Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist – An early predilection for Pippi Langstrumpf and video art

Pipilotti Rist was born Elisabeth Charlotte Rist on 21 June 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland, and received her nickname ‘Pipilotti’ as a child, as she was very fond of the girl character ‘Pippi Longstocking’, created by the Swedish author. She studied photography, illustration and commercial art at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna from 1982 to 1986, and then went on to study audiovisual communication at the Basel School of Design for a further two years, with the intention – according to the artist herself - of thus gaining access to modern video technology. After completing her studies, Rist worked freelance and created computer graphics for industrial video studios. In 1986, she celebrated her premiere as a video artist with the clip I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much, in which she jumped up and down in front of the camera, bare-breasted and singing. The image was mostly monochrome and distorted by strong alienating effects. For the title, Pipilotti Rist adapted a Beatles' song line.

Artistic pornography as feminist statement

As well as film, Pipilotti Rist was also very interested in music. She released several records between 1988 and 1994 as a member of the music and performance group Les Reines Prochaines, but celebrated her breakthrough as an artist in 1992 with the film Pickelporno, in which she showed the naked bodies of a couple up close. The intense, changing colours created a new visual experience and made the human forms of the body seem strangely unfamiliar and exotic. Due to the extreme close-up perspective and the increasing psychedelic effects, the initial narrative of the sequence of scenes soon dissolves into a surrealistic swirl of images. The artist explained that her aim with the film was to make sexual feelings visible, and she remained attached to the theme of sexuality, especially in the context of gender differences and the image of the female body itself. Pipilotti Rist was honoured with the Premio 2000 for her participation in the 1997 Venice Biennale.

Great international success; little demand in Switzerland

Pipilotti Rist compared her passion for the medium of video to a "compact handbag": from literature to painting and music, it simply contains everything. Her installation Ever is Over All, which showed a young woman smashing car windows while being by greeted in a friendly manner by a passing policewoman, was even acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art. In the spring of 2000, her series Open My Glade, consisting of 16 one-minute videos, was shown for two months in Times Square in New York. In 2002, she acquired a teaching position through Paul McCarthy for a year’s post at the University of California in Los Angeles. Rist repeatedly used the name Himalaya for her projects, a name she eventually gave to her son, who was born in 2002. While Pipilotti Rist celebrated great international success, presented her first feature film, Pepperminta, and became the subject of an almost hour-long documentary film in 2009, the response in her home country of Switzerland was muted for a long time.