This biography is republished in full with kind permission from The Art Story – Pipilotti Rist.
Born: 21 June 1962, Switzerland
Died: NA
Country most active: International
Also known as: Elisabeth Charlotte Rist
Pipilotti Rist has garnered international acclaim for her immersive multi-channel and spatial video installations. She is often discussed as the heir-apparent to the founding father of Video art, Nam June Paik, but Rist has done more than her predecessor to overlap the worlds of contemporary art and mainstream culture. Rist’s lush and seductive imagery alludes to the worlds of advertising and music videos, but she brings to this a highly individualistic artistic language. Following her oft-quoted analogy between the disorderly content of her video work with that of the inside of a woman’s handbag, she brings together the worlds of music, painting, technology, movement, humor, and poetry in a way that has the power to entrance her viewer. Rist’s stated aim is to help her followers adopt a more benign view of their world in the belief that positive changes in attitude toward each another can be best achieved through a combination of thought and feeling.
Childhood
Pipilotti Rist was christened Elisabeth Charlotte Rist. She was raised in a small village in the canton of St. Gallen in Switzerland’s Rhine Valley (near its borders with Austria and Liechtenstein). She was the second of five children born to Walter Pius Rist, a doctor, and, Anna Rist, the only teacher at the local one-room schoolhouse. Both parents had worked their way up from working-class backgrounds and their example served as an important life lesson to Rist. She recalled, “both of my parents were anti-elitarian [sic] and nature-culture and people-loving”.
Rist was the only one of her siblings to attend high school and college (her older sister Ursula, younger brother Tom, and younger twin sisters Andrea and Tamara, all went directly from high school into apprenticeships). Says Rist, “For me, it was very clear. I was a good student, and being a good student was the one thing that could make my father pay attention” (her father was an avid stamp collector and was most proud of his daughter when she was commissioned to design a stamp for the Swiss postal service in 2014). The Rist family were casual Protestants, attending church periodically. While Rist is an avowed atheist, arts writer Randy Kennedy makes the point that, “the scaffolding of belief has clearly remained, not only in the sense that much of her work seems to be haunted by the concept of original sin and Christianity’s discomfort with the body but also in the impression she gives of complete personal devotion”.
When she was sixteen, Rist’s parents separated (amicably, despite her father’s serial philandering) and made their daughter “swear I would never marry”. Rist’s mother lived with her children for a couple more years in the family home (a three-story modernist house her father had designed). Rist’s mother (“such a strong lion, very generous and giving”, according to Rist) let out rooms to obscure touring English rock bands who were performing in the area, while her father moved into the house next door from where he ran his practice and entertained his mistresses. When they moved out of the family home, it was transformed into a brothel. Rist later recalled , “until he died [in 2014] he [her father] was the best friend of all the prostitutes. He and I went together […] He talked with them, and had lunch with them on the fire escape. They were not afraid of him”.
As a child, Rist wished to be a boy, and referred to herself as Elizabeth John, or Elizabeth Pierre, during primary school. She was nicknamed “Lotti” by school friends and, when she was twenty, and now attending art school in Vienna, she blended the nickname of her favorite fictional character (Pippi Longstocking) and her given middle name (Charlotte) to create “Pipilotti”. She was also an ardent fan of John Lennon and Yoko Ono and pored over a picture book she owned of Japan (Ono being Japanese), a country she has now visited over a dozen times.
Education and Early Training
Rist attended the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, between 1982-86. Art critic Calvin Tomkins writes, “Swiss artists have traditionally gone elsewhere to learn and practice their craft – Paul Klee to Munich, Alberto Giacometti and Jean Tinguely to Paris, Urs Fischer to Amsterdam and New York. But Rist had no intention of becoming an artist, commercial or otherwise. She wanted to get out of Switzerland and to study physics, which had been her strongest subject in high school, and she wanted to do so in a German-speaking country”. However, having become enamored with the independent films of Norman McLaren, Stan VanDerBeek, and John Waters, she gave up her course in physics and philosophy after just one semester and transferred to a course in commercial art, illustration, and photography.
Once graduated, Rist returned to Switzerland where she studied video at the Basel School of Design. She had worked previously in 8mm film, but, as Tomkins says, “she chose video because it allowed her to do everything herself, from camerawork to editing”. To help finance her studies, Rist took part-time jobs with two Swiss chemical companies, Ciba-Geigy, and Hoffmann-La Roche, both of which produced their own company promotional videos. At Ciba-Geigy, Rist worked for a man named Erhard Hauswirt, who had been a filmmaker himself, and who allowed her to access the company’s cutting edge video technology out of hours. Having become more or less self-taught – “I always was an early adopter. My goal was to squeeze the most out of these machines” she said later – Rist made a seven-minute video film, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much, in 1986.
The work takes its title from the opening line in Lennon’s “ode” to Ono, “Happiness Is a Warm Gun”, which featured on the Beatles’ White Album (1968). Repeating again-and-again her sentiment in a shrill first person chant (Lennon’s lyric reads “you’re not the girl …” rather than Rist’s “I’m not the girl …”) Rist wears a low-cut black dress and dances with such unbridled energy her breasts spill out of her dress. It was her first taste of success, being accepted at the Solothurn Film Festival, and included in an exhibition at Basel’s Museum of Applied Arts.
She produced other videos in these early years, such as Sexy Sad I in 1987. It was a four and a half minute film featuring a naked (save for his sneakers) young man, photographed from the neck down, who dances in the woods to a piano rendition of the Lennon/Beatles song “Sexy Sadie” (also featured on the White Album). Sexy Sad I, which amounted to commentary on male vulnerability, was complemented in 1988 with a commentary on female vulnerability, (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes. At around 11 minutes, it features the artist, in a number of suburban locations, dressed in dowdy dresses, falling down, and standing up. Also in 1988, Rist began her six-year involvement with the all-woman klezmer (traditional Eastern European Jewish music) punk-pop band and performance group called Les Reines Prochaines. She painted stage backdrops and created slides and film clips to be back-projected at performances. Overcoming her crippling stage-fright, Rist also sang and played bass and flute with the band.
In 1992 Rist made a 12-minute video called Pickelporno. Using extreme close shots, interspersed with shots of natures, it focused on a couple engaged in foreplay and was her attempt to make a pornographic film that appealed predominantly to women. Pickelporno passed without causing serious offence, but her following piece, Blood Clip (1993) was a different matter. Tompkins writes, “copious flows of menstrual blood (simulated) […] made some viewers think that she was taking feminism too far”, although Rist countered by saying the work was apolitical: “The idea [was] to get the blood out into the open, to show this red fluid, this marvellous liquid, this flesh-clock”.
Interest in her video work continuing to grow, with Basel’s Galerie Stampa showing several of her early works, and I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much shown in exhibitions in St. Gallen, Graz, and Hamburg in 1993. Rist began to be contacted by galleries in New York. A young Swiss art dealer named Iwan Wirth recommended that she select Luhring Augustine, a mid-level gallery that represented Christopher Wool, Rachel Whiteread, and Albert Oehlen. Shortly after entering into this agreement, Rist also signed with the new Hauser and Wirth Gallery that Wirth and his wife, Manuela Hauser, were opening in Zurich. In 1996, the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen, Denmark, became the first museum to buy one of Rist’s works. The piece was Sip My Ocean (1996). Rist recalls “I was shocked. I didn’t know that what I did was collectible. I never thought about selling, and this gave me a lot of freedom”. In 1997, her work was featured in the Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Premio 2000 Prize.
Of her 1997 video, Selfless in the Bath of Lava, Tompkins explains that to view the work (on display at MoMA, New York) “you have to crouch down and look into a small hole in the floor, where, on an LCD monitor, Rist reaches up with both arms and cries for help. She is naked, with white-blond hair, and enveloped in orange-red flames. “I am a worm and you are a flower,” she wails, in German, English, and several other languages”. Tompkins (in discussion with Rist) explains how the work was a reaction against her experiences with religion: “The church was not a big factor in her family’s life” but when Rist was nine “religion suddenly overwhelmed her [and she] joined a Bible-reading sect and spent much of her free time studying Biblical texts”. Rist told Tompkins, “That lasted three years […] Until I began asking, ‘What happens with the people who lived before Jesus?’ and nobody could give me an answer. Also, God never showed up”. With Selfless in the Bath of Lava, Rist explained that while she was “in hell”, and that the work was (for her) “a really mean story, that you will be burning forever”, it was a cathartic work through which she “got rid of the need to believe in God [and] felt so liberated”.
Mature Period
Rist’s new studio set in Zurich comprised of a series of rooms in the basement of an office building. Her studio manager, Nike Dreyer, remarked that Rist was “uncomfortable with success”. Nevertheless, in 1998, the same year she began dating Swiss technology consultant, Balz Roth, Rist was named the director of Expo.02, Switzerland’s first international exposition since the 1960s. In spite of her strong reservations about bureaucratic interference, Rist accepted the position. She said, “I have no idea why they invited me. I had won the prize at the Venice Biennale the year before, and maybe they thought it would be good for marketing”.
Unfortunately, the challenge of the post took its toll on Rist’s mental health, and this, combined with physical health problems, including severe stomach pains, and a Hepatitis C diagnosis, rendered her clinically depressed and she had to give up the role as exposition director. Wirth said of the doomed appointment, “it turned out to be an impossible task. The public loved her. Pipi became a national figure, the goddess Helvetia, but the art world was skeptical, and the press was disastrous”. It was at this low point in her career that some of Rist’s friends suggest she travel to Los Angeles. She spent a month staying with friend Lili Tanner in her house in Venice Beach. Tanner forbade Rist from reading anything about art, fearing it would worsen her depression. Friends also forced her to cut off contact with Roth, as Rist had become consumed with the fear that he would end their relationship.
On her return to Switzerland, Rist stayed for a month in art historian Jacqueline Burckhardt’s family home in the countryside near Basel. Soon after, and showing signs of improvement with new medication, Rist reunited with Roth, who told her he wanted a child. By this point, Rist was thirty-eight, and realized her “biological clock” was ticking. The couple’s son, Himalaya Yuji Ansgar Rist, was born in 2002. (Himalaya is Rist’s favorite word, though he now prefers to be called Yuji.) Rist was “a bit disappointed” by childbirth, stating that “I had thought that the moment you give birth you realize some great philosophical truth, but not at all. It’s still a big mystery. I didn’t believe so much in the mother feeling, although of course that came”.
Between 2002-03, Rist was a visiting faculty member at UCLA. In 2005, she was invited to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. Her twenty-one-minute audio-video installation, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, which featured music by her close friend, former neighbor, and ex-boyfriend Anders Guggisberg, was projected in the dramatic space of the Baroque church of San Stae. Amongst her other important later works, was a 2008 multimedia installation for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, entitled Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubit Meters). The museum publicized the work thus: “a monumental site-specific installation that immerses the Museum’s Marron Atrium in twenty-five-foot-high moving images. Visitors will be able to experience the work while walking through the space or sitting upon a sculptural seating island designed by the artist”.
In 2016, Rist’s took time out from her video work to contribute to Geneva’s public “art&tram” project. The initiative involved the placing of a number of public art displays on the city’s tram routes. Rist, however, turned her attention to the tram itself. Her “mobile artwork”, known locally as the Monochrome Rose, was painted (inside and out) in a bright pink. The local authority promoted the tram as a “monochromatic nomad in the heart of the city” which would (pleasantly) surprise passengers and the general public when it would “pop up” randomly on the city’s tram routes.
Back in more familiar ground, and also in 2016, Rist produced Pixel Forest, a signature installation (which has been reinvented and retitled in subsequent years) that immerses viewers in thousands of hanging and blinking LED lights. The lights – that create the “forest” of the work’s title – are reflected in the shiny gloss-black floor – or “lake” – creating a king of infinite space that is akin to an “exploding” virtual reality. Most recently Rist has produced the video work, Hand Me Your Trust (2023). It features disembodied human hands floating through the cosmos, which adorn the facade of Hong Kong’s M+Museum. Rist stated that her hope was that the hands would “leap off the Facade and extend far beyond in its impact, empowering audiences to recognise the immense power, tenderness and potential contained within their two hands”.
Rist currently lives on a steep hillside on the outskirts of Zurich, with Roth and Himalaya, in a communal house they share with three other families. She explains that “We were all friends before [and] two of them are the architects who built it. It’s a wooden house that looks like metal because the outer layer is zinc”.
The Legacy of Pipilotti Rist
Rist continues a tradition of performance-based female art practice that can be traced back through the likes of VALIE EXPORT and Yoko Ono. Art critic Roberta Smith calls her “an artist who has effortlessly worked aspects of feminism, the body and performance art into her videos while giving moving images and music an organic unity rare in the art world”. Rist has also led the drive to widen the appeal of video art; to make it generally less earnest and more welcoming. Art critic Calvin Tomkins writes that “What Rist delivers in abundance is pleasure, something that has been out of bounds in contemporary art since the nineteen-seventies. […] One of the delights in her videos is that she clearly has so much fun making them”. Arts writer Imogen White, concurs, suggesting that “Video art is rarely this engaging. It can seem willfully obtuse or pointlessly obscure, and often it’s just plain boring. Not with Pipilotti Rist at the helm”.
Given its playfulness, and its similarities to commercial music videos, some critics are skeptical of the artistic value of Rist’s work. Curator Jan Cavalier wrote in 2016 the she “couldn’t forgive her videos for their inadvertent exposure of the female body as, yet again, an object of sexual desire”. However, London’s Royal Academy said of Rist’s work, “Her installations and exhibition concepts are expansive, finding within the mind, senses and body the possibility for endless discovery and poetical invention”, while the gallery owner, Manuela Wirth, called Rist a “guiding light [who has] expanded my understanding of how art can engage, entrance and immerse everyone – regardless of age or art knowledge”.