Pipilotti Rist at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy

That nice little wrinkle on my neck, the neat little spinal column under my skin. I would like to eat myself. My breasts are the mountains where the rivers rise. My belly is the lake. My wrist wallows in it. Down through the turmoil of my pubic hair. Sticky with blood. Vulnerability in person. My hand skims lightly over the Po valley of my thighs to my knee. That is the village square. The festivities of pores, short hairs and tiny scars. The knee presses softly against the approaching hand. The journey continues over the shin-bone. The shin-bone is the sea. It roars loudly and the muscles relax. Rarely have I bled so much. Everything’s going to be all right now. I can clean my bottom with blood; if only you knew what an honor that is.
–Pipilotti Rist

“My hand skims lightly over the Po valley of my thighs to my knee.”

Pipilotti Rist, Lungenflügel (Lobe Of The Lung), 2009. Audio video installation. Installation view at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, 2009. Photo Credit: Ernst Moritz. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth and Luhring Augustine, New York.

Pipilotti Rist at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy
Tiziana Casapietra

–Pipilotti Rist

These words are contained in the now impossible to find 320 page catalogue published by Costa & Nolan for the exhibition Frammenti, interfacce, intervalli. Paradigmi della frammentazione nell’arte svizzera (Fragments, Interfaces, Intervals. Paradigms of Fragmentation in Swiss Art).

It was the spring of 1992 and curator Viana Conti invited young and promising Swiss artists to exhibit their work in various spaces in Genoa, Italy. These rebellious and restless artists were selected to represent the fragmentary vision of the world, typical of the early nineties. The exhibition identified Switzerland as the paradigm of fragmentation: a country fragmented from a geographical, cultural, political and social point of view. Shortly afterwards, many of the invited artists became superstars. Pipilotti Rist was among them.

For this exhibition, her work was presented at the Leonardi V-Idea gallery. The room was left in semi-darkness. All of the window shutters were closed and decorated with branches of fresh and delicate white flowers, which were also spread on the floor, homage to the awakening of nature.
A video was projected high on the beautifully decorated walls of the gallery located in one of the most prestigious historical buildings of the city. Titled Ssss VII the video was a colorful, floating and sensual excursion of the human body. This taste for the investigation of the body and its epidermis, which might be perceived contradictorily, as poetic and ironic, naive and pathological, echoes the words published in the exhibition catalogue and quoted at the beginning of this review.

Natural and corporeal landscapes were not the only subject of this exhibition. A defiant and politically engaged concert with Les Reines Prochaines, a feminist experimental music band, was also organized in conjunction with the exhibition. During the musical performance, band members swapped instruments and sang provocative protest songs. Taken out of its early 1990s context, the heated feminism of these actions could now be seen as a gratuitous provocation, but at that time it was deeply rooted in the so-called third-wave feminism.

Almost 20 years later, Pipilotti Rist, who in the meantime has gained international fame that seems to have made her practically unapproachable, is back in Italy to open a big solo exhibition at the Nicola Trussardi Foundation in Milan.

Since 2003, the Foundation has presented contemporary art events in some of the forgotten public spaces in Milan, thus rediscovering them and bringing them to the public’s attention. Rist’s exhibition takes place at the Manzoni Cinema in Milan, which closed in 2006. First opened in 1950, the cinema was, for over fifty years, one of the most beautiful movie theaters in the city. Titled “Parasimpatico”, a title that refers to the parasympathetic nervous system that is responsible for the regulation of the unconscious workings of the human body’s internal organs, the exhibition presents both old and new works. Rist will step into the suggestive space of the Manzoni Cinema and, like a magician, will try to transform the sumptuously decorated spaces into a new enormous living creature. Her magic wand will be her usual tools and established repertoire: sound, light, and color, hallucinations and high definition images, will overlap in the space “to restore the joyous magic to what was once Milan’s most prestigious theater.”

Compared to Pipilotti Rist’s debut in Genoa, some similarities immediately emerge between the two Italian exhibitions so distant in time. First of all, the respectful dialogue that Pipilotti Rist manages to establish with the space, in both cases, historical prestigious buildings with strong identities. Indeed, her artistic interventions make most of themselves right when managing to enhance the exhibition location. Even the pleasure she takes in the creation of imaginary worlds of images has remained the same over the years. However, this pleasure seems now to have been deprived of its initial rebellious streak, of the spontaneity and the freshness of those first apparitions on the art scene. The sophisticated and controlled mannerism of today is certainly due to the maturity of the artist, but can this also represent the dark side of fame? As an Italian saying suggests: “we are born arsonists and we die firefighters.” Could this also be the case?

*** This exhibit is on view at Fondazione Nicola Trussardi, Milan, Italy (Nov. 9 – Dec. 18). ∗

This article was published by NY Arts Magazine, 2011. NY Arts Magazine is published by Abraham Lubelski. Sponsored by Broadway Gallery, NYC and World Art Media.