Take off your shoes. It is encouraged. This is the first time there has been carpet in the Atrium of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Sit on the big, circular sofa. Sit in the middle. There are pillows for your comfort. You are inside a giant eye, the dead center of 5,354 cubic meters of space. The room is large. You will need to turn your head to take it all in. On your left, a wild pig devours an apple in the grass. On your right, a naked girl is doing the same. Then the girl starts to bleed. Then the blood turns into tulips. The tulips are 25 feet tall and surround you on three sides. Now the tulips are being crushed. Now they’ve become the bright red branches of your bronchial cavity.

Pipilotti Rist, the multimedia artist responsible for this immersive experience, titled “Pour Your Body Out,” started her career in the early ’80s making Super 8 films while in art school in Switzerland. Her work deals with sound, color, nature, and the human body, often her own. During her career, she has used Beatles songs, wannabe porno music, and her own voice, frequently sped up to a high-pitched squeak to accompany her surreal visuals. In Pour Your Body Out, the music, which emanates from underneath the couch, sounds like a cross between the whining of an electric violin and the deep moans of a whale. The entire experience is meant to “reconcile you with the perception of your own body and the surrounding environment through the acceptance of the unbelievable variety of beautiful and ugly forms that make up human beings and the world,” according to Rist.

Rist’s most notable works include Ever Is Over All (1997), in which she smashes car windows in slow motion with a large flower-shaped pipe, and Selbstlos im Lavabad (1994), a small video installation about one inch in circumference embedded in the floorboards of the lobby at P.S.1. in Queens. Rist received Premio 2000 of the Venice Biennale in 1997 and was nominated for the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. She currently lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.

Watch a clip from “Pour Your Body Out.”

“Pour Your Body Out” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through February 2.

KEYWORDS: installation, MoMA, Pipilotti Rist, video art

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