Horner's Corner

At the Hayward Gallery, South Bank, London is a wonderful exhibition by an artist of joyful, subversive power.

Pipilotti Rist (her first name his an amalgam of the two names she was called by family and friends respectively -’Pipi’ and ‘Lotti’) produces video installations that are sometimes minute (tiny screens, embedded in walls, floors, objects) sometimes huge (immersive experiences in which you seem to be at once viewer and image) and all sizes in between. A lot has been written about this artist, so I’ll keep my remarks quite brief. She is new to me. Anyway, the thing is to go and experience her marvellous work, not to read about it.

First Thoughts and feeling prompted by Pipilotti Rist’s Eyeball Massage -very tentative and partial, and missing a whole lot out, of course:

*Dreams It’s a cliche to say watching film is like dreaming, or that a dream one had was like a film, but these videos that migrate into handbags, packing cases and wombs: who is dreaming them? Rist’s work seems to be neither simply autobiographical (although it is her we see, in various guises, in most of the films) nor disconnected from her experience as a dreaming body. Here the videos seem to dream, or to invite us to merge their dreams with us.

*Shapes. The objects and shapes we move through, round or into in this exhibition -veils, sea shells, handbags, cradles, etc, seem to stand as analogues for bodies, and it is the body and its senses that seem to be the key to all we experience. The art is feminine: I would find it hard to imagine this being made by a male artist. Why? The female (Rist’s) body is the subject, and so are her dreams. The feminine -the feminism -is in the form of the works, not some ‘message’ to be found in them. The form is the content: in her joyful wisdom, Pipilotti Rist has created art that we need for the 21st century, a kind of expansive, unalienated experience rooted in a woman’s embodied dreaming. In place of the male subject who ‘stands for’ or ‘stands in for’ all of humanity, here it is a woman’s body that is the human form, inclusive, singular and universal. A woman who is the human subject.

*Pleasure. this exhibition is deeply pleasurable – a real massage. In it caressing warmth it seems to challenge the idea that the only kind of opposition to reification and alienation has to be a militant dysphoria.

*Machines of representation: They may be like dreaming things, but they are still machines and she never lets go of this awareness, and consequently, neither do we. We have an experience, highly mediated, of a physical immediacy. In what ways are we like these machines that make pictures?

* Within you, without you: We sometimes peer into small things to see videos, sometimes walk or sit in large spaces, surrounded by images and sounds. Ultimately the inside/outside organ/epidermis, building/world sets of alternations embraces the Hayward building itself, and then, as smoke filled bubbles, generated from the roof the of the building, floats far beyond.

*Sound. Sound: ambient music, shrieking, laughter, singing (including lip-synching to pop songs)..is a part of the experience of being in these affective spaces.

*Anxiety The main exception to the above might be her giant installation Suburb Brain. I won’t try to describe it, but the mouth we see and hear talking seems to be like that of an analysand, in which what is said (statements) seem overloaded, almost at times bending and failing under a weight of affect. There is questioning and anxiety here, felt through the staging, the saying, the multiple signifiers.

*Machine and body, nature and culture. Always interwoven, in all she does.

*Beyond the single dreaming subject. The videos dream for us, perhaps, in an inter-passive, inter-subjective manner. Rooted in the body, her films seem to evoke an experience that transcends the single subject that is structured and divided by language.

* Hysteria -a kind of productive, happy  hysteria? if this is possible, we find it here. And the exhibition has a kind of delirium.

*Play. There is a kind of utopian promise in play, and there is a strong play element in Pipilotti’s work. I think it links us to our childhood and to another world of pure, absorbed, non instrumental activity. I was particularly taken by her lip synch performance to Kevin Coyne’s Jacky and Edna (‘You called me Jacky’). The sight and sound of this is something I’ll remember for a long time.

*Go and see her work, go and be in her work.

An article on Rist:

Pipilotti Rist: We all come from between our mothers legs | Art and design | The Guardian.

Film of Rist in conversation here.

For more on play, childhood and utopia see  here and here.

 

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness which one had as a child at play -Nietzsche

Freud was right when he said getting work and love right are essential for a good life, but he should have added a third: play. What is play? I think it’s something like a pure means, without any ends.  When we play we do something that has no real utility, no end, no extrinsic reward. It’s done for its own sake. As such, it is the exercise of our freedom.

When a child plays with something everyday -like a box, a cup, a coaster – she turns it away from its fixed meaning as a tool, a bit of equipment, and recreates it as a thing subject to the play of her imagination. Its potential to be a thousand things is there; the child makes it in imagination a multitude of them in an hour.

When we play, as adults, we release ourselves from the means-end  logic of the day. Play here reveals its affinity with art. Both, I think, have a utopian aspect: negating the sad realm of necessity, linking the infant we were to the joyful adult we are. Or might be.  I’d go so far as to say that making this possibility real for everyone should be the  ultimate aim  of politics. Stendhal called beauty the promise of happiness; play is the thing itself.

Play is the unneurotic unhurried childlike absorption in the present, a sign of maturity. To to be childlike is to be in the opposite state to childishness. It’s childishness that our mass entertainment industry stimulates in us, an endless distraction, without real focus on anything, the finger of the depressive hedonist flipping from channel to channel. Childish: the promise of satisfaction, forever witheld, just out of reach of the tetchy kidult. The full absorption in what one is doing is utterly different to this.

So we need play, we need it as we need freedom and love. Are they even possible without it?

For truly it is to be noted, that children’s plays are not sports, and should be deemed as their most serious actions.
Michel de Montaigne

I know of no other way of dealing with great tasks than as play: this is a sign of greatness -Nietzsche

Rolfe Horn: ‘Mind Like Water’

To become mature is to recover that sense of seriousness one had as a child at play  (Nietzsche)

Mahler’s 4th Symphony is  a piece of music I’ve long associated with the longing for a better world. That world is usually thought of the happy unalienated one of the child, as imagined by the adult (“childhood” is a state for the adult, not the child). A happy world. A longing that the past – the happy absorption of  oneself at play, for instance – should come again. But it cannot really come again: it only returns in dreams, in illusions  and in art. But art – this art, anyway, does more than that. I think it challenges our present by giving us a glimpse of something different and better, reminding of something we already know. This  world could be a happy one, and not just in dreams.

So much of this music could be taken as a mere escape into  a false innocence. The symphony’s last movement for instance, is supposed to be a child’s vision of heaven – with ‘naive’ lyrics that are awkward, even embarrassing for the ‘sophisticated’ adult. But the  listener is supposed to abandon irony and knowingness, and as in a dream, experience a kind of release into that simple sensibility. But of course we wake from dreams; what kind of world do we wake into?

A radically unjust one, of course. For all we know this we need to keep recalling it: it’s a place in which most people are denied the fullest life they could have, where a minority live in material comfort – one in which, to take just one example among so many that one could cite – half the world live on $2.50 per day. Even the globally rich minority (chances are, if you can read this, you are one of them) are divided into radically unequal classes, possessive, competitive consumer-workers.This is what we grow up as adults into, what we get used to, and accept as the only world that is possible.

To dream one’s life away amid such conditions would be intolerable: it would signal a willingness that one’s return to childhood can be bought at the price of the broken lives of real children. This is the case against art-as-escape: the lotus leaf, the drug or substitute religion: an opium of the people.

But if art can release imaginative energies that are potentially uncontainable by the commodified, administered world of capitalist “realism”,then perhaps all art , even the most commercial and ephemeral,  has in it the promise of something better and different. If that is so, it is surely even more true of Mahler’s supreme art. Ernst Bloch, whose ideas about art and utopia ran along these lines, proposed a thing he called vor-schein, ‘anticipatory illumination’ – the gleam of hope in the dark present. By all means enjoy that gleam, but don’t fail to notice the contrast with the surrounding darkness. The experience of  happiness in art can maybe make us less accomodating to the false promises of the commodity world of waking life. If art does this, then it is a nobler thing than an opiate. It’s become a sign.

Mahler’s art here, in delivering us to the ‘simple’ is actually very complex, and if we listen with any attentiveness, we shall surely sense that even happiness, even joy, can be complex. More: there is a kind satisfaction open to the adult and denied to the child. Do I really want to be a child again? no: I want this evocation by the adult Mahler, an experience possible in music (the art that moves in time). It’s an art that has the power to help us face our lives as adults, in a world of injustice  that must be changed, by us, now.

Slavoj Zizek

My knowledge of architecture is constrained to a coupler of idiosyncratic data: my love for Ayn Rand and her architecture-novel The Fountainhead; my admiration of the Stalinist “wedding-cake” baroque kitsch; my dream of a house composed only of secondary spaces and places of passage – stairs, corridors, toilets, store-rooms, kitchen – with no living room or bedroom. The danger that I am courting is thus that what I will say will oscillate between the two extremes of unfounded speculations and what most is already known for a long time.

More here

‘Two Men Looking at the Moon’ and a ‘A Man and a Woman Looking at the Moon’. Apparently, the former was an inspiration for Samuel Beckett’s ‘Waiting for Godot’.