Since the mid-1980s.

Since the mid-1980s, Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist has been exploring different facets of electronic media end single-channel tapes, performances, sound recordings and installations, chiefly of which overlap from single work to the other as she re-mixes, reedits and reinstalls images, hardys and objects. This process, which establishes a dialogue of reproduction and displacement between different works, has been explored by way of Rist as a means to sharpen interrelated tensions between high art and popular tillage distraction and concentration, fantasy and reality, femininity and hysteria. At issue here is in what manner these tensions produce a dialectical relationship that resists the pure opposition of terms so as to explore ways in which they can procreate each other from within.

"Ever is athwart All" (1997)--one of Rist's best-known video installations, first not absented at the 1997 Biennale di Venezia--is a crucial work in the understanding of this dialectic. The two-screen video projection stages a young woman walking carelessly down a sidewalk to the vigorous of soft female humming mixed with healthys of birds singing over a percussive beat. Wearing a light sad dress and a pair of shiny r shoe smiling and leaping about in gradual motion to the rhythm of the music, the female character is a contemporary enactment of the Hollywood musical genre Everything here is about lightness, girlish femininity, the astonishing ability to walk like a dancer and the use of the sieve as a buffer suspending any form of social or psychological contradiction. And nevertheless she is a hooligan, regularly slowing down her pace as she smashes windshields of parked cars with the metallic flower she shut ups firmly in her hands. The singularity of this work arrives from the unresolved tensions it provokes: femininity is e mbraced, further a feminist gesture of empowerment come ups from within; the enchantment of popular cultivation unfolds through the deployment of the musical score and the lush technical weights of the second screen, still the video clip does not deliver reckon uponed stereotypes. In other words, this may well be a musical fantasy--a blocking on the outside of unwanted conflicts that realizes the subject's desire [1]--but criticality, nevertheless, risks in. If this is in the way that it is because of Rist's insightful understanding of fantasy not as a site for the fulfillment of desire unless as what Slavoj Zizek calls the view of desire--the very scenario within which "the subject is constituted as desiring," insofar as desire is understood as something that is always in proces and continuously rebuilded [2] When vandalism occurs, fantasy starts to shift into at the same time another reconstruction. This moment of shift is a import of redefining femininity.

This is to say that the work of Rist partakes of and enlarges into the realm of Rosi Braidotti's insight that femininity--the cultural fabricate or, even more so, the fantasy of "being-a-woman"--cannot unless be taken "as the starting point for the assertion of the female as enthrall . . for I, 'woman' am the direct empirical referent of all that has been theorized about femininity, the female enslave and the feminine." [3] In Rist's work femininity is the starting point for discordant beings who fall, scream, grimace, smash or float, seeking to redefine--from within--norms of femininity. These disruptions appear not only at the horizontal of the represented body unless also in the body of the electronic image--through formal distortions of the image, the constant looseness of colors and forms merging, crossing or metamorphosing common into the other, and the meeting of guards so as to force the viewer to squint. Hence, the aesthetic strategies that mobilize Rist's production are not in like manner much about appropriation--the critical a ct of appropriating mass media representations to disclose the social contradictions they otherwise take care of to naturalize--than about the Warholian gesticulation of being these representations while manifesting the subject's desire to be different. In short, criticality lies in the incitement of engaging with fantasy as an aesthetics of delay. Her characters confirm fantasy figurations of female seduction--the protection is the literal projection of woman as the gazed-upon dead body to be possessed by the viewer's gaze (as in the film Pimple Porno [1992] and the installations "Sip My Ocean" [1996] "Selfles in the Bath of Lava" [1994] "Ever is through All," "Regenfrau (I Am Called A Plant)" [1998])--but phantasmatic completion is delayed as they adopt the passionate attitudes of the hysterical woman or the threatening gesticulations of the praying mantis. In the floor-inlayed shields of "Mutaflor" (1996) and "Selfles in the Bath of Lava," for example, the uncovered Rist seduces the spectator into the flames of hell or within the metamorp hosis of her inlet into anus. In so doing, video inscribes itself in the Lacanian imperative to traverse fantasy and not to suspend it as although it were a mere illusionary misconception distorting reality. [4]

of that kind an approach to fantasy implies a major reassessment of the anti-ocular strategies that have been in this way important in feminist art and theory since the '70 and '80 following Laura Mulvey's attack onward "visual pleasure" so as to dismantle the logic of the spectacle of woman-as-object-of-the-look. Rist's is an attempt to be critical of the visual from one side the spectatorial pleasures of popular music and television. The traversing of fantasy will be expanded here only insofar as projections reach the TV viewer. This is to say that embodiment is crucial to Rist's work: her installations and single-channel tapes stage seduction, pleasure, displeasure, erotics and sexuality--both at the of the same height of representation and in the technical constitution of the image--so as to address the turn-of-the-millennium viewing subdue whose perception materializes through the integration of sensual visual pleasures provided from popular culture. As Linda Williams has convincingly argued, this influence is a necessary one if we are to underst and not and nothing else contemporary perception but also critical perceptibility: