The steel-and-glass warren of Midtown Manhattan may seem a long way from an Edenic meadow in Switzerland, but with her new installation Pipilotti Rist is doing her best to bridge the distance. Step into the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art and you're enveloped by fleshy images of alpine pastoral bliss. A woman roots among cotton-candy-pink blossoms while a pleasant little pig snorts his plump way around some fallen apples. Was this what paradise looked like before the serpent came along and ruined it for everyone?
In Pour Your Body Out (7,354 Cubic Meters), the 46-year-old Swiss artist nicknamed after Pippi Longstocking is wrapping the cavernous MoMA space with her 25-foot-high video projections accompanied by an ambient soundtrack by Anders Guggisberg. The show's power derives from its near-to-the-ground, dreamlike perspective — a hallmark of Rist's lush camerawork. She made her name in the nineties with panoramic videos like Pickelporno, in which she let the camera linger on a slow tour over her bare, supine body. They took the look and feel of music videos and converted them into contemporary art, turning Rist — who once played in a girl band called Les Reines Prochaines ("The Next Queens") — into something of an art-world rock star: a model for aspiring video makers who wanted their MTV and their MFA, too.
