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  • The Color of Your Socks: A Year with Pipilotti Rist
  • Mike Leggett
The Color of Your Socks: A Year with Pipilotti Rist by Michael Hegglin, director, producer. Catpics Coproductions Ltd, Zurich, 2009, Distributed Microcinema International Inc. San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. DVD, 53 min. Sub-titles: English, French. Distributor's website: <www.microcinemadvd.com/>.

The Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist was honored with a commission to re-open the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York City in 2004. This project, a large-scale video installation titled Pour Your Body Out, requires visitors to lie on specially prepared carpets and gaze at the projections on the surrounding walls and ceiling. "What should we do if people don't want to take their shoes off?" asks one of the museum docents. Use some humor, suggests Rist: "Tell them, I'd like to see the color of your socks."

Color and movement is the theme throughout this observational video of the preparation of the commissioned work. Rist is the colorfully dressed CEO of her art production company, darting from one meeting to the next with her collaborators, sponsors, assistants and technicians. Sketches, maquettes, then scaled-up models move inexorably toward the day of the opening (interrupted by other more minor projects), each stage announced onscreen with titles, the what and the wherefore of the contemporary art scene: a "chic" Monument to Emilie Kempin-Spyri, the first Swiss woman "to attain" a doctorate in law at the end of the 19th century; a Liberty Statue for London, in Basle; the shooting of Rist's first feature film, Pepperminta—"so many more people will see a film than will see an installation," she observes.

For the film and video shoots, her crew uses the new technology of high-resolution micro-cameras mounted on the end of boom poles. The camera operator has power and screen strapped to his body, leaving his arms free to move the wide-angle, deep-focus camera around, above, below and close into Rist's performers, both clothed and unclothed, ensembles and individuals. "Naked people?" asks the visiting Swiss MOMA curator. Could this be a challenge to New Yorkers, one wonders? Surely not . . . ? Shoes off in public? Now that could be an issue.

There is little else left with which to engage in this DVD. It is an electronic catalogue entry, providing some background to the central character and her work. "Am I an Artist, a Video Artist or a Fine Artist?" she discusses with another assistant at one point. "An Artist," she decides. There is no interpretation of the work as would occur in a print catalogue, no probing of the concepts behind the movement and color. "I wish for a more colorful life," says someone at a preview of the film; it's also about "overcoming barriers" and providing "exercise for back and hips," encourages the artist. Her onscreen subjects demonstrate the precept as they entwine, entangle and cavort through green fields, red apples, the "fires of hell" and super-green treetops; Caribbean seas too—"Maybe too cute?" queries Pipilotti.

Large-scale video installations as semi-immersive, cinema-like environments have become de rigueur on the international art circuit of biennales, exhibitions and festivals. The affordances of computer-based video and sound technology have made this possible, not only in the gathering and ordering of sound and image but more essentially in their presentation across multiple screens and sound sources, maintaining perfect operatic synchronization for hours and weeks, sometimes months on end. Contemporary art on a grand scale requires a production effort and organization akin to that of the 19th-century monumental sculptors, the Renaissance religious image industry and Hollywood itself. [End Page 299]

At an early stage of this disappointing DVD, we are reminded of the vagaries of the fine art scene, populated as it is by bright and optimistic people like Pipilotti. Rist inspects the photograph of a work by the celebrity queen of contemporary art, Yoko Ono. It is an installation of a stepladder with a piece of paper stuck on the ceiling above it. Visitors climb the ladder with magnifying glass to read the tiny word "Yes." "This work cost $32...

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