Film Festival, in 2010. The narrative
centered on a young woman (played by
Guzik) whose grandmother had as-
signed her the task of freeing the world
from any fears that were not required
for our survival. The work, hampered
by the absence of a viable script, made
little impression, and Rist has not tried
this form again. While she was at Sun-
dance, she had several conversations
with Robert Redford, and was surprised
to find that he had seen “Sip My Ocean”
and other works of hers, and knew a lot
about video art. “I often think how
different it would have been if cinemas
had provided places, rooms for videos,”
she told me. “For a while, video was
floating somewhere between cinema
and art, but it was the fine arts that
finally embraced it.”
Early in her career, Rist worried that
the phenomenal popularity of her work
would be held against her. Crowds con-
tinue to line up for her museum shows.
The Times’ Roberta Smith, writing in
2016 about “Pixel Forest,” at the New
Museum, described Rist as “an artist
who has effortlessly worked aspects of
feminism, the body and performance
art into her videos while giving mov-
ing images and music an organic unity
rare in the art world.” There are critics
who assume that work this popular
should not be taken seriously, but so
far no one has dismissed her on that
ground, and there is hope that she will
not be punished. It helps that even in
her most color-drunk and hedonistic
videos there are darker elements—mel-
ancholy music, weed-choked water,
blood, and muck.
Still, what Rist delivers in abundance
is pleasure, something that has been out
of bounds in contemporary art since
the nineteen-seventies. Tine Colstrup,
who curated Rist’s 2019 show at the
Louisiana Museum, said recently, “I
think Pipi wonders who invented this
idea that pleasure cannot be intelligent.”
One of the delights in her videos is that
she clearly has so much fun making
them. In the early years, before she could
afford to hire assistants, she enlisted
help from her friends and siblings. The
Rist Sisters Corporation, an informal
resource with a fluctuating number of
employees, worked on stage sets for Les
Reines Prochaines, as well as on her
video productions and anything else
that Rist might be doing. Anders Gug-
gisberg, in addition to writing the music
for “Ever Is Over All,” painted the metal
flower that Silvana Ceschi, a filmmaker,
uses to smash the car windows. (It’s
modelled on a red-hot poker, a hardy
perennial that is native to South Af-
rica.) “We found we could not smash
the window unless we scored an ‘X’ on
it first,” Rist explained. “I wanted to
give Silvana protection glasses, but
she said no.” The red-coated woman
in the video is Rist’s mother, whose
Volkswagen is one of the cars that get
smashed. The young man in the striped
shirt is her brother, Tom. The idea of
breaking car windows with a flower
came to Rist during an argument with
the editor of the Swiss art magazine
DU, when she was guest editing an
issue. Rist wanted a photo of an older
woman on the cover, the editor refused,
and she thought, “I’m going to smash
your car!” (The older woman ended up
on the cover.)
Nineteen years later, Beyoncé paid
her the sincerest form of flattery by
stealing the idea, for her 2016 music
video “Hold Up,” in which she breaks
car windshields with a baseball bat. I
asked Rist how she’d felt about that.
“Uh, cool homage,” she said, laughing
(pant-pant-pant). “Pop music openeda window on Yoko Ono and the art
world for me, and I’m glad to give some-
thing back. I would have preferred that
Beyoncé did it with a flower and not a
baseball bat, because it changes the
meaning. But, no, I was very flattered.”P
ipi Rist and Balz Roth live on the
outskirts of Zurich, in a house they
share with three other families. “We
were all friends before,” Rist said. “Two
of them are the architects who built it.
It’s a wooden house that looks like metal
because the outer layer is zinc.” My wife,
Dodie, and I were going there for din-
ner, and Rist had picked us up at our
hotel in Roth’s Mercedes Wagon, which
she rarely drives. (She doesn’t own a car,
and commutes to her studio by bike or,
on stormy days, by bus.) “My man is a
very good cook,” she said. “We’re not
married, but we’ve been together for
twenty-three years.” The house is on a
steep hillside. “We live on the shadow
side,” Rist said. “Rich people live on the
sunny side.”
Roth arrived a minute or so after we
did. He is a year older than Rist; his
graying hair is cut short, and he has the
tanned, super-fit look of someone who
spends a lot of time outdoors. Fourteen
pairs of skis, and not a single graceless
snowboard, stood against one wall of
the communal entrance. (Rist quit ski-
ing when she was ten, after injuring
both knees in a mistimed jump from a
swimming-pool springboard.) A stair-
case led to their family room, where big
windows at one end overlooked the city.
Himalaya, a lanky eighteen-year-old
with uncombed dark hair, got up from
a sofa-bed combination near the win-
dows, where he had been reading, and
came over to shake hands. (It was before
people stopped doing this.) We had last
seen him in Venice, California, in 2002,“I’d be fast, too, if I had legs that long.”