Hayward Gallery, London, 28th September 2011-8th January 2012
Pipilotti Rist (whose work appealed to me at this year’s Venice Biennale) is now the subject of a retrospective at the South Bank including dozens of video and performance works going back to the late Eighties. Personally I’d find such a prospect horrifying if it was my work: who wants everyone to see the dodgy things they were doing as a kid twenty or thirty years ago? Unless it’s all been downhill from there, obviously, in which case you probably should rest on those early laurels and hope that nobody notices you’ve made anything new because your new stuff is nowhere near as good. Unfortunately this happens, too. I’m not saying that Rist’s new work is crap, I think it’s quite the reverse in fact: I just mean that if she’d died or her video making arm had been amputated in a freak museum of modern art accident or something so she’ll never make a film again, then there might be some justification for the context provided by showing some of her juvenilia. Her old stuff has not aged well at all, though. Some of it made me cringe on her behalf but presumably she doesn’t care or she’d have omitted it, so good for her I suppose if she’s been brave and decided that we must see her entire career, warts and all.
Her appearances in her own works suggest that she’s an absolute nutter who seems to have more than a passing acquaintance with psychedelic drugs, which locates her a very long way from the pomposity and arid conceptualism that’s the boring norm in video art. In fact she seems to do exactly what she wants without much regard for looking cool, for art world orthodoxy or for standing apart from her own ideas. She seems very willing to embrace her own ridiculousness and narcissism. That’s both admirable and much too unusual in performance and video art. (more…)
