismal pool
All those years ago when he wanted to be
Somebody’s child and on fire in that being. Lord,
I want to be somebody’s child and chosen
Water spilling over their scalp, water
Taking the shape of their longing, a deer
Diving into evening traffic and the furrow drawn
In the air over the hood of the car—power
And wanting to be something alive and open.
Lord, I want to be alive and open,
A glimpse of power: the shuffle of a mother’s hand
Over a sleeping child’s forehead
As if clearing the city’s rust from its face,
Which we mostly are: a halo of rust,
A glimpse of power—James Baldwin leaning
Into the word light, his voice jostling that single grain
