Bill Viola's "Acceptance" analyzed

Bill Viola’s 2010 video installation titled “Acceptance” is one that resonated strongly with me. The black and white video begins as a blurry image of a person looks as if lights are being cast down on it. As the video goes on the audience learns that it is actually water that is being rained down upon the figure. This figure gets easier to see and now the figure has transformed into a woman, the video continues and slowly the woman’s head begins to change. The audience sees the body of the naked lady but now, with what looks like Bill Viola’s head. The water slows to an almost stop towards the end of the video and the woman body with a man’s head walks forward through the water starring straight towards the audience.

When I began watching this video I had the word “acceptance” in my mind due to the title so I tried to associate what I was seeing with the definition. Acceptance defined is “in human psychology a person's assent to the reality of a situation, recognizing a process or condition (often a negative or uncomfortable situation) without attempting to change it, protest”. As the video went on I just tried to “accept” the images I was looking at. I think Viola was commenting not only to accept other people’s choices and appearances but also to accept yourself for who you are. The blurriness in the beginning makes our brains search for some kind of meaning to the unclear picture and then the naked woman emerges clearly and we see her walking through the “waterfall”. After watching a few times, I see that the woman is walking through the water possibly on her journey to becoming her “true self” which is the final image of a man with the body of a woman. It is possible that Viola was specifically touching upon transgender people’s struggles to be accepted and understood by others and by themselves.  Also a broader idea of to just accept what is in front of you without a further reason other than it is simply reality.  The naked body of the woman walking through the water might make some uncomfortable and the woman seems to be screaming during her “transformation” which indicates she could be in pain. This symbolizes that the path to changing and thus accepting these changes are not necessarily easy. The idea of accepting might also be an uncomfortable concept for people to grasp therefore it is important to be conscious of your psychological rejection of things that are unknown to us or not “normal” and to refrain from doing this. Discomfort and pain can be a part of growing and understanding the reality around you but at the end of the video the audience sees the calm, clear image of the naked woman with the head of a man, fully emerged from the water and moving forward.

Visual Art Final Essay: Pippilotti Rist’s “Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava)”

            The visual and audio installation by Pippilotti Rist titled “Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava)” has found a permanent home at the Moma PS1 in Queens.  This very small piece of art is embedded in the floor of the lobby. This video was first exhibited in Basel, Switzerland in 1994. In a later exhibition in Zürich, Switzerland, the video was shown at the foot of a Madonna and Child sculpture. In the video, Rist is featured naked swimming in a glowing lava bath and cries out “I am a worm and you are a flower!” It catches people off guard because it is so small yet loud enough to hear while standing by it. You have to search for the small hole to see where the voice is coming from.

            This piece is very interesting to me. I enjoy a lot of Rist’s work and this one especially brings about an important social issue. From research, I learned that Rist was brought up Christian and once she grew up rejected the religion. She did not like the way Christianity made people think they are less than other beings (God). This particular piece refers to the religious notion of damnation. In Christian belief, damnation is the condemnation to eternal punishment in hell. I think when making “Selfless in the Bath of Lava”, she could have been thinking about how people might feel like others are better than them and how that makes people feel very small, like depicted in this tiny visual installation. Her screaming out to people who would be just walking by also indicates that she is hoping for someone who is higher up than her (God) to stop and rescue her from eternal damnation in the small hole.

            Pipilotti Rist is definitely a unique character. This piece evokes a lot of feelings especially if you are someone who believes in Heaven and Hell. If you do something that is considered to be a sin you are casted to Hell which is just fire and rock and you are never allowed to leave.  When this belief is taught to children it can shape how they act, think, feel and view themselves. Having God as an overseer to your life and telling you how life should be conducted can make one feel very restricted or even controlled. Knowing that Rist is a free spirit who promotes self-love and recognizes the beauty in all things natural I can confidently say that “Selfless in the Bath of Lava” can be viewed as how not to live one’s life. To live life in fear of eternally living out your afterlife in Hell would waste the wonderful experiences and natural process of growing up and making mistakes. If more people believed that it is not necessary to totally outcast people when they do something that doesn’t fit a requirement of the Bible or another religion then there might not be so many self-conscious people. I am not sure exactly if this is what Rist intended for her viewers to think about but I think regardless it is important for people of all ages to recognize that they are human and will make mistakes and will survive through the consequences of their actions and hopefully learn from them without being held in an eternal Hell by themselves, or by other people or other Gods.

Pipilotti Rist Oral Presentation Outline

Oral Presentation Outline

Introduction: Who is Pipilotti Rist?

Pipilotti Rist, original name Elizabeth Charlotte Rist was born on June 21^st 1962 in Grabs, Switzerland. She is a video installation artist known for work about sexuality, gender, and the human body. The name Pipilotti is a fusion of her nickname, Lotti, with Pippi Longstocking created by Swedish writer Astrid Lindgren. She began making super 8 films while in college and now uses high definition film. By the late 1980s, she was producing vivid and slickly made videos which lasted only a few minutes, and contained alterations in their colors, speed, and sound. Since the early 1990s, her films and installations have been shown in museums and galleries internationally.

Unlike other conceptual artists who take a more intellectual approach, she conveys the critical element of her work by creating an intensely sensual experience. She is renowned for bridging the gulf between popular culture and art, and for merging various media. Although her work is regarded as feminist by some art critics, her colorful visual art transmits a sense of happiness and simplicity to its audience. Throughout her career, her multimedia installations have been capturing the many contradictions and anxieties of modern society. Her experimental works which have been both successful and influential are exhibited at many important art collections worldwide. With her innovative style she has emerged as one of the most recognizable names in contemporary video art. Her work drew deliberately on MTV-style pop music videos, but she added a reflective element of her own.

Themes

-body image

-beauty of the natural state of things

-nature and purity; flowing water, flowers

-animals and food

-vivid, bright colors

-humor

-hallucinating elements

-denies explicit feminist agenda yet her work is filled with women body parts and powerful images of women and their bodies.

Inspiration

-Yoko Ono and Nam June Paik=Paik being the “father” of video art and the Fluxus movement, anti-elite emphasis on involving the viewer in the art piece, connecting art and everyday life.

Pipilotti Rist on her working methods march 2004

-She prefers working in small groups, largest 8 people at most because she wants to be involved in filming and editing process. She enjoys video work because it is social and it takes other professions to create full a project. Video also allows for experimental aspect when shooting a scene over and over again getting exactly how she wants it to be.

Visual Examples

1. Sip My Ocean

2. Ever is Over All

3. Pour Your Body

4. Pepperminta Preview

Discussion of Rist’s Art –information taken from video sources-

Pipilotti Rist’s “Pour your body out” at MoMA (Dec-Feb 2008) Timeout NY interview

This is a video insulation that was 200 feet across, 25 feet high and wrapped around the room on second floor of MoMa when it was being shown in 2008. She is known for vivid imagery of the body and landscape, the body as landscape and nature footage. To create her videos she cuts scenes into pieces, and will mix and match footage together.

This piece and most of her artwork makes you experience art, images are very large which can evoke positive feelings and a change of perception, the large images make people feel insignificant compared to the whole process of nature, most of her video insulations like this one have vivid color and sound. There was a giant round couch that resembled an eyeball from above also. At some points the room was all red from the images which symbolized bleeding and the menstruation cycle. The movement of the body is how she tried to make the images across the walls move.

Pipilotti Rist Interview at ACCA, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase, 2011-2012

Rist wants people to take time to bond their bodies with soul, she wants to give people different perspectives, wants to give people the opportunity to reflect differently in the atmosphere she has created, give space and landscape to immerse into art. She would like her living room to hold art insulation so that she can be inspired every day to live life as if there are no limits set on her decisions. She says that her work is 50% prepared 50% freestyle.

She speaks of how video is a bad copy of our eyes therefore she never tried to show reality which is always sharper, so she creates videos which show her perception and the natural time frame people think in. (ex: how in memory sometimes a month goes by what feels like very slow or when a year seems to have flown by very fast.) She uses colors to show real true color because in memories the color is faded and wants the reality of memories to be noticed; the bigger the projection is the slower the images move so she adjusts them by hand and adjusts color individuality because no two projectors are the same.  Now she uses high definition film but she used to use 8 mm film only. Rist uses internet to research and share which she likes. bad copies of human brain. She’s humans a very complicated beautiful creatures, how everyone so dedicated and full of humor and professional feel, if you putt100 hours into one minute of film and then person who views the 1 minute gets 100 hours out of it.

6 artists on decisive moments behind their work by Louisiana Channel

Using “Ever is Over all” 1997 as an example her  inspiration comes from random events, some are very well thought over, no two projects are the same inspirational events, a guy at a newspaper gave her the okay to create her own spread and she wanted to have an old lady as the front picture and they wanted her to change the picture so she got upset and wanted to smash his car, so the aggression and destruction she felt she made a positive thing by creating art and the girl being very calm as if she does this every day, car is symbol of given things, not long ago that people did not have cars people get used to things very quickly and she wants to be a counter force against that.

Major Works

-In 1998, she was one of six finalists for the Hugo Boss Prize, an award administered every two years by the Guggenheim Foundation for significant achievement in contemporary art, and her single-channel video installation ‘Sip My Ocean’ (1996) was shown at the ‘Guggenheim Museum SoHo’ in New York City.

-Her work has been the subject of solo shows at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; AroS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Århus, Denmark; Fondazione Prada, Milan; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Tex.; and Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y Léon, Spain.

Awards and Achievements

- In 1999, she received the prestigious ‘Wolfgang Hahn Prize’ for her distinguished visual works.

-In 2001, she was honored with the ‘Art Prize’ of the City of Zurich.

-She was the recipient of Zürcher Kunstpreis, Stadt Zürich, Switzerland, in 2001 and an award from the Universität der Kunst, Berlin, in 2004.

-In 2009, her video "Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)" won the award for ‘Best Exhibition Of Digital, Video, or Film’ at the 26th annual awards presented by ‘The International Association of Art Critics (AICA)’. The same year, she also won the ‘Joan Miró Prize’ in Barcelona.

-In 2010, she won the ‘Cutting the Edge Award’ at the 27th Annual Miami International Film Festival.

-In 2012, she won the title of ‘International Artist of the Year’ by the Bazaar Art, Hong Kong, China.

-In 2014, she received the Best Site Development award from Baukoma Awards for Marketing and Architectur

Bibliography

1.                  Kennedy, Randy. "The World’s Most Colorful Video Artist." The New York Times Magazine. The New York Times, 11 Nov. 2011. Web. 2 Dec. 2015. <http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/magazine/15rist-t.html?_r=0>.

2.                  Pipilotti Rist Talks about Her Working Methods. Perf. Pipilotti Rist. SF Moma, 2011. Art Forum, 2011. Web. 2 Dec. 2015. <http://artforum.com/video/mode=large&id=28762>.

3.                  Conner, Jill. "Pipilotti Rist: Rooms With Many Views." Interview Magazine. N.p., 20 Sept. 2010. Web. 3 Dec. 2015. <http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/pipilotti-rist-luhring-augustine#_>.

4.                  6 Artists on Decisive Moments behind Their Work. Perf. Jonathan Meese,Bill Viola,Leigh Ledare,”Elina Brotherus,Yajoi Kusama,Pipilotti Ris. Museum of Modern Art Louisiana, n.d. Web. 3 Dec. 2015. <http://channel.louisiana.dk/video/six-artists-decisive-moments>.

5.                  "Pipilotti Rist Interview at ACCA, I Packed the Postcard in My Suitcase ,2011-2012." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 04 Dec. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0z_-ofYzkqE>.

6.                  "Pipilotti Rist at MoMA." YouTube. YouTube, n.d. Web. 04 Dec. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4LjjC-jx1Ys>.