SPARKLY SPECTACLE
Artist Pipilotti Rist explores beauty inside and out via two works being exhibited this summer at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
In a world that seems bent on embracing visual as well as verbal ugliness, Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist offers a moment of quietly rebellious beauty.
A person could go quite woo-woo in Rist’s sublimely colorful cosmos — a swirling world of permeable earth, water, sky and human flesh. A whole roomful of people could turn deliriously happy there, together. Maybe even forget politics for a while.
On Sunday, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston unveils two signature Rist works that could have just that effect. They’re the latest acquisitions in a hit parade of installations that have made the museum’s Cullinan Hall a full-immersion summer sensation for the past four years.
Rist’s intricate two channel video “Worry Will Vanish” runs about 10 minutes across two walls. To access it, visitors traverse the dangling lights of “Pixel Forest Transformer,” which consume much of the cavernous room. If heaven had a beaded curtain, it would look something like this.
Rist has been a leader in the movement to extend the possibilities of video art for 30 years, although she seems to have more officially arrived in the U.S. only last fall, with a major retrospective at the New Museum in New York. The show broke attendance records, bringing the kind of exposure that can make an artist a household name.
When MFAH director Gary Tinterow saw Rist’s New York show, he urged curator Alison de Lima Greene to fast-track a purchase. No hesitation there: Greene has wanted to acquire a Rist piece since 1997, when former director Peter Marzio was alive.
She was awed then by the cheerful, pretty car-bashing video “Ever Is Over All,” an iconic work that got a pop-culture boost last year when people accused Beyoncé of copying it for her “Hold Up” video.
Rist’s tools have evolved continuously; she employs every new camera technology that suits her purposes. Yet her vision has remained consistent: She focuses unapologetically and eagerly on imagery so lush and feminine, contemporary art insiders consider it provocative.
“I try not to be afraid of beauty,” she said a few days before the Houston show opened, as we settled into a sea of beanbag chairs where visitors are encouraged to lollygag while viewing the exhibit. “If we don’t have anything to call beautiful, we would go crazy. It’s evolutionary; our brain needs it.”
The sparkly spectacle of “Pixel Forest” might remind visitors of Yayoi Kusama’s “Aftermath of the Obliteration of Eternity,” which the MFAH featured last summer. They are utterly different experiences, though.
Kusama’s closed environment was intense and ephemeral by design — visitors were allowed in for only a few minutes. Rist invites community. The more the merrier, this time around.
“This work comes alive best when you’re in here with more than one person,” Greene said.
“Pixel Forest” also has the walk-through tangibility of Jesus Rafael Soto’s “Houston Penetrable,” shown in 2014.
While the fancy technology Rist employs isn’t the point, it is fascinating.
“Pixel Forest” is composed of 3,000 LEDs in cocoonlike structures of clear, textured plastic. Each is programmed as one pixel of a 3,000-pixel image that’s synchronized to the “Worry Will Vanish” video projection. Sometimes the LEDs literally reflect the light and colors of the video; sometimes they contrast.
Though viewers won’t discern any pictures within “Pixel Forest” because of the distance between the cocoons, the whole contains an image that’s actually been “exploded” into space. Lighting designer/developer Kaori Kuwabara has filled thousands of Excel spreadsheets to map the exact “addressing” of the pixels.
Rist hopes visitors might realize how “pixelated” the world has become. Her light strings also evoke brain synapses.
“Our thinking and speaking is all low-voltage signals. Even the heart,” Rist said. “Everything in the body is electric impulses.”
Birds sang in the background as she spoke. Anders Guggisberg’s soundscape for “Worry Will Vanish” also melds watery magic, some vaguely Asian-tinged flute and mysterious electronics. It imbues the space with a contemplative aura that’s just about perfect for imagining one is swimming inside oneself.
That is where Rist has always yearned to take viewers. We are closer to our bodies than anything else in the world, yet we can’t really see them, she reasons.
“Worry Will Vanish” combines 3-D animations with live action. It’s a gazillion images without the frenetic pace of music videos, rendered in poetically slow motion. Naked female bodies float and cavort in the live video snippets, toward rapturous close-ups of a critter-free natural world: Dew-dusted ferns. The horizon line of a calm sea in a red sunset.
The animations, created with the Swiss studio Elefant, “travel” through the interior of an imaginary body like the submarine of the 1966 film “Fantastic Voyage,” minus the miniaturized crew. Some of the coloring and surfaces are inspired by veiny embryonic tissue.
Rist’s innovative lighting (with animations lit by video projections) and onion-skinlike layering contribute to the seamless effect.
Ultimately, “Worry Will Vanish” evokes not just the wonder of being at one with oneself but of being at one with the universe.
Yet Rist doesn’t want to appear pretentious. She bounces, bare-breasted, in one scene that is more about joy than sex.
“This scene was not planned,” she said. “I wanted to do a little sequence to make fun of myself.”
Greene said the innovation of “Pixel Forest” made it the museum’s must-have out of all the possible Rist works the institution could have acquired. She also likes how it speaks to the Kusama and Soto works.
For Rist, this is more than an introduction. It’s a return, although many of the faces have changed. The Contemporary Arts Museum Houston hosted her first U.S. solo show, a midcareer survey, in 2009.
“To me, it’s really nice that the museum across the street would give me their trust,” she said. “It’s super emotional.”
‘If we don’t have anything to call beautiful, we would go crazy. It’s evolutionary; our brain needs it.’ Pipilotti Rist