THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER14, 2020 49
afterward, she was reunited with Roth.
“I did not choose a man who was sim-
ilar to my father,” she said. “And when
I was able to stop taking medication
Balz told me he wanted a child. I had
never thought about having a child,
never, but I was thirty-eight, so I knew
it was probably my last chance. Balz
promised that he would take care of
the child, and he kept his promise.”
Their baby, a boy whom she named
Himalaya (“my favorite word”), was
born in 2002. Rist took a great interest
in the process of pregnancy—all the
bodily changes—but the birth itself left
her “a bit disappointed,” as she put it.
“I had thought that the moment you
give birth you realize some great phil-
osophical truth, but not at all. It’s still
a big mystery. I didn’t believe so much
in the mother feeling, although of course
that came.”
R
ist’s work expanded dramatically
in 2005. She had been invited to
represent Switzerland at the Venice
Biennale that year, and was told that
she could choose the Swiss pavilion, on
the Biennale grounds, or the Baroque
Church of San Stae, on the Grand
Canal. She chose the church. “Homo
Sapiens Sapiens,” a twenty-one-minute
video projection, with music by Anders
Guggisberg, turned the high, vaulted
ceiling of San Stae into a sensual par-
adise, teeming with images and per-
spectives that evoked the illusionistic
ceilings of Tiepolo and Tintoretto. “I
tried to do a paradise without the fall
of man,” she explained. Nude female
figures floated in a blue sky, crushed pa-
payas between their breasts or under-
foot, and swam slowly among huge
water lilies. Ewelina Guzik, a startlingly
beautiful dancer and choreographer
with red hair and pale, lightly freckled
skin, lay motionless on a bed of green
foliage, locking eyes with the viewer.
Fingers glided through undergrowth,
faces and bodies doubled and tripled,
and waves of changing colors flowed
over and through it all. Mattresses (made
by Rist’s sister Tamara) had been pro-
vided so that viewers could lie down,
immersing themselves in the prelapsar-
ian choreography. After two months,
the Roman Curia, which oversees Bi-
ennale exhibitions, ordered this one shut
down—why it was allowed to stay up
for so long is a mystery.
Rist had achieved what Massimiliano
Gioni, the artistic director of the New
Museum, calls “the technological sub-
lime, in the sense that the sublime has
migrated from landscape to data.” It’s
an interesting thought—the monu-
mental, nature-worshipping canvases
of Frederic Church, Thomas Cole, Cas-
par David Friedrich, and other nine-
teenth-century artists reincarnated in
pixels and moving images. In the mul-
tichannel videos that Rist has made
since “Homo Sapiens Sapiens,” the
technology becomes increasingly com-
plex and inventive. She had learned
how to shape video images to fit specific
areas, in a process called pixel-map-
ping, which requires breaking the image
down and working with one pixel at a
time. For “Parasimpatico,” a show that
Gioni invited her to do in 2011, Rist
transformed the interior of a huge aban-
doned movie theatre in Milan into a
fantastic world of moving images. The
show began in the theatre’s Art Deco
lobby, where she hung one of her “un-
derwear chandeliers”—made of female
undergarments and a few male ones.
Video images were projected on the
walls of the grand staircase and on the
theatre’s giant screen, which had been
one of Europe’s first Cineramas. “Her
images were throughout the house,”
Gioni remembers. “She wanted them
to float away from the screen, flying
breasts and mouths and lips and body
parts. She said it was a way to caress
or stroke the cinema, which had been
left empty for so long.”
“Pour Your Body Out,” at the Mu-
seum of Modern Art in 2008, brought
unexpected new life to the museum’s
overlarge second-floor atrium, which
was notorious for making even Barnett
Newman’s “Broken Obelisk” look puny.
It was “arguably the first project to hu-
manize—and feminize—the atrium,”
Karen Rosenberg wrote in the Times.
Viewers could sit or sprawl on an up-
holstered mound in the center of the
room—it looked like a doughnut, or a
giant eye—surrounded by wall projec-
tions of eighteen-foot-tall clouds and
meadows and tulip fields and under-
water bodies and plants and a very large
black-and-white pig. Children loved it,
and some people came back again and
again. “For me, that was a paradigm
shift at MOMA,” Klaus Biesenbach told
me. “You knew the architecture was at
the service of the art.” In the two weeks
before the opening, Rist sat in the atrium
with a few technicians, reworking and
recalculating every detail.
“Pepperminta,” her first attempt at
a full-length feature video, fared less
well when it screened at the Sundance
In his throat as if he might drop it or
Already has. I am calling to that grain
Of light, to that gap between his teeth
Where the many-of-us fatherless sleep
And bear and be whatever darkness or leaping
Thing we can be. In James Baldwin’s mouth,
My difficult beauty, my weak and worn,
My future as any number of angels,
Which is not unlike the beast Grendel,
Coming out of the wild heaven into the hills
And halls of the mead house at the harpist’s call
With absolute prophecy in his breast
And a desire for mercy, for a friend, an end
To drifting in loneliness, and in that coming
Down out of the hills, out of the trees, for once,
Bringing humans the best vision of themselves,
Which, of course, must be slaughtered.
—Roger Reeves
