Pipilotti Rist’s Sip my Ocean is simply narcissistic biennale filler

Behold the superficial and trashy production of a rich girl who has managed to convince the international art world to take her seriously.

Artist Pipilotti Rist with one of her MCA exhibition works. Picture: Hollie Adams.

One of the most annoying things about exhibitions used to be, not so very long ago, the compulsion of visitors to take photos of the pictures on the walls. Very occasionally this may be justified when someone wants a shot of a rare and unreproduced work or a close-up of a signature, a background detail or the quality of the brushwork.

In the vast majority of cases, though, it is simply a snap of the work that the visitors are after. But what are they going to do with all these pictures? In some cases, they will also take a shot of the label, but in most cases there is no attempt to record the relevant facts of authorship, subject or date. Above all, the picture is ­almost never taken after a time spent gazing at the work; instead, it is a substitute for looking, a kind of alibi for not looking.

Young women at Pipilotti Rist’s Sip My Ocean installation. Photo: Jessica Maurer.

But will these pictures be carefully examined at home instead? Is close examination simply being deferred? Unfortunately this is hardly likely, and if there were any intention of studying the works in greater depth, one would buy the catalogue. No, the taking of pictures in ­exhibitions is essentially a way of avoiding engagement with art while at the same time somehow asserting a small act of appropriation and ownership.

Taking photos in exhibitions — and even ­elbowing the genuinely interested aside to do so — became much worse with the arrival of the smartphone, which meant that everyone was permanently armed with a photographic device. But then it rapidly evolved to a whole new level of absurdity when visitors began turning their backs on the works of art to take a self-portrait with them.

Rist’s 4th Floor to Mildness. Picture: Anna Kucera

At this point it was clear that the art had been reduced to a mere background for the staging of the self, which by definition needs new and picturesque settings. Thus Sculpture by the Sea, for example, with the unbeatable combination of beautiful natural setting and endlessly diverse sculptural objects, makes the perfect location and is duly overrun with selfie-takers.

The point of the selfie, of course, is to be published on social media as part of a continuous, endless construction of the illusion of the self for the benefit of one’s peers and ultimately, ­because of the naturalisation of the illusion, for oneself. Social media, in this way, is essentially a medium for the expression and proliferation of narcissism.

The use of social media and the publication of self-images are overwhelmingly dominated by girls and young women, who have long been the object of commercial exploitation of female narcissism, one aspect of which is the so-called internalisation of the male gaze, in which girls learn to construct themselves as objects of the desire of men while believing that they are doing it for themselves.

Rist’s Serious Fantasist. Photo: Jessica Maurer.

The Pipilotti Rist exhibition at the MCA, as it turned out, was like falling down Alice’s rabbit hole and landing in the frothy, pink and futile world of social media mirages. The show itself is swimming in pinks and pastels, with flashing lights, hanging gauzy curtains, fragmentary projections, rooms of suspended baubles and so on. But most fascinating of all was the audience.

You can tell a lot about artists from the audiences they attract, and here it was overwhelmingly young women. They evidently thought the exhibition was utterly cool, but not because it disturbed them with the slightest thought or doubt: simply because it was like a giant set for selfies or for pictures taken by friends on their own phones.

In every room, in front of every colourful light effect, in the hall full of hanging shiny baubles, there were pictures being taken in all directions. In the hall of hanging silvery objects, an attendant advised us on entry to walk through the set path rather than weaving through the hangings, but this proved hard to do because at every point the path was crowded with girls posing for portraits.

A still from Pipilotti Rist’s Ever Is Over All.

Later, outside and in front of another set of projections on the wall, I realised that several young women were taking turns walking through the moving projections, making little film clips. I began to wonder whether this was not perhaps the more interesting artistic phenomenon, as though Rist had really set up a kind of interactive space in which members of the public were invited to participate and create their own artworks.

Except that unfortunately there was nothing really artistic about any of this, since its aim was only to produce images of glamour, flattering and exotic shots that would look seductive and impressive to others and would on no account reveal any of the truth, the complexity, the loneliness or sadness of the girls so eagerly performing for the cameras.

And why all this is so interesting is that it ­really does reveal something that is at the very core of Rist’s world. Her work is ultimately the superficial and trashy production of a rich girl who has managed to convince the international art world to take her seriously. For the past 20 years or so she has been on the standard shopping lists used by biennale curators all over the world, and because such curators are always in need of content to fill up their exhibitions, she is likely to be recycled through quite a few more international shows before she is eventually dropped for a newer or more edgy name.

A key to the whole of her work is provided by a video shown near the beginning of the exhibition. A young and attractive woman — the artist in 1997 — walks down a street in slow motion, apparently beaming with happiness. And then suddenly she lifts a kind of mace-like object that she is carrying and smashes it into the window of a parked car. Still beaming, she carries on her walk, until once again she ­smashes another car’s window, and so on.

This work, oddly described by one writer as “a vivaciously feminist call to arms”, is in reality the epitome of the alienation of the narcissist. The protagonist may be having a great time ­destroying the property of strangers but you ­really don’t have to think very hard to imagine what it would be like to be an office worker hurrying to their job or a mother taking her children to school, and coming downstairs from their apartment to find that their car had been collateral damage in someone else’s joyful and uninhibited self-expression.

Is it pedantic to make this objection? But how else can we possibly interpret a work that explicitly evokes and, more worryingly, celebrates a state of narcissistic, even hysterical dissociation that in the real world we would associate with mental illness?

The exhibition drifts through rooms full of fragmented video projections that alternately evoke aspects of the body or of natural forms, flowers, colours and so on, in an undifferen­tiated flow of superficial sensory stimulation which, as we have already seen, is mainly ­appealing as a background to social media portraits. The most interesting clip is one that is projected on the floor, below the visitors’ feet, and follows a loop around a naked girl’s body, briefly passing over her anus before coming to her mouth, which opens into the zooming camera as though to swallow us whole.

The suite of rooms with hanging baubles or cloths and other bits and pieces ends with two main exhibition spaces. In one of these we seem to find ourselves in a vast and surreal living room with random assortments of objects and furniture and projections appearing in unexpected places, such as the middle of the seat of an armchair. There is also a large bed on which visitors are invited to lie and in which couples have themselves duly photographed.

The other room is filled with small beds and here visitors are meant to lie down, because the main object is a projection on the ceiling, a massive visual effect that again reminds us what big business this kind of international art is — huge costs are involved in the technology, the special effects, the staff and assistants and managers required to keep this circus on the road.

Funds come from government grants and from corporations eager to associate their brand with a successful contemporary artist. And while the show is in one town, the planning for the next stop, the next biennale or the next slot in yet another international contemporary art museum, which as already noted are always in need of content and of significant names that will attract sponsors, is well under way. This is the art equivalent of the Hollywood film industry, the product of busy factories and the expression of big money.

Not surprisingly, the aesthetic content of the room is far from clear. We lie on the little beds and we look up at the colossal ceiling projection, and what do we see?

We seem to be looking up into the water of a riverbed, and on looking more closely we can see that the camera is filming at an angle, not straight up towards the sky, so that the surface of the water occasionally ­appears at one edge of the projection.

We see thus a watery expanse on the ceiling, and in the water there are weeds and branches, but even here the meaning is far from clear: at times we might conclude that the water seems dirty and polluted, and then at other points it is clear. Are we being asked to consider the pollution of rivers in the modern world? Even if this was the artist’s intention, we have to wonder whether this vast special-effect installation was needed to make such a point.

Or is it just meant to be about experiencing the ebb and flow of nature, the movement and sound of water? But that doesn’t really make sense either, because the movement and the cutting are too disturbed, and the soundtrack is too noisy and uneven.

So we may be physically relaxed, passive in our supine position, but we are not led to a state of stillness or contemplation because the main tendency of the work, as in all of Rist’s work, is to confront us with sensory overload; which is to say that it does not offer a perspective ­beyond egoism but leaves us in the stagnation of the self.

A New York curator described this work as resembling Monet’s Water Lilies, but from underneath. A nice piece of marketing flim-flam, but in fact Monet’s water lily paintings could not be more different, with their almost mystical ­insight that the whole sensory world is like ­insubstantial visions dancing on the reflective surface of the mind.

Pipilotti Rist: Sip My Ocean

Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Until February 18.