Pipilotti Rist
‘Pour Your Body Out’
MOMA 2008


Pipilotti Rist’s, ‘Pour Your Body Out’ breathes desire, relishes the naked physical, gives new meaning to the color fuschia, the taste of raspberry, makes one want to run out, roll around bare on the grass, then slide into a deep pool of crystal water…A streaming, no holds barred, enveloping bath of pure consciousness…I haven’t had this much fun since a video surround at Expo 67 as a teenager,…or my first time smoking pot. This is a light filled, happy, trippy, in your face, up your sleeve and around the corner, visceral trip, a loop of pulsating visual splendor, amid dissolved body boundaries. Breaking open the four square canvas, blowing out the walls, Pipilotti Rist grabs you coming and going. This is art as experience akin to ritual, the Greek maenads on a tear through the hills, heads on fire, heart beat pulsating. A primal Eve bites into the apple, fully flush, ripe desire unbound, satisfied. Back to the garden,…no bleak, forlorn foreboding, just a gushing, palpable oneness. Woman rooted in her natural habitat, unbuttoned, no set table, no table at all,…Just pluck from the tree, pick from the ground, no body is clenched, hovered, prone in work, anxiety mode. Across time and rooted in the primal, lush images spill out and over,…a rooting boar searches, it’s fleshy snout quivering, naked toes splash through the rain,…a powerful infusion of energy, light, earth, buoyant water and inside, menstral blood flows out onto the body alive,…no boundaries, no domesticity, encounters are not mandated, experience is random,…not contained. Are we ready for this kind of freedom in art, or in life, no looking over one’s shoulder, seamlessly hog wild on the prowl…equal parts desire and digestion...A raw tenderness, infuses consciousness. As in the contents of Rist’s ‘handbag’, her metaphor,…the world is random, filled with myriad tools for probing, entering the senses,…a jumble,…rambunctiousness abounds. Here life is a deep root, a cosmic spore, setting off a web of shape shifting fantasms,…wild utterances, gorgeous sighs where the art springs out and margins expand, the opposite of defined, categorized. At the MOMA exhibition children were leaping through the air, bouncing into the images, the elderly smiling, eyes uplifted to the bounding play across the walls,…Art and experience opened out at a cosmic full tilt…


Stephanie Bell Behnke
2008