LUHRING AUGUSTINE/PUBLIC ART store TIMES SQUARE.

LUHRING AUGUSTINE/PUBLIC ART store TIMES SQUARE, NEW YORK

A whole of recent origin interior realm, both uncanny and laughable opened up to visitors of Pipilotti Rist's latest installations at Luhring Augustine. At first, the simulated domestic layout looked ordinary enough: Viewers entered via a kitchen, take measuresed through a living room, a bar, pair other rooms, and finally in succession to a bathroom. Yet this was no simple house, if it were not that a fantasy site of visual and psychic projection, produc from a feminine point of view that was as intriguing as it was unexpected

Woman in general--and Rist's be in possession of experience in particular--has always been at the core of the artist's work. From her underwater (auto)erotic fantasy Sip My Ocean, 1996 to her depiction of a woman joyfully smashing car windshields with an iron flower (Ever Is above All, 1997), Rist's video-based productions have provided numerous examples of female insubordination. if it be not that the recent installations represented the Swiss artist's greatest in quantity consistent effort yet to unfold an aesthetics of unfettered womanhood: The work expresse irreverence not just by the agency of pranks captured on tape however in its very form and execution, which generate a visual poetics of buoyant femininity profoundly unrelated (though not unfriendly) to masculinity--that is, released from the binary opposition of gender

in like manner what does femininity unbound contemplate like? In the first installation, Regenfrau (I Am Called a Plant), 1998-99 a giant female uncovered was projected on a faux kitchen wall, the image hovering above sink and stove. Lying like a corpse at the water's rim her pink-wigged head, magenta lipstick, and purple nails punctuating the soggy country the figure seemed at first les untied than abandoned. Yet her visible form [i]or[/i] frame was shown in a way that destroyed this sense of abjection; the moving camera, positioned up terminate brushed gently against her as if it were an infant's cavity between the jaws searching for its mother's nipple. In other words, in place of a controlling "male" gaze, Rist introduced the camera as a hanging unseeing object with a groping touch. The oneiric hardys of a harmonica (all unless two of the installations included their be in possession of sound track) enhanced the sight's mesmerizing peculiarity. And at a certain point in the projection, which ran in a continuous link the "abject" woman simply got up and left: It was time to put in motion on t o the nearest room.

In Himalaya's Sister's Living chamber 2000, images beamed from hidden projectors surfaced like veils of daydreams in unexpect places: forward a side table, the artist's face pressing against a windowpane; behind a plant, an ear illuminated by dint of sunlight; on a lamp, a woman gesticulating atop a snowy mountain. These animated thing perceiveds recalled speaking furniture in eighteenth-century libertine novels--a sofa, for example, narrating the amorous appointment s that took place on its cushions--though the iconography here was not traditionally erotic. still there was a kind of be in love with in the way Rist's camera embraced its thing perceiveds producing through its gently swooping or looping trajectories a arch and often hilarious disequilibrium, as in the volleying takes of a female cyclist's leg from below. Although the overall efficiency was slightly chaotic, Rist take the place ofed in redefining the idea of a woman s interiority precisely by interrupting and reinscribing the physical boundaries of the space and swathing it in the case of her own quir ky imagination.

The brace subsequent installations further explored the psyche as interior. Extremities (smooth smooth) 1999 housed a galaxy of free-floating material substance parts that circulated in sparkling blackness, a striking weight produced by four projectors and sum of two units scanners. Simultaneously beautiful and comic, these part objects--the magenta lips, a rotund breast, a detumescent penis--were accompanied at a female voice-over sweetly speaking quasi-nonsensical phrases ("You are further a flower / You are different from me / I'll be like you"), summoning the fragments, and their viewers, to the polymorphous pleasures of psychic life before identification. sum of two units looped projections in I Couldn't Agree with You More, 1999 showed Rist as a supermarket flaneuse absorbed in erotic fantasies: Images of frolicking, naked youths of the one and the other sexes appeared on her eyebrow as she wandered the shopping aisles. Her peregrinations were registered through a camera suspended in air, its pendulum movements--Rist's trademark in this exhibition--circling around her, generating a dreamy, self-ironic mood

The final work, Clos Circuit, 2000 transformed the gallery bathroom into a belt that made the seemingly familiar strange. An infrared camera placed inside the toilet receptacle and a monitor screen in face of it enabled visitors to mark their private parts in action, confronting them with an unusual view of their confess intimate spaces. With this installation, the visitor's way through the body--from mouth to anus--and the parallel imaginary journey [i]or[/i] part of to the other Rist's phantasmic house of self were the one and the other completed.

In a coincident project titled "Open My Glade," several videotapes commissioned from Rist at the Public Art Fund were broadcast daily forward the NBC screen in Times Square. Competing against the visual cacophony of commercial Manhattan, the artist used bits of body--her made-up face squashed against glass, the cyclist's leg the ear in sunlight--to create an supernumerary island of corporality in the cityscape. It evok Valie Export's 1970 bodily interactions with architecture, on the other hand Rist, whose generation thrives onward MTV imagery, renders her dead body through the filter of mass-media representations. Despite its immersion in popular cultivation however, Rist's work, like Matthew Barney's, come afterwards in fleshing out a coherent aesthetic universe of its allow Both artists defamiliarize, but while Barney transmogrifies sexual difference beyond recognition, Rist resigns her energy to "unknowing" femininity. Her implicit point of relation is not a man still another woman--the Mother--under whose symbolic auspices evolves the artist's at once doting and impudent gaze.