Pipilotti Rist

Description

Swiss-born artist Pipilotti Rist (b.1962) creates colourful multi-screen video works which, often with the pace and seduction of a pop promo, signal the birth of a new interdisciplinary artform. With such lighthearted artworks as Ever Is Over All, showing a princess-like young girl blithely smashing car windows, Rist invents new possibilities for poetry, feminine identity and the traditional genre of portraiture. The highly accomplished technological skill reflected in her work since the late 1980s, incorporating in unprecedented ways the artforms of film, music, sculpture and performance, have established Rist among the world’s best-known contemporary video artists.

American academic Peggy Phelan surveys the artist’s work to date, investigating the psychoanalytic and feminist implication of the artist’s increasingly complex video installations. Curator and critic Hans Ulrich Obrist discusses with the artist her ideas of utopia: utopian art, utopian working structures, utopian museums. Swiss academic Elisabeth Bronfen examines one of Rist’s earliest works, (Absolutions) Pipilotti’s Mistakes (1988), centring upon the phsychological aspects of the work. The artist has selected a short story by Richard Brautigan and a poem by Anne Sexton, both of which echo the dream-like quality of her own work. Pipilotti Rist’s diverse texts range from a homage to 1960s video pioneer Nam June Paik to a previously unpublished text ‘Monologue in Car (Suburb Brain)’.

Peggy Phelan is among the world’s best-known contemporary feminist theorists and has written extensively on contemporary visual arts and performance. She is Professor of Performance Studies at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Co-Director of Exhibitions and Programmes and Director of International Projects at the Serpentine Gallery, London. He has been co-curator of such international biennials as Manifesta 1 (Rotterdam, 1996), the 50th Venice Biennale (2003) and the 2nd Guangzhou Biennale (2005). Currently Inviato Speciale of Domus magazine, Obrist has also edited more than sixty books, including Hans Ulrich Obrist Interviews, Volume 1 (2003) and do it (2005).

Elisabeth Bronfen is Professor of English and American Studies at the University of Zurich. A specialist in nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, she has also written articles in the areas of gender studies, psychoanalysis, film, cultural theory and art. Her most recent publication is The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and Its Discontents (Princeton University Press, 1998).

On the Contemporary Artists Series

“The boldest, best executed, and most far-reaching publishing project devoted to contemporary art. These books will revolutionize the way contemporary art is presented and written about.”—Artforum

“The combination of intelligent analysis, personal insight, useful facts and plentiful pictures is a superb format invaluable for specialists but also interesting for casual readers, it makes these books a must for the library of anyone who cares about contemporary art.”—Time Out

“A unique series of informative monographs on individual artists.”—The Sunday Times

“Gives the reader the impression of a personal encounter with the artists. Apart from the writing which is lucid and illuminating, it is undoubtedly the wealth of lavish illustrations which makes looking at these books a satisfying entertainment.”—The Art Book

Additional information

Dimensions	0.75 × 10 × 11.5 in
Series	Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series
Imprint	Phaidon Press
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780714839653
ISBN-10	0714839655
Author	Elisabeth Bronfen, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Peggy Phelan
Audience	General / adult