Friday, July 19, 2002

Rist versus Lachowicz

A forty year old man talking about two women artists from the Nineties can be "DANGER, Will Robinson!...DANGER!"

So against my usual affinity for things art historical, something guttural and endearing about Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist and her videos seem very vox populi in nature given the poetry of flowing narrative imagery. Is it her familiarity of MTV that she utilizes to seduce my couch potato television myopia? Or could it be her manipulation of the medium to merge the popular cultural world associated as slacker into a universalized statement about "being a girl"? Whatever it is, even Chicago White Sox-watching me (So Hurtus Maximus is now really the Big Skirt), the typical "guy" can access its contemporary sense of beauty.

"Sip My Ocean" is her video installation of the Chris Isaak song, "Wicked Game" that reworks the notion of the remake as a universal value translated. Rist dually projected her piece as a mirrored image into a gallery corner at the MCA. She sings her version of this song from a hauntingly feminist perspective; accenting certain passages, changing the inflection in her voice to the point of unexpected screams. I stood transfixed by the power of how this artist transformed through appropriation something created by another artist to be reclaimed as her own. It bespeaks of the politics of perception through interpretation, of the want to be someone else through your own eyes or mind.

The same cannot be said for me about Rachel Lachowictz. As much as her work references the history of art, it is her strategy of appropriation (ala Sherrie Levine) through the specific material of lipstick to remake Donald Judd or Marcel Duchamp that fails eventually. No doubt, her feminization-when I saw versions of the urinals at LA County Museum of Art-operates successfully. But then the redundancy of her idea begins to lose steam. How many other items or works need to be recast in lipstick before we get the point? Somehow Lachowictz needs to incorporate other "girl" material or concepts to reengage the viewer to see something fresh that adds newer dialogue to her increasingly trite work.