Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out
Museum of Modern Art Commissions Multimedia Installation
Jan 1, 2009
Subtitled 7354 Cubic Meters to reflect the dimensional volume of the space, the site-specific video, audio and sculptural installation was commissioned by MoMA to transform the atrium and engage museum visitors in an immersive landscape of monumental imagery.
Multimedia Installation
Rist, a graduate of the Institute of Applied Arts in Vienna who represented Switzerland at the 2005 Venice Biennale, is known for her deft fusion of cutting-edge technology, lush palette and provocative imagery to create innovative multimedia installations.
Towering 25 feet high on three walls approximately 200 feet long, the immersive visuals of Pour Your Body Out are created via seven high-definition projectors. A sculptural seating arrangement in the center of the room mirrors the design of the human eye, and also acts to conceal the speakers that provide a soundtrack of organic noises and a mesmerising musical score. Extreme slow-motion lends the monumental panorama a languorous fluidity which reinforces the pool-like transformation of the atrium space.
Abstract Narrative
On continuous flow in a ten-minute loop, the narrative of Pour Your Body Out – characterised in a video tour by the artist as poetic in its brevity and abstraction, in contrast to a full-length film Rist is currently working on - echoes elements of the Garden of Eden story referenced in Rist’s Biennale piece, Homo sapiens sapiens (2005).
The scale and focus of the visuals ineluctably highlight the aesthetics of form, both beautiful and grotesque, sublime and degraded. The physicality and earthiness of the garden imagery (giant tulips, voluptuous clumps of soil, a writhing earthworm) are counterbalanced by the ethereality invoked by the use of light and sound in the space, emphasising its cathedral-like verticality.
Immersive Visual Art
The overarching aim of Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) is to engage viewers in both a spiritual and corporeal sense. Visitors are invited to lounge, stretch, sing or dance while immersed in the artist’s creation. Says MoMA Chief Curator of Media Klaus Biesenbach, who curated the project: “In Pipilotti Rist’s installations, the viewer is at all times immersed and part of an ‘oceanic’ volume of light, colors and sounds.”
Pour Your Body Out acts as both a celebration of the museum as interactive public institution and a condemnation of society’s seemingly intransigent move toward the passive private consumption of mass media.
Pipilotti Rist: Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) will be on exhibit in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until February 2, 2009, after which the piece will join MoMA’s permanent collection.
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