Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage
Hayward Gallery, Wednesday 28th Sep - Sunday 8th Jan 2012
Pipilotti Rist’s 30-year retrospective is one of the most intriguing, discombobulating and pleasing exhibitions recently on display at the Hayward Gallery. Strings of underwear greet the audience, hanging between the gallery and the numerous lamps on the South Bank concourse. Whilst Nothing, a machine that emits what Rist calls ‘bubbles, peace bombs or farts within trousers’ sits unnoticed on the roof. These are harbingers to the exuberant, surprising and at times, laugh-out-loud funny retrospective inside, which illustrates well why this Swiss artist is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists.
Eyeball Massage is Rist’s first major public survey show in the UK, presenting videos, sculptures and installations, bringing together over 30 works spanning her career from the 1980s to today. Highly accomplished technically and rich in dazzling colour, Rist’s practice fuses sensual images, music, and the occasional text to create mesmerising works. Continually, the art of installation is reinvented; films are presented in diverse and imaginative ways from simple single screen video to environments conceived for particular space.
A hanging chandelier festooned with white underwear opens the show. Overlaying it is a flickering video projection that slowly reveals itself to be footage of travelling along a tube; a nod towards the bodily functions enacted by the area of the body contained within underwear - birth, sexual pleasure and defecation. Rist’s fascination with the human body – its strangeness, its sensuousness and its manipulation through media – is apparent as the exhibition unfolds further.
In Suburb Brain, the viewer towers over a miniature suburban bungalow reminiscent of Rist’s childhood home, and is surrounded by videos of Rist ruminating on the failures of marriage and family life. On the mezzanine, body-shaped cushions litter the floor beneath a labyrinth of diaphanous curtains in Administering Eternity. Though soothing when lying down, they are also unsettling with the continual eerie music throughout the gallery space. In Lobe of the Lung, 2009, one is completely immersed by the video, drowsily lying on cushions as green strawberries bob in pink water and tulips shine in microscopic close-ups against a vivid blue sky.
Throughout the exhibition there is a strong sense of an all-encompassing and limitless female sexuality, highlighted in the Freudian trope video images half-hidden inside velvet-lined handbags and curving conch shells. You can completely lose yourself in these works, deliriously drifting from space to space, from one pleasure piece to the next. The exhibition feels like entering into someone’s dreams or waking visions, until we return to the harsh realities of life, and it is then that one can reflect on the truly mesmerising work of Pipilotti Rist.
Review by Emily Burke
Images courtesy of the Hayward Gallery, photographed by Linda Nylind
