Eyeball Massage: Pipilotti Rist at the Hayward Gallery by Ben Addicott

Photo: Linda Nylind

If you were to visit the new Pipilotti Rist exhibition, and I think you should, might I suggest that you go at night? I would also be so bold as to direct you to walk up Belvedere Road, passing the winter market on your left and mounting the concrete cast stairs to the Southbank Centre. If you do this, not only will you have the chance to toast your cockles with a mug of Glühwein, but you’ll also pass under Hiplights (2011), a pre-show teaser displaying Pipilotti at her most Risty. On each and every one of the Centre’s string lights there now hangs a pair of 2nd hand ladies briefs, prettily illuminated and swaying in the wind. This tells you much of what you should expect when you step indoors. The homely and the surreal sat side by side, the intimate coupled to the absurd, the rudimentary to the technological and all the while the feminine, in all its archetypes, runs through.

Pipilotti, probably the only artist to draw a visual style, an ethos and a name from the Swedish literary character Pippi Longstocking, was born Charlotte Rist in Grabs, Switzerland. She has worked in moving image since attending University in Basel in the mid 1980s, utilising video to produce her first acknowledged work, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986). Stylistically it contained seed for much of what is on show here, hence its inclusion. The subject is a semi-naked female body, alone in a blank colour field, distorted by focus, speed and video glitches and contorting before a camera that twists and turns. She repeats the piece’s title endlessly, to the point that its either funny or distressing.

The piece has been updated by its incorporation into a sculptural intrusion called, with typical humour, A Peak Into The West – A Look Into The East (1992/2011). In order to view the work one must now duck into this sculpture and carefully peekaboo your head into its interior where in I’m Not the Girl… is hidden. Whether this is a method of dividing the monochrome old work from the sensual playground of the other work, a mischievous joke, a reappraisal of the piece or all three isn’t clear, but then it needn’t be.

While challenging viewing is a constant, the monochrome is certainly kept within the East… West… box, beyond this piece colour dominates the show. Nowhere more so than in the first room where two huge Super 8 films fill the walls with sumptuous images of the Swiss suburban landscape. Low Fi to the point of near abstraction and shot casually from a car window, they slide past in shaky slo-mo filling the room with rich, warm light. Closer to, a chandelier, constructed entirely of yet more briefs, glows with vibrant abstract images from twin projections. The floor to your left is filled by a scale model of a bungalow complete with garden and surrounding fields. This piece, titled Suburb Brain (1999),contains the first example of the handmade, that features so often in the show, both in its arts and crafts model and the beaten up cardboard box that incongruously supports a hi-def projector.

The video being projected offers the only reality check within the show and is a perfect place to align the mind before wading into Pipilloti’s world, I would also recommend returning here once you’ve emerged from it all. In its 8 or so minutes Rist talks candidly to an unseen companion about childhood, family and love. Though little in the monologue is clear, she sets us up for the bizarre, questioning work to come and even offers a convenient release in case we become overwhelmed:

   ’3000 years of Philosophy, 150 years Psychohistory, you mustn’t think you can, once again,    reinvent  the whole lot in an afternoon.’

As you leave this cavernous Room One and enter the labyrinthine caves of Room 2  and 3, the bombardment begins. Psychedelic, swirling images of bodies embracing or alone in virtual worlds, nostalgic Super 8s of sun-drenched countryside, blood and water, coloured spotlights trailing the floor: the experience is heady and reaches the point of sensory overload. The virgin viewer of Rist would be forgiven for losing focus, especially by the artist herself who prefers to think of her spaces as ‘places of comfort for parched minds’. With that in mind, lay back, quite literally, and immerse yourself, for little while in this exhibition requires explanation.

The show is a sensual success no doubt but one academic point needs addressing as it seems to have been quite readily assumed: is Rist’s work feminist or is it simply feminine? This seems to be the most vital question, not because the work of any female artist must simply be one or the other but because to interpret it in feminist terms is to ignore the wider discussion of humanity. ‘If there’s a naked woman in my work she represents mankind’, not only a beautiful turn of phrase but an enlightening approach to the whole show, take it in with you.

Exhibition ends: 8 January 2012

Hayward Gallery

Southbank Centre,

Belvedere Road,

City of London

SE1 8XX

020 7960 4200