Visual Journal: Entry 7

 To discover the author’s main idea within a critical analysis it is useful to analyse their essay, and identify which steps of art criticism are present. In this online article by Robert Storr, he reviews an art exhibition by the Swiss video artist, Pipilotti Rist (born 1962), at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, in New York. The first paragraph begins with Storr reminding us that, “…video as a medium can do more than provide a platform for talking heads”. This sentence is integral to the rest of his article and acts as a wonderful prelude to his analysis of Rist’s visual work. He describes Rist as a “lusty feminist flower-child” who was born too late to experience the hippie movement first-hand, but uses her “position to look back on them critically” because unlike the original counter-culturists, who became jaded by the “Utopian fantasies”, Rist “deployed a sensual ethos” to “embrace such idealism without any apparent cynicism”. This reveals that Storr, who lived through the 1960s, is similarly jaded. Yet despite this, he is gradually entranced by “the abiding worth of such optimism” in Rist’s work.

 We can find some clear examples of art criticism in the fifth paragraph of this essay, when Storr recounts his experience of a video installation called “To Mildness (2016)”. Firstly, he describes it with a variety of colourful words that create a vivid mental image:

… they consist of complex digital montages of multiple views of plant growth just above and below the waterline of a calm lake or pond suffused with multicolored organic matter and occasionally disturbed by body parts bobbing or plowing through this wetlands flora; hands, feet, faces, and one enormous, Moby-Dick-like breast.

 He then begins using more technical terms, as he proceeds to further analyse how parts of the video work together to produce contrasting scenes and rhythmic visual effects:

All of these clips, which also include extreme, subtly disorienting close-ups—the breast—and the clever superposition of spatially inverted or tilted glimpses of the bubbling surface of the same lake or pond, plus periodic bursts of mud or seeds or natural powders.

 Finally, the paragraph concludes with Storr interpreting how the combined effects of the audio and video slowly began to affect him personally, as a viewer experiencing the installation:

As annoyingly unintelligible as the libretto was much of the time, in short order my resistance to these sights and sounds gave way to an attentive surrender to the lulling amniotic flux of a liquid universe, and the subdued murmur of the recorded words emanating from another dimension.

 By identifying these elements of art criticism in Storr’s critical analysis of the exhibition, it becomes clear that his main idea is the realisation that video has become an underutilised medium that can and should allow great artistic exploration. He believes that Rist’s work is an interpretive iteration of a nostalgic idea of the flower power sixties era, brought forward into the modern era:

“… Rist’s effect is very “Back to the Sixties,” but by means unavailable in those days and therefore not merely a restyling of a previous aesthetic.”

 Obviously, Rist’s work is made in the current time, with a different political climate and social culture, but Storr realizes that the idea of a sixties nostalgia can clearly be recognized in her work, and although she cannot completely personify and reiterate the past, she nevertheless proceeds to explore it in her own way. He compares her work to the New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague) group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, who combined objective and subjective realism with an authorial commentary to create a narrative ambiguity of unanswered questions:

It is like watching a stripped down nouvelle vague movie of the 1960s remade by Steven Spielberg, with contemporary film industry production values effectively substituted for the spirit of make-it-up-as-you-go anarchy.

 He also states that her videos, being an art piece, are able to become more than what the public traditionally thinks of video as a medium i.e. a movie, or a news program that merely consists of static “talking heads”:

Throughout, Rist’s video sleight of hand paradoxically renders a tactile, olfactory reality in hypnotically optical terms.

 Since Rist breaks free and reaches outside the mould she can explore the multifaceted world of the sixties, albeit through the lens of a modern perspective. She uses advanced video equipment and editing techniques to produce her films, and provide us with a visual spectacle of what she believes someone in the sixties could have created if they had access to such technology:

Deploying relatively simple special effects—digitally increasing contrasts and denaturing color, dropping out shadows or increasing highlights to the point that forms break up—in support of medium-tech strategies involving montage, mirroring, and uncanny juxtaposition, Rist has conjured a pantheistic pleasure dome.

 Throughout her work, Rist embraces the idealistic part of the general public’s idea of the sixties without any cynicism, because she had not lived through that era, and uses this to create her optimistic view of sixties culture, which is something Storr only criticized because he himself had lived through that era and experienced that not everything was the happy-go-lucky dream assumed by most people.
 From these quotes, we can see that, despite his initially sceptical attitude, Storr has fallen under Rist’s spell and become enchanted by the nostalgia provided by her optimistic visions of an alternative reality, where free love was allowed to spread and prosper indefinitely.

References:
1. http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/12/26/pipilotti-rist-pleasure-dome/ (2016).
2. http://barrymiles.co.uk/all-books/in-the-seventies/ (2011).
3. http://www.newwavefilm.com/about/history-of-french-new-wave.shtml (2008).