loading...

Pipilotti Rist at Hauser&Wirth Somerset: are you looking for ways to decentralise culture?

Returning to Hauser & Wirth Somerset for a second time (our first visit was reported on CFA six months ago) the main attractions were the Pipilotti Rist video installations, including the humorous, ‘Hiplights’ (2011), consisting of underwear strung between each of the buildings around the farmyard, previously seen at the Hayward Gallery in London in 2011.

 

Once more, Education officer, Debbie Hillyerd, kindly greeted us and reported enthusiastically about the high visitor numbers, but, even more importantly, of the enthusiasm and meaningful links being created with “the locals”.

A major aspect of the engagement with inhabitants of the area was not just through the educational workshop links with schools but by having an artist-in-residence programme, which from summer 2012 to summer 2013 brought Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist to Bruton. This immersive, sabbatical year enabled the artist to engross herself in the community and the idyllic surrounding landscape with a highly positive, personal outcome, as she has commented: “Many people I met in the little town of Bruton made me laugh so often with their English humour and have fascinated me with their ability to carry this tradition while looking into modernity. The year cleared my mind, body and soul and I am very thankful to everyone who helped me.”

 

The interest of the community has of course been reciprocated with an exhibition programme worthy of any contemporary gallery, in any major city, in Europe or beyond. Also on display were sculptural works by John Chamberlain (two of his large-scale, floor based ‘Gondolas’ from 1981/82) and a selection of Richard Tuttle’s multi-media assemblages from the 1980s, hung on the walls. (Incidentally, it would have been interesting to see these two exhibitions combined in the same gallery space, as the assemblages of everyday materials; Chamberlain’s metals and paints; and Tuttle’s aluminium, foil, plastic and rope ingredients could have played off of each other in their respective horizontal and vertical presentations).

 

But it was the excitement and high expectations of a Pipilotti Rist exhibition that had essentially drawn us to this transformed farmhouse. Rist had two internal installations on view, the first of which was ‘Sleeping Pollen’ (2014). In this large space, the Bourgeois Gallery, mirrored spheres were suspended from the ceiling, creating moving projections. As we walked around these sci-fi globes the projections were reflected from both the walls and the bodies of the visitors, who in effect, became players in the space. The modernity of which Rist has referenced above, includes a subversion of a distancing between viewer and artwork, so although one could not literally touch the sculptures, a physical, virtually tactile experience was achieved through the projection of the videos that wove the viewer into the work and created a sense of quiet drama and excitement.

 

In the next installation, in the Rhoades Gallery, the engagement slowed and was experienced more horizontally as the carpeted and rug filled floor invited participants to remove their shoes, lie down, relax and engage effortlessly. A video was projected onto two huge, wide walls that emphasised a Rorschach-like mirroring of human, plant and landscape forms. But rather than inkblots, the video presented continuously moving, filtered and layered sequences of colour shapes and forms that suggested a near psychedelic experience of the English landscape. The dreamy, colour-paradise, and utopian effects of the video engulfed the recumbent viewers, creating a truly immersive experience inviting visual and tactile sensations and engaging more than just the visual senses. A recording of banjo folk music by Heinz Rohrer accompanied the video screening; although one was tempted to image a Pink Floyd soundtrack, circa 1968, to the set the controls for the heart of Somerset.

 

The Fauve-like colour experience was to some extent a contrast to the actual winter landscape (albeit very mild in southern England this year) contained in the natural palette of the surrounding views, but doors and windows had been covered in translucent acetate in cherry red and moss green, creating a pleasant hazy luminosity that changed in intensity as the light altered throughout the day. As in many landscape artists’ work throughout history, an interpretation and re-presentation of the world, changes and establishes a certain way of seeing, thinking and psycho-physical relationships. Rist’s earlier reference to mind, body and soul reveals her vision to celebrate a sensuous, tactile and visually shared space: a kind of Eden, burgeoning with erotic, fecund and fertile possibilities which is continuously in a state of labile and liminal energies, where, as Heraclitus teaches us, nothing is really fixed.

February 27, 2015