Immersive “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” is most popular exhibition in history of New Museum (photo by twi-ny/mdr)
New Museum of Contemporary Art
235 Bowery at Prince St.
Tuesday through Sunday through January 15/22 (closed January 1-2), $12-$18
212-219-1222
www.newmuseum.org
There’s a very good reason why “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” has become the most popular exhibit in the history of the New Museum: It’s a splendidly curated, warm and embracing show that invites viewers into a magical world in which nature and humanity are one. The Swiss artist has been trapped under the floor of MoMA PS1’s lobby for decades, her tiny video calling up to passersby from the floorboards in “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” and she mesmerized MoMA visitors with the Marron Atrium immersive multimedia work “Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)” in 2008, but her first comprehensive U.S. survey is so much bigger, taking up three floors of the downtown institution, each one offering its own charms. Rist doesn’t just design installations; she welcomes you into delightful environments where you can relax, kick off your shoes, and get lost in a display of pure beauty. “In the generous, lush, expansive, and fecund universe created by Pipilotti Rist, we are all but small, organic specks in a massive, corporeal cosmos — ever-connected, always reproducing, endlessly social and intriguing as we move through space and time, colliding with other molecular debris,” Juliana Engberg writes in her catalog essay “A Bee Flew in the Window. . . .”
Pipilotti Rist’s “4th Floor to Mildness” offers a relaxing multimedia journey at the New Museum (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)
Curated by Massimiliano Gioni, Margot Norton, and Helga Christoffersen, “Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest” begins with “Open My Glade (Flatten),” a single-channel video of dreamy colors and Rist pressing up against the New Museum’s front window, as if in a kind of fishbowl that cannot contain her. In the lobby, “Nichts (Nothing)” is a mechanical contraption that emits large soap bubbles filled with smoke, floating through the air until popping on the floor, what Rist calls “peace bombs.” On the second floor, a long, narrow corridor contains several of Rist’s early single-channel videos, set up so only one person can watch each one at a time, as if a personal peepshow, comprising cutting-edge experimental works that play with technology while redefining female identity, including “I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much,” “(Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes,” and “You Called Me Jacky,” while “Sexy Sad I” follows a nude man in the woods and “When My Mother’s Brother Was Born It Smelled Like Wild Pear Blossoms in Front of the Brown-burnt Sill” shows a live birth. Those private viewings serve as an introduction to the larger works experienced by groups. In the two-channel “Ever Is Over All,” on the left side a woman marches down a street, gleefully smashing in car windows with a flower stick, being followed by a female police officer, while on the right the camera scans a field of the same flowers. (Yes, Beyoncé took a page from Rist in her “Lemonade” video.) The two-channel cater-corner “Sip My Ocean” is a kaleidoscopic underwater journey set to Rist and Anders Guggisberg singing Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game.” Nearby, “The Patience” can be seen on a boulder. “Administrating Eternity” forms pathways of moving mirrors and curtains. And in “Suburb Brain,” a miniature model of a suburban home, with life going on inside, sits in front of a two-channel installation, one side projected onto a wall of whitewashed everyday objects.
Pipilotti Rist’s “Open My Glade (Flatten)” can be seen at the New Museum and in Times Square (photo by Maris Hutchinson / EPW Studio)
On the third floor, visitors make their way through “Pixel Forest,” three thousand hanging LED lights that change color with the music and images surrounding them, each light representing one pixel, to get to “Worry Will Vanish Horizon,” where viewers relax on cushiony duvets while watching a two-channel video of natural surroundings, hands, eyes, and more. “Mercy Garden” also offers respite, while “Massachusetts Chandelier” is a light covered in underpants. As you venture to the fourth floor, be sure not to step on another iteration of “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” which resides on the floor of the landing, now showing Rist trapped in a cell phone. The fourth floor consists of “Your Space Time Capsule,” a room in a wooden transport crate, and “4th Floor to Mildness,” a large area that offers visitors single and double beds where they get comfortable while watching two videos projected onto amorphous screens on the ceiling as mirrors reflect the light onto the viewer, resulting in a dreamlike trip into mysterious worlds. It’s a rapturous show that confirms Rist’s description of her art as the “glorification of the wonder of evolution,” as she takes visitors on a psychedelic journey into the body and the mind, into life above and below the sea, merging the natural world and technology, sound and image, into private and shared experiences that are especially hypnotic in these dark times. On January 7 at 10:00 am, the museum will host the workshop “First Saturdays for Families: Crafting Eternity”; on January 12 at 3:30, curator and writer Laura McLean-Ferris will give an Outside the Box gallery talk; and on January 19 at 7:00, there will be a conversation between Rist and New Museum artistic director Gioni. The full exhibition continues through January 15, with the second and third floors open until January 22; in addition, Times Square Arts’ Midnight Moment will feature a new version of “Open My Glade (Flatten)” every night in January at 11:57 across multiple billboards.