Pipilotti Rist. Ever Is Over All, 1997; two-channel video and sound installation, color; 4:07; dimensions variable. Sound by Anders Guggisberg and Rist. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Ever Is Over All (1997) first reeled me in—a video vignette that received extra pop-culture attention this year when one of Beyoncé’s music videos from Lemonade cited it. In Rist’s video, a White woman wears a light blue dress and red pumps. She grins euphorically as she struts down a sidewalk, carrying a cast-metal replica of a flower. She repeatedly swings the flower into the windows of parked cars, glowing all the while. A White female police officer passes her and nods approvingly. In this utopian wonderland, a (White) woman is free to move about public space as she pleases, with an expression of what might be a gesture of female rage. It’s a mixed bag (which Beyoncé’s video emphasizes): Are we expected to smile through the pain? Is our anger only acceptable when it is aesthetically pleasing?

Throughout the four floors, Rist’s recurring themes of gender, nature, and human bodies emerge through differing strategies in video and multimedia installations. Rist’s tactic of spatially manipulating the viewing experience repeats throughout. For example, a collection of Rist’s video pieces is viewable only by inserting one’s head into triangular boxes that protrude from the walls. There is no disembodied viewing here, as viewers must feel themselves move in order to watch.

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest, 2016; single-channel video installations; installation view. Courtesy of New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

Any initial discomfort quickly turns to seduction. In one corner of a darkened room, two video pieces, Worry Will Vanish (2014) and Mercy Garden (2014), loop on the conjoined screens. Visitors recline on large, pebble-shaped cushions on the floor. I initially hesitated to join them, feeling conscious of how on display my own body would be. Reclining is a gendered pose, too, presenting a certain kind of to-be-looked-at-ness that is historically associated with women and traditional femininity. I felt surprised that Rist would initiate this possibility for viewing, but I eventually accepted the invitation for intimacy, drawn in as I was by the video. The seamless transition between the films and their visual similarities made viewing them like one long film. I interpreted them as one entity: a poetic combination of plant close-ups with human flesh.

Pipilotti Rist. Mercy Garden, 2014; two-channel video and sound installation, color, with carpet; 10:30; dimensions variable. Sound by Heinz Rohrer. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

On a different floor, another of Rist’s viewing environments,4th Floor to Mildness (2016), was created for the exhibition and takes this experience to the next level, as she provides numerous beds for visitors from which to watch projections on the ceiling. The footage for this environment is similarly dreamy and nature-focused. In these unusual reclining positions, I lost myself in the work. I could feel the comfort of Rist’s imagery. I felt in awe.

Awe is one of those words that embarrasses us today. When I first entered the exhibition, I bristled at the museum’s description of her work as “[fusing] the natural world with the technological sublime.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines “sublime” as “of very great excellence and beauty; producing an overwhelming sense of awe or another high emotion through being vast and grand.” As a buzzword and the topic of much discussion in high art theory and aesthetics, the sublime is something I typically resist in all discussions of art, associating it with paintings of epic natural environments (oil painting, of course) that invoke the horror and magnitude of a patriarchal God. But Rist makes me want to give it a second chance, even where I least expect it.

Pipilotti Rist. 4th Floor to Mildness, 2016; video and sound installation with two projections onto two amorphous screens hanging horizontally from the ceiling, single and double beds with pillows and covers, four projectors, two moving mirrors, four media players, audio system, black sprinkler net, curtain, carpet, wall paint, neon; 8:11/8:11/7:03/6:19 mins. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

The installation Pixelwald (Pixel Forest) (2016) is more atmospheric than anything, and doesn’t clearly align with the other works. Figurative images of bodies and plants are absent, in contrast with her earlier works foregrounding naked bodies and sex, such as the playfully erotic Pickelporno (Pimple Porno) (1992). Nonetheless, walking through the space is delightful and, in line with the other installations, invites viewers to feel their own embodied presence. Strands of glowing lights in textured crystalline resin orbs hang from the ceiling, like jewel-toned jellyfish, illuminating the darkness of the room. The colors shift, undulating in time to gentle instrumental music. It almost feels like a cheap trick, but it works—this mass-appeal magic of Christmas lights installed in a gesture toward infinity. Pixel Forest might be an underwater hallucination or travel among stars. It’s easy to get lost here alongside viewers taking selfie after selfie. Though it’s simple, Pixel Forest cultivates its own form of awe.

Pipilotti Rist. Pixelwald (Pixel Forest), 2016; hanging LED light installation and media player; 20:55; dimensions variable. Courtesy of the Artist, Hauser & Wirth, Luhring Augustine, and New Museum. Photo: Maris Hutchinson/EPW Studio.

The installation adds to this new, accessible sublime that Rist puts forth. What Rist reveals is that the vast and grand is from this earth: It is human, it is plant, it can be conveyed through technology, it is even candy-colored and simple. The sublime could be ours again, removed from its loftiness—a newly humbled word, rooted in life, only whispering of what could be bigger than us.

Pipilotti Rist: Pixel Forest will be on view at the New Museum in New York through January 15, 2017.

Cover image of Mass Effect, featuring Cory Arcangel, Drei Klavierstücke op. 11, 2009 (still); single-channel video, sound, color; 15:58. Courtesy of the Artist and Team Gallery, New York.

Although I’m familiar with contemporary art history and theory, before reading this I could not have easily named artists who seemed to clearly fall within the genre (for example: Cory Arcangel, Petra Cortright, Seth Price, Cao Fei, Trevor Paglen, Hito Steyerl, Ryan Trecartin, and Angela Washko). Internet art has an expansive definition: art that is either made with, for, and/or in response to the internet. So, like the art historian Claire Bishop in her controversial 2012 essay, “Digital Divide: Contemporary Art and New Media” (originally published in Artforum and reproduced in the anthology), I found myself wondering why the art world doesn’t seem to have a flourishing relationship with new media. Her essay received substantial and hostile criticism of what was perceived as her ignorance of existing new-media and internet-art communities, enough to prompt the editors of Mass Effect to invite Bishop to pen a follow-up response for the anthology, which is worth reading for its additional context and contemplation about the topic.

Seth Price. Dispersion, 2002–08. Courtesy of the Artist and Petzel, New York.

The anthology has a chronological structure and begins with a genre I’d never heard of before reading the introduction. “Net art” is the term for the early generation of internet art, created during the time when the internet was clunky and less accessible to the masses; a relatively small number of users were capable of creating content. In our current age—when creative consumers habitually curate their newsfeeds, when Pinterest makes collecting content easy and addictive—it’s hard to remember that the internet was once unwieldy. At one point in time, the mere act of folks posting and sharing content—in “surf clubs”—held its moment as a burgeoning, creative, pre-Tumblr practice.[1] The year 2002 marks an important turning point, and the bulk of the anthology focuses on the period since then, the history of which is admittedly new but nonetheless rich. After 2002, the internet ceased to be a new medium and became a mass medium, a more widely accessible (though one still dependent on various socioeconomic factors) and assumed condition.[2]

Guthrie Lonergan. Excerpt from webpage presentation for the “We Did It Ourselves” lecture at Light Industry, 2009 (screen capture of HTML webpage). Courtesy of the Artist.

I found myself working hard to read most of the essays. I’m no stranger to slogging through academic texts laden with theory and specialized references. And I don’t find digital technologies inherently alienating, though at times they seem mysterious. But I found myself craving more simple and accessible language from the book. Often I latched onto transcribed interviews between artists and curators, hungry for shorter sentences and clear statements: writing that made me want to spend some time with the art. Throughout the book, I noticed a tendency to foreground historical and theoretical justifications above nuanced visual descriptions and any mention of emotions. Might the subject of a fresh genre be an opportunity to change the style and institution of academic art writing? The pressure on the editors to adequately historicize a semi-new medium with the pomp of traditional art history must have been great, but I found myself wondering how this anthology could be different. What role might an accompanying online exhibition or publication series play? Both editors are affiliated with Rhizome and the New Museum, which just this week launched a comprehensive digital exhibition of net art; though not clearly associated with this publication, it promises an engaging, perhaps more accessible, experience.

Martine Syms. Black Vernacular, 2013; illustration for the lecture “Black Vernacular: Reading New Media” at SXSW Interactive 2013. Courtesy of the Artist.

Of course, internet art and its accompanying texts fall prey to the same pitfalls of other genres. The predominantly male scene repeats chauvinist patterns, despite one’s hope that new technologies and the knowledge they bring would have a positive, equalizing effect.[3] Notably, the anthology’s essays that specifically address dynamics of race and gender (such as those by Martine Syms and Karen Archey) fall toward the end, indicating that they are the most recent publications. Perhaps this is adequately representational of the growing canon of the literature. But it is heartening to find such works included as the latest and, hopefully, most impactful of the genre, representing the springboard from which the next generation will launch.

Notes:

[1] Guthrie Lonergan, “‘We Did It Ourselves!’ AKA ‘My Favorites’: Volume 1, 2005 to 2009,” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter‬ (MIT: 2015), 184.

[2] Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter, “Hard Reboot: An Introduction to Mass Effect” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter‬ (MIT: 2015), xv.

[3] Paraphrased from “Aleksandra Domanović and Oliver Laric in Conversation with Caitlin Jones” in Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century, ed. Lauren Cornell and Ed Halter‬ (MIT: 2015), 116.