Pipilotti's Pickle: Making Meaning From the Feminine Position

Female artists continue to confront a central contradiction in their practice since the traditional place assigned to women in representation is as the bearer of symbolic meaning. As objects of representation, women are denied the specific agency required to create meaning as an artist. While the question of a woman's place in relation to the symbolic is a larger issue over which much ink has been spilt, we have examined less those women who are artists and who do, ostensibly, make meaning. How do they accomplish this impossible task? Put simply, a woman who desires to be a maker of meaning must transgress gender in order to create from a stance that is not dominated by the controlling patriarchal system. She cannot merely appropriate the male position for her own, nor can she reject the other entirely, since the first underscores her own lack and the latter is essentializing. To take the opposite stance in a binary relationship is really to take the same side, since each is only known through relation to its opposite, and in delimiting the feminine as that which is not masculine, the woman is putting herself right back in the place of other. The woman artist must therefore see both as subject and object, a splitting that allows her to view the system of patriarchy with a critical eye and simultaneously to envision a new concept of woman as the subject of representation. It is this double-vision that drives the work of Swiss video-installation artist Pipilotti Rist. Her work is one small eruption in the expanding feminist discourse, but when seen in its trajectory, it serves as a manifesto for creating new forms outside of the patriarchal system.

Rist struggles with the same problems female artists from Vigée Le Brun to Cindy Sherman have faced: transgressing her gender role in order to establish herself as an agent of meaning. Rist's early work suggests that she looked to the feminist writings of Hélène Cixous and Luce Irigaray for a mode of creating from a female stance, exploring the purely feminine incarnations they espouse in motifs such as fluid and the body. In Pickelporno (1992) Rist intersperses clips of the female body with shots of various fruits, intimating an innate connection between the female body and natural processes. Nancy Spector proposes that the body of water in Rist's Sip My Ocean (1995) can been seen as a metaphor for the female body, mastering its own desire by giving it tangible, if fluid, form (Parkett 48). But even female desire is a concept still tied to the binary opposition of gender differentiation. It requires a reciprocal response in order to be fulfilled. Rist must work beyond or transgress that opposition in order to create a non-essentializing and therefore truly feminine work. In Ever Is Overall (1997), Rist discovers the double-vision that breaks through the barriers of gender differentiation that anchors Sip My Ocean. By subverting symbolic language in the video-installation, Rist demonstrates the relative ambiguity of gender roles. Rist must first establish the terms in which she encounters the traditional symbolic order. To construct her own paradigm outside of the essentialist paradigm Rist implements the flower, one of the heralded symbols of the feminine.

Central to the visual arts throughout its iconographic development, the flower is now the most recognizable symbol of so-called vaginal iconography. ¹ Via a relatively simple path, the flower motif came not only to allude to the feminine but to signify it directly. The metaphorical structure of language has fostered the association of woman and flower through visual correspondence with the female genitalia. The association of woman/flower became flower/vulva, and therein the woman was reduced to her sexual function. When feminist artists in the 1970s followed Cixous's call for the purely feminine, they fervently claimed the symbols that they had already been appportioned by...