Installation view of Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)’ via Artnet

The Museum of Modern Art in New York commissioned Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist to create a site-specific installation in the museum’s second-floor Marron Atrium. Rist filled the 7345 cubic meter atrium with  seven twenty-five-foot-high video projections with a large circular eye-shaped sofa in the center of the floor available for reposing visitors.  Rist is well-known for her video works that deal with issues of the body, gender, and sexuality.  Many of the images of ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354)’ present a lush amalgamation of femininity: gigantic pink tulips, glistening apples, a pool of menstrual blood seeping from a woman’s crotch.

Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) [MoMA]
Pipilotti Rist Turns MoMA Into a Gigantic Vagina Eye [NY Magazine]
Tiptoe by the Tulips (or Stretch by the Apples) [NY Times]

Still from Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)’ via MoMA

When visitors walk into MoMA, Rist’s installation is one of the first things they see. The wall text encourages viewers to sit down, take their shoes off, relax before moving on to the rest of the museum. It says, “Please feel as liberated as possible, and move as freely as you can or want to! Watch the videos and listen to the sound in any position or movement. Practice stretching: pour your body out of your hips or watch through your legs. Rolling around and singing is also allowed!” Rist’s aim, as she says in a video at moma.org, is to “melt in” with the architecture of the atrium, allowing an environment of comfort that is almost womb-like.

Rist, 38, gained notoriety with her video at the 1997 Venice Biennial, ‘Ever Is All Over,’ in which the artist walks through a city, smashing car windows with a flower-shaped hammer. She has since gained acclaim sexually-tinged videos that have, grown in scale and ambition. ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354)’ is composed of footage from a feature film planned to be released in 2009.

Installation view of Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)’ via NY Times

Installation view of Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)’ via Artnet

This entry was posted on Friday, December 19th, 2008 at 5:39 pm and is filed under Go See. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.