Pipilotti Rist
Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan
Without exactly functioning as a retrospective, ‘Karakara’ at the Hara Museum in Tokyo nonetheless feels something like a greatest hits album. The exhibition boasts a sense of easy familiarity, which goes well with Pipilotti Rist’s trademark bedazzling whimsy, while also showcasing the hard edge of a seemingly soft feminism. The integration of provocative ideas and sensual feeling is, as ever, strongly present.
‘Karakara’ exploits the domestic setting of the Hara Museum to maximum effect, using the intimate gallery spaces to communicate the physical and psychological entrapment that is often at the core of the Swiss artist’s work. This comes to the fore in the installation of works such as Selfless in the Bath of Lava (1994), a miniature video piece laid into the floorboards, in which a naked Rist alternatively berates and beseeches the viewer.
Laplamp (2006) also juxtaposes physical confinement with the longing for psychological escape. A dreamy video is projected into the lap of the viewer, situated amongst the explicitly domestic props of a chair and reading lap; appropriately, the work is installed in a small side room off one of the main gallery spaces.
But the notion of the separation between external reality and inner fantasy is often most powerful when the two are brought to a deliberate (and often literal) clash. By pressing one world against the other, Rist captures the uneasy bifurcation that is at the core of subjective experience. The resulting incongruity characterizes some of the artist’s most memorable work. In I Couldn’t Agree With You More (1999), a night time fantasy of naked figures and dark woods literally plays on the screen of Rist’s head, as she moves through several quotidian settings ranging from a supermarket to an apartment.
The seminal Ever Is Over All (1997) forcibly hauls a private fantasy into the public space of the street. Featuring a blissfully jaunty woman smashing in car windows with a phallic flower stalk, the work remains a powerful and unexpected expression of a giddy female rage. It also feels, with its Wizard of Oz blue dress and red shoes, like a fairytale for modern times – and like the fantasy of a woman unlikely to agree that there’s no place like home.
Katie Kitamura
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