[title]
Video projections that cascade across different surfaces; super-saturated colours that meld and overlap; gauzy images that gibber and ooze from dark corners. Pipilotti Rist’s 30-year retrospective is one of the most discombobulating exhibitions I’ve ever experienced – in an entirely good way, that is. Often, it’s deliberately unclear where one work ends and another begins. Detailed projections onto the floor and curtains are suddenly traversed by coloured discs of light, for instance; or the ostensibly pure white objects that make up ‘The Innocent Collection’ become tainted by brilliant sunset colours from another projection. The sense is of different elements combining and intermeshing to create something thrillingly overwhelming, a kind of amniotic wash of constant imagery and sound.
If the dazzling wonders of the video age are one part of the Swiss artist’s essential theme, then the other is the human body – its sensuousness, its strangeness, its manipulation by different media. Various projections depict close-ups of masticating teeth, glistening vulvas, or a whirling, cyclical journey between the artist’s anus and her enveloping mouth. Elsewhere, there’s a giant, triangular object, like a solidified projection beam – putting your head through one of its holes creates a weird sensation of bodily disconnect as you watch the video within. And everywhere you look, there’s a sense of delirious, boundless metaphor – images of nature and fecundity in the queasily trippy video triptych, ‘Lobe of the Lung’; or a sexually suggestive installation of velvet-lined handbags and curving seashells (all, inevitably, containing more miniature video screens).
Occasionally, though, the symbolism feels slightly overworked, even within the context of Rist’s gaudily excessive style. Take, for instance, ‘The Little Circle’: a crazy video mixture of sexual imagery, framed by a blinking eyelids motif, with the screen itself positioned inside a model of a bacterium, which then sits inside a child’s cot, finally surrounded by swaying diaphanous curtains, themselves catching further random projections – it’s the ethos of the show carried too far, until the dizzying layers of meaning simply feel like a distraction.
'Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage' is a The Hayward Gallery until January 8 2012