Perhaps \u201cenjoy\u201d is not the right word\u201d\u2026 We were interested \u2014 but not necessarily amused. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Minsheng\u2019s survey was a momentous, systematic show of video art, much of it both historic and remarkable. Check. Chinese artists have done much to involve themselves with this medium. Check. Beginning with Zhang Peili\u2019s \u201c30\u00d730\u201d (1988), the show orchestrated a chronological tour through over 50 works by over 30 artists. Check. Some aspects were moot: the exhibition\u2019s inclusiveness, for example, because according to the Book of Minsheng, \u201cChina,\u201d means largely the mainland, and on the flip side, one needn\u2019t quibble over the distinction between video artists and artists who happen to have made a video work. Not to mention \u2013 as Phil Tinari recently let slip \u2014\u00a0\u201c\u2018mini-scandals\u2019 over things like whose work was projected versus played on a screen\u2026\u201d(1)<\/p>\n\n\n\n But in hindsight, scope, scale and egos aside, something that resonated with a visit to this show \u2014\u00a0and which escaped the reviews \u2014\u00a0was its lack of\u2026how to put it? Pleasure. These videos are\u00a0sober<\/em>: amongst this myriad of screens nestled precious little visually or otherwise to tease or amuse. This is not to say the show lacked imagination (courtesy of film-festival darling Sun Xun), quirkiness (the ever-wacky Hu Xiangqian) and \u2014\u00a0\u201coooh! androg\u00e8nes stalking through the woods in golden bondage gear!\u201d\u2014 offbeat eroticism (Huang Ran). Sure, it was a rare privilege to see Qiu Zhijie\u2019s fun-packed \u201cWashroom\u201d (1995), and one can but be absorbed by Ma Qiusha\u2019s jolly razor-blade monologue of 2007. But who could claim for \u201cMoving Image in China\u2026\u201d the ability to relax, titillate or beguile its audience? Yang Fudong\u2019s slick sequences are, by a certain cinematic osmosis, seductive; a whole ground floor area was devoted to them \u2014\u00a0perhaps unwittingly to provide a more sensuous (if slightly gormless) monochrome endnote. But where was the FUN! \u2014\u00a0the invitation to unburdened absorption, visual abandon before moving imagery? Do we wish merely to bathe in the beam of the black box? No. It\u2019s just that on exiting Minsheng\u2019s darkened halls, one was left impressed by the absence of certain moods \u2014\u00a0playfulness, buoyancy, sanguinity \u2014\u00a0in Chinese video art. Champagne, anyone?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let\u2019s now take a moment to appreciate the palpably outr\u00e9 title of\u00a0Pipilotti Rist\u2019s most recent exhibition at London\u2019s Hayward Gallery: \u201cEyeball Massage.\u201d<\/strong>\u00a0It\u2019s a heading ripe for Rist\u2019s oddball visual viscera. Born Elizabeth Rist in 1962 (she changed her name to \u00a0\u201cPipilotti\u201d after the anarchic protagonist of Astrid Lindgren\u2019s beloved 1945 children\u2019s book \u201cPippi Longstocking\u201d\u00a0(2)), the Swiss artist has since the 1980s been pursuing her desire (as quoted in the Hayward pamphlet) to \u201cdiscover new ways of configuring the world, both the world outside and the world within,\u201d through video. She has won wide acclaim as an inventive choreographer of psychotropic, mellifluously coloured and bodily-charged imagery. Rist\u2019s breakthrough came with \u201cEver is Over All\u201d (1997), a slow-motion film of her skipping gaily down the street in a cutesome dress, smashing the windows of parked cars with a giant fake tropical tulip; a policewoman nods in greeting as the artist gambols merrily past\u2026 Back at Minsheng, we were wondering if our drinks would last the course.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEyeball Massage\u201d surveyed Rist\u2019s oeuvre to date. The first room juxtaposed a luminescent \u201cchandelier\u201d composed of frumpy white knickers (perhaps a play on illuminating the ordinary) and a miniature, box-like suburban home laid out on the floor complete with reddish internal lights, a little mower on the lawn, etc. The back wall was a blanched collage of household items and packaging \u2014\u00a0egg boxes, polystyrene fillers, t-shirts. An ephemeral layer alighted via mobile projections swimming over the walls and installations, animating the objects\u2019 surfaces. There were fixed projections here, too \u2014\u00a0a small one onto the wall of the model house and another in which the artist remarks on relationships from the passenger seat of a car \u2014\u00a0but their narratives dissolve against the psychedelic environment. As befitting the exhibition\u2019s title, images and coloured light caressed the fringe of vision in the corners of the eyes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The setting Rist creates is often immersive, less accessible to those who refuse to give way to her particular brand of optical lube than to non-initiates of video art practice (no bar to enjoyment here \u2013 not so chez Minsheng). One room was rendered like a tank for floating imagery and sound. Thin white drapes (Rist\u2019s fabled \u201cimage-carriers\u201d) caught projections of glistening beards, big masticating lips and goats in pastures. Rist\u2019s camera-eye zooms unflinchingly towards and around its subjects, casting the viewer into a hyper-reality wherein inward sensations seem to meld with sensory information. Visitors were encouraged to recline on the floor, padded by surreal stuffed trousers and jumpers left lying about, and bask in Rist\u2019s dilated, drooling world. For her, the way to viewers\u2019 hearts is through their eyes, ears and stomachs; her project is to galvanize our guts with sound and images. There\u2019s even a shot of her anus at one point, which just goes to show there are no holes barred.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But it is the second space that really intrigued, where the artist\u2019s will to flex the possibilities of projection generated an optical phantasmagoria. \u201cSuck it and see,\u201d she seemed to whisper from amongst the assembled audio-visual amuse-bouches; were we to take a bite out of the meal Minseng made of Chinese video art, chances are we\u2019d crack a tooth. Shells and handbags became vehicles for tiny LED monitors in \u201cYoghurt on Skin \u2014\u00a0Velvet on TV\u201d (2009); a spherical screen sardonically suspended in a yellow swimming costume emitted internal images of the digestive system. For \u201cSelfless in the Bath of Lava\u201d (1994) a tiny Rist, naked and consumed by magmatic graphics, shouted theatrically from a pinhole in the floor. In a booth created by a curve of cellophane panels (like Richard Serra gone porno), one was invited to take a seat so that itinerant projections could appear on your lap \u2014\u00a0an insect\u2019s eye view of the countryside. \u201cI\u2019m Not the Girl Who Misses Much,\u201d a fast-forward video of 1986 wherein a topless, gyrating Rist sings that same Beatles line over and over (you wouldn\u2019t catch Wang Jianwei doing that), was hidden in a surreal sharp pyramid protruding horizontally from the wall; in a masterpiece of awkward \u2014\u00a0and somehow intimate \u2014\u00a0intrigue, it demanded that one stuck one\u2019s head up through one of two holes cut in its underside to watch. Linking these and further installations within an overall schema were vivid cobalt discs of light roaming the floor, fibrous and plastic screens demarcating separate nodes and a deadpan, mesmeric hum that underpinned it all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cEyeball Massage\u201d wholly reflected Rist\u2019s ambition to intervene in customary \u201cviewing rituals.\u201d Where this retrospective charted her personal mission to change our experience of moving images, challenging the bilateral convention of cinema to place pictures and light above, below, onto and around her audience (she\u2019d project onto our insides if she could), at Minsheng, the medium was definitely not the message. Visitors progressed through a dark display organised around time periods that inherently drew attention to narrative (yawn \u2013 are we there yet?), rather than to the experiential properties or potentials of video. Reviewing the show for\u00a0LEAP<\/em>\u00a0magazine, Tang Lingjie called it \u00a0\u201cconservative\u201d(3), whereas theGuardian<\/em>\u2019s critic, a delirious Adrian Searle, deemed Rist\u2019s exhibition \u201can environment\u201d(4). A few flashes of experiment with the mechanisms of seeing did appear within some of the early works at Minsheng: \u201cWashroom\u201d was projected onto the floor, \u201cSight Adjuster-3\u201d (1996) by Shaohong Chen offered each eye its own screen at the end of a concertinaed extension from two TVs, and Goang-Ming Yuan\u2019s 1995 video showed footage from inside a bird cage. But as the years \u2014\u00a0and the exhibition \u2014\u00a0unfolded, this impulse evaporated entirely. \u201cEyeball Massage,\u201d was a product both of the artist\u2019s intent to probe perception in her own way and the gallery\u2019s willingness to animate its space (much as one critic might have criticised this as a staging of \u00a0\u201cart for the crowd-hungry Kunsthalle\u201d(5), to which, in this instance, so what?). \u201cMoving Image in China,\u201d on the other hand, was content with sedate linearity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So, a blithe circus of video from Pipilotti Rist in London, and a funless survey of Chinese art in this medium by Minsheng Museum; one show of moving image work sheds useful light on another (and vice versa, if you so choose). True, these are overarm observations, but responses to exhibitions \u2014\u00a0especially those in the same medium \u2014\u00a0need not always be insulated by their proximate contexts. It spoils all the fun.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Using Pipilotti Rist\u2019s recent show as a … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/randian-art.s3.ap-east-1.amazonaws.com\/2023\/04\/zh-hant\/image-262.png\")
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