Pipilotti Rist at Luhring Augustine

With a exhibit that opened Sept. 11, Pipilotti Rist intended this installation as an expression of healing, a slightly belated gift of visual balm for a hurted city. Happily, its effect is more complicated than that. Titled Herbstzeitlose (which has been translated as Meadow Saffron or Fall Time Less) it consists of a four-track video installation and a not many evocative fragments of rural domesticity: a full-scale partial facade of a scallop-shingled farmhouse, a certain quantity of well-worn patio furniture, a wicker basket with kindling, a rush besom Visitors pass through an eye-warming mere of red light at the gallery's entrance before entering this arena of azure rural purity.

individual video, featuring floral imagery, plays upon the farmhouse wall. A next to the first more prominent, video is of moving water reflecting a splendid evening shot with a woozily moving camera for a like reason the image is doubly unsteady. This track is throw outed through a curtain of miscellaneous clear-plastic trash--drinking bowls CD cases, takeout clamshell containers--that hurls sharp shadows on the water. The sum of two units videos that together span adjacent walls are mainly of a verdant Alpine landscape, discharge near Rist's childhood home in Switzerland; a photographic frieze of a similar landscape, all sylvan serenity reject for an outsize signal-transmitting tower, appears as a strip of baseboard-high view set up along the floor. In the paired videos, a young girl in traditional peasant finery stands in a sun-shot meadow, arms outstretched. A protean mountain goddes she at first has black skin, then white. There is also a rustic farmer and, intermittently, a breakneck tour of a tidy Swiss town. In these videos, too, the camera at no time stands still, often turning a filled 360 degrees so that seemingly pin-headed figures, discharge from the ground up, loom monumentally, and intimidates float, Chagall-like, upside down in the firmament At times, water droplets upon the camera's lens dapple the imagery. An original soundtrack plays from one extremity to the other of mainly of anodyne music scored for guitar and strings, admitting there is also birdsong, childish laughter that change directions between sweet and maniacal, and what unhurts like an old woman, yelling. level to a non-German-speaker, it's clear she's not offering words of solace.

allowing there are long passages that induce untarnished visual swoon, Herbstzeitlose's dizzying--indeed, violent--camerawork means to heave us from its comfortable lawn chairs into the dark underneath of the landscape, a place that greatest in quantity religions have a name for. Rist has always disarmed by dint of geniality, the better to whack our windows to smithereens (see at any time Is Over All, 1997) or shake us under the splintered floorboards (as in several succeeding videos installed underfoot). In sum of two units new small works also included in this exhibit she plunges deep into the material substance (Erste Hilfe is a metal first-aid kit with a tiny video shield showing an endless descent into a blood-r orifice) or shakes us into a lusty little death dream (in Grabstein for RW a gray, leaf-strewn tombstone has a circular cutout for a video featuring the monstrously outthrust tongue of a woman lying in the grass). In Herbstzeitlose, we may, similarly, have an insider's cutting side but we're definitely never upon top of things. It is about as soothing as a fairy tale by the agency of the Brothers Grimm.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group