Skip to main content

The World of Pipilotti Rist and Ever is Over All

Ever is Over All is an audio-video art installation by Pipilotti Rist, an eccentric, feminist, color loving visual artist from Switzerland. The piece in question consists of two overlapping projections projected onto a corner wall, two players and one sound system. 

 

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a56RPZ_cbdc 

One half of the piece is a colorful, oversaturated field of flowers. In the other half, you see a woman in a white dress carelessly strutting down the street. She is wielding a flower and smashing windows of cars parked alongside the sidewalk with the said flower - all that with a smile on her face. A female police officer walks by, not stopping the woman, but saluting her with a smile, as if telling her "I understand" or "Good job, sister"

Throughout this scene, a funky yet calm, almost exotic tune plays, with a female voice humming a dreamy melody and birds chirping ocassionaly. There is a powerful point, where the music stops for a moment and you only hear the sound of a car window breaking.

  Society's treatment and view on women throughout history has been fueled by sexism and misogyny. For a long time, we have been fed with unrealistic expectations and roles in regards to the gender we have been assigned at birth. Women are often seen as gentle and sweet, used as a decoration, incapable, superficial and marketable. But a human being is more than a simple label and such constraints of thinking and acting are not only unrealistic, but also harmful.

Rist has said in an interview "Color is Dangerous" that the inspiration behind this piece was her own  experience of mistreatment and the idea of women being a mere decorative item:

"Ever is Over All came from a very weak moment, when a guy, news redactor, gave me carte blanche (full discretionary) to do all the pages... I wanted to have a picture of an old lady in the title and he said: 'You have to change the cover, we will not sell this.' And I just had a picture that I would smash his car."

In this interview, you can catch Rist mentioning the fuzzy visuals and describing her work as "painting with video". She has also compared video art to handbags, which she has quite a collection of. "There is room in them for everything: painting, technology, language, music, movement, lousy flowing pictures, poetry, commotion, premonitions of death, sex, and friendliness."

The flower theme and oversaturated and fuzzy look of the video gives a dreamy feeling, that strongly contrasts with the violence aspect, but doesn't disrupt the dream at all. The viewer is easily transported into the world of the woman, who is unbothered and the aspect of violence is natural in her world.

To most people, including me at first, Pipilotti's work screams feminist art. This is what she had to say about critics categorizing her as that: "Politically, I am a feminist, but personally, I am not. For me, the image of a woman in my art does not stand just for women: she stands for all humans. I hope a young guy can take just as much from my art as any woman."

With that said, Ever is Over All doesn't have to be necessarily feminist, but it is open to even more interpretation than what I thought of at first glance, such as general freedom.

As a person that happens to identify as nonbinary, I really enjoy this statement. Pipilotti understands how important mutual respect and understanding of everyone in society is and she acknowledges the unfortunate twisting of actually important aspects in 3rd wave feminism, such as feminists "hating all men" or a seemingly endless list of "made up genders" (which are actually all umbrella terms), resulting in misunderstanding with the masses and general mockery of the whole movement.

 

Pipilotti Rist is overall a very charming and fun artist with many interesting aspects about her, from her fashion sense to her witty personality and undeniably honest passion for what she does. I mean, who else would name their child Himalaya? From climate change advocacy to Vogue interviews and mainstream pop music, she has something for everyone.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Yayoi Kusama - Infinity Mirrored Rooms

The "Infinity Mirrored Rooms" are a series of works by Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama. They are immersive artworks incorporating the viewer and all sorts of artistic additions taken from Kusama’s incredible imagination. Her recent piece, ‘Infinity Mirrored Room - Filled with the Brilliance of Life’, shown here at the Tate Modern in London, features a dark room with hundreds of twinkling LEDs, reflected in a shallow pool of water, with the walls and ceiling covered in mirrors. The galaxy-like lights are reflected in the room of mirrors. As a result, the viewer is transported into an otherworldly space that seems to go on endlessly. This work is incredibly immersive. The viewer travels through the space by following integrated walkways, they may shift and change position and view of the work in order to better see it and understand it. In contrast to the typical experience of viewing art in a gallery, Kusama’s work escapes the canvas, taking overseemingly huge amounts of sp...
Post a Comment
Read more

Madonna's Banned Music Video

The music video of Madonna's lead single and album title song "American Life" was so controversial, it was banned because of how explicit and shocking it was. Because of the controversy, there are 2 music videos for this song, both directed by Jonas Åkerlund. The second video is heavily censored compared to the first one, with the singer simply lip syncing in front of various national flags floating in the background. The original video is centered in a fashion show that is themed around the American military and slowly progressing to show shock elements, even including gore, to portray the cruelty of war. Even the directors cut that I have linked is missing one of the last scenes which portrays the singer throwing a hand grenade at George W. Bush, him catching it and using it as a lighter to light his cigar, which is one of the main reasons that this particular video was banned. The lyrics talk about Madonna's political and religious views. How the American dream ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Vincent Van Gogh - Flowering Plum Tree - Mental Health, Genious and Japonism

Van Gogh, together with his brother Theo, participated in the craze of collecting cheap ukiyo-e prints. To quote The Guardian: “The artistic relationship between the European avant garde and Japan in the 19th century is one such cross-cultural flow. There’s plenty of evidence that the (mostly French) artists who laid the foundations of modernism were obsessed with the images of Hokusai, Hiroshige, Utagawa Kuniyoshi and other masters who took popular, brightly coloured woodblock printmaking to a zenith of sophistication in 18th and early 19th-century Japan.” We can find evidence of this very easily, as you can see Van Gogh's ukiyo-e collection portrayed in many of his artworks, that do not necessarily have anything to do with Japan. The walls of his studio were covered by an assortment of oriental prints. A good example is his incredibly famous “Self-Portrait with a Bandaged Ear” from 1889, painted two years after he recreated Hiroshige’s garden scenery. Behind the artist...
Post a Comment
Read more