Pipilloti Rist - Eyeball Massage

Where?
Venue: Hayward Gallery, London

When?
28 SEPT 2011 - 8 JAN 2012

How Much?
GBP10 for adult
GBP8 for student with valid student card holder











Introduction

Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist fuses dazzling colour, sensual images and mesmerising music to create innovative and immersive video installations. In this exhibition, explore environments in which you yourself become an important element. These all-enveloping artworks are 'place of comfort for parched minds' where Rist wants people to meet, watch the videos together, interact and discuss.

Eyeball Massage is Rist's first survey in the UK. It presents videos, sculptures and environments spanning her career from the 1980s to the present, including a vast, immersive artwork which she describes as 'a forest of light' created especially for the Hayward Gallery.

来自瑞士的艺术家皮皮罗迪莉斯使用耀眼的色彩、感性图像和迷人的音乐呈现出创新且让人感觉身临其境的录影装置艺术。此次展览中，观者成为展览环境中其中之一重要的元素。莉斯形容这一组的作品是“留给拥有炽热的心的人的舒适的地方”，她希望观者在这里邂逅、一起观赏录影、互动与讨论。

眼珠按摩是莉斯在英国的初次展出。展览涵盖了她艺术生涯中自1980年至今的录影、雕塑及装置艺术。她更特地为海沃德画廊创作了一件广大、令观者身临其境的新作。

Exhibition Plan

Video projection, as a new medium of art, is widely being use by artists under contemporary art scene, worldwide. With this new technology, HD recording and projection, artist can project mass scale of video that changes image as time pass, in an environment, which invite audience to observe and immerse themselves into the scene. Sometime the audiences will feel like they are the people living in Lilliput, or they'll observe the environment just like Gulliver.

The exhibition begin with an artwork Hiplights or Enlighted Hips before you enter the gallery, the area around the gallery, is hung with numerous underpants (according to the brochure given by gallery, there are 300 pieces of underpants).

录像投影，广泛地在全世界受到当代艺术家的青睐。加上今年来开始流行的高清录影，高清投影，艺术家能把随着时间推移而改变的录像用很大的尺寸投影出来。

Hiplights or Enlighted Hips

We arrive at day, and didn't see the "enlighted hips", Rist created 2 of her artworks with underpants, the other 1 is Massachusetts Chandelier

 

Massachusetts Chandelier

 

Underpant is a clothe that cover our sexual organ, as a symbol of fig leaf, behind the underwear, it is the privacy of every individual. Rist challenge the preconceptions of the audiences to the underpants. Normally, we feel that the underpants is the dirtiest garment in a bunch of unwashed clothe. And if it is possible, we will wash underpants separately from our Levi's Jeans and Burberry Dresses. Rist displayed underpants in a diferent way, audiences always view the underpants above their eye level as they are decorative, sublime and luxury.

Referring to underpants as 'the temple of our abdomen', Rist elaborates: 'This part of the body is very sacred, as it is the site of our entrance into the world, the centre of sexual pleasure and the location of the exits for the body's garbage, the proof that our internal cleaning machine is miraculously working'.

The human body is central to Pipilotti's work. She treats the body as a landscape, and encourages us to look at our physical beings free of cultural and social taboos.

 

Mutaflor

The artist deliberately disrupts the viewing rituals of audiences, by projecting images that can only properly be seen by walking over them, lying down or kneeling. Strive for the strangeness to our daily happening and objects, we will re-consider the aesthetic and thought to them. 

Projection on Lobe of the Lung

The element that impress me the most in this exhibition is Nude, as in Malaysia nude is always being censored, as THEY think that the view that we can always look in front a mirror when we took off our clothes doesn't ever exist in this universe. Viewing the underpants and nude of the artist from a perspective of Eastern Tradition, I have the feeling of the so-called culture shock. I was wondering what are the people around me in the gallery space are thinking when they saw the artworks. Underpants and nude will probably associate to  pornographic in Eastern Culture, we always try to cover them under our clothes and ethic, as in the art appreciation history of eastern art, there is no any period of praising the beauty of human body like Greece Art, even worse in Islamic places.

Woman's nude gives the feeling of feminism, as body is the field of fight of the feminist. The artist expose the nude to the audience, in a different view. inside out the body, glide on the body like it is a landscape. It is awkward to stare at a nude, but after the painting of Gustave Courbet 'The Origin of the World', I guess our acceptance to human nude is widen. But if we are not supposed to observe the nude as the way we observe it before, what should we think when we stare at it? Pretend to be noble? Or wake up and try to escape from the dirty mind? In an open-minded society here, I was curious about what they think about nude?

Pipilotti Rist- I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (Video showing in the artwork 'E-W')

The venue is installed with daily objects. The Innocent Collection Like a wall of white packaging items, Sparkling of the Domesticated Synapses video projections on a vase that seems to reveal the memory of the decorations, Administrating Eternity projected colourful curtains like aurora, and stuffed garments on the floor like a dead body that you will probably get shock when step on them, and of course dazzling colour and mesmerising soundtracks. Visiting to Pipilloti's Eyeball Massage, is definitely a trip to massage your eyeball and your mind!

Lap Lamp

Lobe of the Lung

Selfless in the Bath of Lava