PEGGY PHELAN

Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist creates colourful multi-screen video works which, often with the pace and seduction of a pop promo, signal the birth of a new interdisciplinary art form. With such lighthearted artworks as Ever Is Over All presented at the 1997 Venice Biennale (which won Rist the Biennale’s Premio 2000), showing a princess-like young girl blithely smashing car windows, Rist invents new possibilities for poetry, feminine identity and the traditional genre of portraiture. The highly accomplished technological skill reflected in her work since the late 1980s, incorporating in unprecedented ways the art forms of film, music, sculpture and performance, have established Rist among the world’s best-known contemporary video artists. Critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses with Rist the collaborative nature of her work, from her college-day video experiments to her recent large-screen installation in New York’s Times Square. In her Survey feminist theorist and critic Peggy Phelan looks at the many sources behind Rist’s art, from other contemporary artists working with video, to Andy Warhol, MTV, Impressionist flower painting and Hollywood film. In her Focus, theorist Elisabeth Bronfen makes a psychoanalytical study of Rist’s portrait of defeat and failure, the 1998 video (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes. The subtle poetry of Rist’s work is reflected in her two Artist’s Choice selections, the poem Barefoot by Anne Sexton and a short story by Richard Brautigan, as well as in her dreamy diaristic Artist’s Writings.