NEW YORK— A few things to know about Pipilotti Rist: She likes red beets, her favorite number is 54, and her real name is not Pipilotti. Born Elizabeth Charlotte, Rist adopted her artist moniker, Pipilotti, in 1982, when she combined her childhood nickname, Lotti, with the name of a favorite kids character, Pippi Longstocking. The allusion to the fictional young heroine is fitting for Rist; the Swiss video artist looks far younger than her 46 years and still has the exuberant and unaffected manner of a child.

Rist had her first solo exhibition in 1984, when she used painted cardboard to turn Vienna’s Galerie Prottore/Stauraum into a re-creation of a bank branch. But it was her first video, I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), that really set her path in the art world. In it she repeatedly sings the title line, an adaptation of a lyric from the Beatles song Happiness Is a Warm Gun, while dancing around in a black dress pulled down to expose her breasts. The female protagonist, nudity, and the central role of music are motifs that she has since continued to explore in her work.

Over the years, her practice has evolved from single-channel videos to multi-channel video installations to her latest project, a feature film due out next year. She has represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale twice — first in 1997, when she won the Premio 2000 award, and again in 2005; had solo shows at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museo Nacional de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, and the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, among others; and landed her work in the permanent collections of such institutions as the Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Aside from the feature film, Rist’s most recent project is Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), a large new video installation at the Museum of Modern Art, for which Rist has transformed the museum’s atrium by hanging pink curtains, laying down a carpet with concentric rings of color (meant to mimic the iris of an eye), and installing a couch-like seating structure. On three out of the room’s four walls, she will project images featuring what the museum calls a “lush, immersive landscape.”

ARTINFO sat down with Rist while she was installing the work, which opens Wednesday, November 19, and runs until February 2, 2009, to talk about the piece, the difference between nudity and sexuality, and the symbolism of flowers.

How does Pour Your Body Out differ from other installations you’ve done?

I once did a piece in the square in front of the Centre Pompidou, which was physically bigger, but in terms of video resolution, this is the biggest. Otherwise it is quite similar to other situations where I have adapted content to a room, but here it took us five years.

Five years — was that figuring out the subject matter and going back and forth with the museum?

Yes. When they first asked me to do something, I proposed making little holes in the walls and having landscapes behind them. Then they asked me to do something more symphonic. Then a couple of propositions were not possible because of security reasons or because of visitor flow, so I made new ones.

But I like it when a project takes a long time.

Why?

Different reasons. The institutions have to prove they trust me. Also, if something doesn’t happen, maybe it wasn’t worth it. Our times are too fast-paced anyway — we plan too quickly, and everything has to be built too quickly. One exposition I did, in my favorite museum, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, took 11 years. Also, the constraints and obstacles help you clarify. It’s like in architecture: When there are physical or financial constraints, they often help make things clearer and more logical.

You have to distill down and figure out what’s important and what works.

Yes, especially when you work in such big rooms. For this project, I built a model in the studio on a scale of one-to-three, but to actually create the installation takes more than three times the effort. Working in the room, the size explodes. Have you been there?

Yes.

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.

When is the film coming out?

In the spring. It depends on which festivals take it, if any.

How was the process different from your usual work?

I enjoyed it very much. I have a decent position as a video artist, but even with my budget, I cannot afford many professional coworkers. If you want to do a long story, you really need more people so that it all holds together. Working with professionals in a bigger, harmonic group was a beautiful feeling.

Your work is often characterized as feminist, and many of your videos deal with the limitations and stereotypes that women face. You also make use of some stereotypically feminine imagery — flowers in particular. How do these two trends relate? To me it seems like you’re reappropriating clichés of femininity.

Yes, you’re right. I’m interested in the activities that are associated with women, like gardening and decorating. I appreciate these things a lot, and I’m afraid that we’re losing them: To have equal rights and duties doesn’t mean we have to give up our own culture.

Also, for me, flowers are very symbolic. They were here before we were. When Georgia O’Keeffe did her flower paintings, she said, “I want to force New York people to look really closely again.” That’s always stayed with me. Those things, like flowers, really have a huge variety of meanings, and we should not be stuck looking at them and saying, “Oh, they’re decorative.” We would miss a lot of the world.