Pipilotti Rist

Photo by Raphael Zubler, courtesy raphaelzubler.com

Pipilotti Rist

Pipilotti Rist Georgia O'Keeffe Leonardo da Vinci Roberto Burle Marx The Appendix: Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Pipilotti Rist, and Paul H-O How the Mona Lisa Lost Her Eyebrows The Appendix: Beyoncé in Egypt, Leonardo in L.A., and a New Tower in Chicago Body Image

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I decided to meld with [MoMA architect Yoshio] Taniguchi. I could have tried to fight or ironize him, but instead I wanted to kiss him.

Sometimes you create comfortable environments with carpets, where visitors can take off their shoes. Why?

The carpet and the option of lying down are usually there when the video is on the ceiling, so that visitors can put their bodies in another position. I’m very eager that people expand their bodies or take advantage of the room — a museum is really like a prolonged common living room.

Much of your work deals with the human body and sexuality. Are you trying to make people more comfortable with nudity?

For me, nudity represents the philosophical human; as soon as you add clothes, you put someone in a social, religious, or geographic category. Like Leonardo da Vinci’s [Vitruvian] man, the naked female for me is the symbol of the human, and not much linked with sexuality. It’s a problem that we leave nudity to the porno industry, and then they have a hold on it. If you look at older art, the figures are always nude. Of course, older art has that abstract step of sculpting the nude or painting it; with video, people take it literally.

This reminds me of the statement you wrote as the Armory Show’s commissioned artist in 2007, where you talk about nudity as the original form.

Yes, I was writing about my piece for the 2005 Venice Biennale.

What happened with that piece? You mention in the statement that it was taken down early.

A group of 46 people went to the bishop [at the San Stae church], and he forced the priest — who initially said it was fine — to close it. So it was open for four months and closed for two. And they wrote, “Closed for technical reasons,” which was so mean! It’s written in the bible: “You should not lie.”

Have you faced censorship at other times?

In Hong Kong they asked everybody who came to see my work for his or her passport, and it was shown only to people 18 and over. For the Shanghai Biennale, we had to deliver all the tapes ahead of time, but officials watched them and said they were okay. So no other censorship, and the Venice piece will actually go to Brazil, to Inhotim. Do you know of it?

No.

Inhotim was initially designed by landscape architect Roberto Burle Marx and has about 200 gardeners. It’s a huge park where art and nature coexist. They asked me to create a house to show the Venice piece, but I proposed to dig a hole into a mountain there. We haven’t really started working on it yet, but they are already digging holes to see where the fewest hard rocks are.

You were in the band Les Reines Prochaines from 1988 to 1994, and some of your older videos are set to pop songs. How important is music for you? Do you write music yourself?

I’m very interested in music, but I’m not a stage person, and I’m not a virtuoso. I’ve been collaborating with [Swiss artist and composer] Anders Guggisberg for 14 years. This installation is one of the first times I have not contributed as much, although I did arrange the music with him.

In general, music should be half the experience of my installations, but music doesn’t work in public situations like this one, because it’s annoying. The biggest challenge at MoMA is that the atrium is also a transitory room, so I won't be able to fill it with music. The sound will come from under a round sofa, and you will probably only hear it well in that area.

What will we see in Pour Your Body Out? I heard there are tulips, an apple, and a pig.

Yes, and a woman digging for earthworms. (The earthworm on that scale is half a meter long.) The work speaks about how we are destroying our planet, and at the same time, how we think it’s disgusting to pick up something off the floor. There’s a big discrepancy between this hygiene trip we’re on and how dirty we treat the world. I want to show, in a humorous way, that it’s just a question of viewpoint, what is disgusting and what is beautiful.

I shot the footage for Pour Your Body Out parallel to my first feature film, Pepperminta. The film is the story of a girl or a woman — a human, really — who tries to free herself and the world from unnecessary fears. But that will be like a novel, and this is like the poetical extract.