Please come in and relax, but don’t walk those dirty sneakers all over my carpet!

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters)
Museum of Modern Art, New York
November 19, 2008–February 2, 2009

It is redundant to state that contemporary can offend. However, it is necessary to acknowledge, at a point, if art focuses too single-mindedly on attacking viewers’ perceptions, assumptions or complacencies, then a response of alienation rather than enlightenment is sure to occur. The Swiss video artist Pipilotti Rist responds to this sense of ‘viewer assault’ with her installation Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters) (2009), currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This mammoth installation, filling all 7354 cubic meters of the museum’s atrium, uses video projections of natural environments, soft furnishings and an organic soundtrack to encourage visitors to simply relax.

Rist’s video dominates the gallery. Images of flora and fauna are projected onto the three four-story high walls of the atrium. The colors are seductively saturated. Tulips, apples, worms, water, a naked girl, a hairy hog: all pan across the walls, writhing slowly. The giant scale of the images, and the ground-level perspective, casts the viewer as an ant in this bizarre natural world, and with a bug-like understanding we have no awareness of a larger narrative. Our world is reduced to a series of sequences – a hog eats an apple, a girl pushes a flower petal up her nose – unfolding to the sound of insect-like humming and droning.

The theme of slightly grotesque beauty flows through to Rist’s decorating choices. The floor is covered with plush puce carpet, upon which sits an even plusher white rug. The upper-gallery balconies are covered with fuchsia curtains. While in the middle of the gallery sits a large circular teal lounge.

Pipilotti Rist, Pour Your Body Out (7354 Cubic Meters), installation view (curator Klaus Biesenbach explains all here)

A wall text reads, “Please feel as liberated as possible and move as freely as you can or want to!” Rist’s embracing philosophy attempts to make intimate and accessible a space that might otherwise be considered unsympathetic and elitist. Judging from the crowd of viewers filling the atrium on the cold Wednesday morning when I visited, Rist has been successful. Every space on the white rug was filled with bodies; couples snuggled on the lounge, babies crawled about on floor, and singles sprawled anywhere they could.

Rist has given MoMA’s atrium an extreme makeover, and she plays the gracious host inviting guests to come and experience the new renovations. Although like a house-proud, yet faintly uptight host, Rist requests visitors, “Please remove your shoes before stepping onto the while carpet or sitting on the sofa and please make new friends at the museum.”

The incongruous request to ‘remove your shoes’ and ‘make friends’ at the same time hints that Pour Your Body Out is not quite the love-in it originally seemed. Does taking our shoes off makes us feel so liberated we can talk to strangers? Do we really trust the lady who matches puce carpet with box-pleated fuchsia curtains?

Rist’s transformation of MoMA’s atrium is remarkable. Her video projections are beautiful yet sinister, and her furnishings transform a through-space to a destination. However, Rist’s suggestions for how one can respond to Pour Your Body Out are slightly irritating. While her enthusiasm is admirable – “Rolling around and singing is also allowed!” – her instructions are invasive. Unsophisticated ideas of ‘rolling around and singing’ do not coalesce with the languid atmosphere Rist has created. This in evidenced by the swarm of visitors lounging upon the central couch. Like bees to honey, it is an instinct to be intrigued by Pour Your Body Out, not a directive.