All for One and One for All
Is the image of coated folk in white interiors, standing bemused with thumb perched under chin and index finger sprawling across the right cheek far from the mind at the mention of an art exhibit? Stereotypes do have an origin. The isolated experience of art-viewing has too seldom betrayed this particular one. As the origami of art continually unfolds into something new, dexterous minds have been trying to wear down this image with new ways of integrating 
the audience into the art experience; not the least of these personalities, Pipilotti Rist. Nicknamed after the gravity-defying pigtailed Pippi Longstocking, Rist is none short of the character’s defining audacious eccentricity which she channels generously into her art. “Heroes of Birth”, her most recent exhibition, follows in the manner of her others: viewers and art become integrated into one landscape. With kaleidoscopic neon geometries raking the walls and adapting themselves to the contours of chance persons in the line of their projection, the show makes the audience not a necessary part of the exhibition dichotomy but of the entire art experience. ”Fellow-viewers silhouetted behind the scrims–aswim in deeply layered, peaceable torrents of sheep and geometry–make membership in humanity a great idea.” In an age where gallery exhibited art silently pressures burgeoning ambition with the challenge of inaugurating fresh functions of art, Rist eschews these implied responsibilities. ”Rist resolves no critical problems of contemporary art. She just makes you forget that there are any.” Peter Schjeldahl of The New York Times transcribes the communal experience of both the show and Rist herself:
“Rist is remarkable for having insisted on bliss throughout an era, which peaked in the nineteen-nineties, when a paarade of artists ambitiously expanded art’s physical scale and social address only to burden it, self-importantly, with theoretical arcana and political sanctimony. (Going to galleries and museums became like attending church or school.) Today, after a subsequent spell of market-bedizened, balefully frisky seductiveness, from the likes of Jeff Koons (a gifted artist with a lot to answer for) and Damien Hirst (from whose nightmare of chipper cynicism we may finally be awakening), Pist stands out in a graver light. Responsible as well as responsive to contemporary art’s enlarged public sphere, she maintains standards of craft and sincerity–outward discipline, inward necessity–that speak for themselves, without critical gloss or winking irony. She is innovative but conveys no wish to be congratulated on it. Rather, she makes advanced techniques of video and installation seem like common-sense means, as normal as pencils.”
A just-over 5-minute recap of Rist’s exhibition at the Luhring Augustine gallery:
