‘Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor’ Merges Bodies and Environments (Review)

I sat at my kitchen table, a picture window to my left. I’d just returned from Pipilotti Rist’s new exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. A serpentine sensation started to coil in my periphery. I turned towards the window, waiting for the image to distort in the same vein as her videos: to undulate, bisect itself, or dilate into a micro view of the bamboo stalks outside. I’d become so absorbed in her perspective I transferred that peculiar lens into my own home; as odd and unexpected as this was, it reflects a driving force of her art.

Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor is the Swiss artist’s first West Coast retrospective, which includes pieces from the 1980s as well as new work. The multimedia show immerses attendees into her (often playful and sensuous) explorations of liminality, portals, and worlds within worlds. Large-scale installations create domestic and otherworldly environments; guests penetrate and are absorbed into these remarkable spaces to participate in communal and confidential moments. Videos, her anchor medium, are embedded and projected throughout the exhibition.

Her work challenges our shared constructs around private versus public, the familiar versus the foreign, and fantasy versus reality. She invites viewers to abandon their sense of separateness, to excise the membranes of our lives — whether actual or perceived — and to peer, with humor and empathy, at our thoughts, characters, corporal selves, and surroundings without cellular divide.The exhibition realizes her sentiment of museums as “shared apartments where you can visit each other’s brains and bodies” and the show yields a “big, public living room” to probe the in-between spaces that shape who we are.

When she first began her work decades ago, photography and videography were tangible, expensive affairs. Now, digital photos and video are ubiquitous and flow like millions of tributaries throughout our media landscape. The barriers for creating and sharing such media have been obliterated for the global majority. At the same time, our devices, especially smartphones and wearable tech, have become an extension of ourselves. Identity is commonly and explicitly expressed through electronic mediums and social platforms. For some, philosopher René Descartes’ statement, “I think, therefore I am” has transitioned into, “I post, therefore I am.”

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Over the course of her career, many physical, technological, and cultural veils between identity, body, nature, and society have lifted while new scrims have emerged. Since the pandemic’s onset, our private spaces have become visible through the gates of Zoom. In some cases we deployed virtual backgrounds to obscure the inner worlds of our homes or we curated the actual backgrounds into spatial portraits like an Instagram feed. Technology we’ve leaned into during this time has fostered new communities and it has also highlighted or reinforced our divides.

These disconnects are integrated throughout the exhibition. Like husking corn, she peels apart the layers of self, tech, and environment; her juxtapositions sever the associations we’ve adopted and rewire them in ways that are somehow disorienting and reassuringly familiar. Organic objects such as grass, intestines, tongues, and a pig’s nose appear as though under a microscope, their structure and outlines so enlarged as to take on abstract shapes. As views toggle between micro and macro settings, the tangible world starts to morph; gravity seems to evaporate and borders between substances seem to dissolve. Set in the facade of a two-story clapboard home, windows frame projections of extreme close-ups of eyes; a provocation surfaces: when is the body a house and how is the house a body?

This is where Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor transcends and embodies the pandemic’s effects. After a year of often feeling caged within technology, her art inverts our viewpoints and the result is liberating. By dissecting the physical, psychological, and emotional, Pipilotti Rist forms a new whole; parts are conjoined to spawn a fractured, yet cohesive survey that feels both intimate and universal. The world seems more fluid and interconnected. Its surreal magic feels warm, welcoming — like home.

Pipilotti Rist: Big Heartedness, Be My Neighbor runs through June 6, 2022 at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA in Los Angeles. Tickets at $18 general, $10 for Seniors and Students, and children under 12 are free.

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