Pipilotti Rist at MoMA

Pipilotti Rist’s site-specific video installation, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), casts the normally austere MoMA in a warm, fuzzy glow --- literally. Her trippy images, projected on the gallery's three walls, feature supreme close-ups of grass, apples, pigs, women (and their lady parts), flowers, and other objects in nature, along with a soundtrack rooted in electronica and trance. Gone is the metallic, phallic Broken Obelisk, replaced by a huge purple couch. A sign encourages visitors to sit down, take their shoes off, and make new friends; the space, reconfigured in every way, is Rist’s attempt to encourage visitors to meditate before heading through the museum’s other galleries.

When we visited, the place was packed, as if people were just too relaxed (having too much fun?) to bring themselves to tackle the harshness of most of MoMA’s permanent collection. Critics too have delighted in the Swedish artist’s work: Jerry Saltz argues that it’s a response to the museum’s misogyny; Karen Rosenberg claims that it “reflects an obsessive curiosity about nature.” Both like what she’s done with the place. And we did too --- to a point. The light splashes and oozes, filling the huge atrium (the cubic measurement mentioned in the title) with color and movement, but then the visual-and-aural combo can suddenly become too much, necessitating a retreat into the cool, orderly galleries above.