The Colour of Your Socks - A Year with Pipilotti Rist
Die Farbe Deiner Socken - Ein Jahr mit Pipilotti Rist

About the film

"On our retinas we have cones, for blue, red and green, and these we must stimulate!" This quotation sums up perfectly just who we’re dealing with. From the very first moment of Michael Hegglin’s documentary, it is clear: Pipilotti Rist likes to stimulate—even irritate—her audience, and is an artist who bathes joyously in color. There’s a lot of Rist herself in Pepperminta, the protagonist of her first feature film who pronounces these words. Pepperminta is about "a sort of eyeball massage. If we hit upon the right combination, we can overcome fear."

Hegglin accompanied Rist on the shoots for that film and as she worked on installations. For an entire year, he and his camera were there whenever Pipilotti Rist got her audience to cast off old habits and plunge their senses into her art. The occasional difficulty of this becomes apparent as Rist discusses with the guards at New York's MoMA how to get visitors to take off their shoes.

Those who do so are reliably rewarded with entirely new perceptions. Hegglin’s sharply observant camera captures the mood and fascination which Rist evokes with her art. He transports us to spectacular video installations at the Venice Biennale that are to be watched lying on one’s back. He affords us hidden views into the abyss at Kunsthaus Zurich, and he takes us to the University of Zurich, where a gigantic sofa is unveiled as a memorial to Switzerland’s first woman doctor of law—a sofa upon which distinguished professors are free to bounce around playfully and feel like children once more.

Hegglin immerses his viewers in Rist’s world of color and images, but he also shows the work that lies behind it all, Pipilotti Rist the enterprise. And as he does so, one sees that sensuous experience is no less important to Rist in everyday life than it is in art. She has a penchant for interrupting moments of the most intense concentration with a fundamentally important message: "We really could go and eat, now."

Birgit Kempker on the film

There is no "outside" in the universe

of a Queen, for which reason this documentary here is a part of her.

This documentary is very Protestant; it refrains from exaggeration, and it’s as modest as it is soft, parallel, quiet, traveling, resonating, flying, it’s camera’s eye sweeping over likable things with a lighthearted smile, but in its essence secretive and intimate in a distanced, brotherly, polite—and thus paradoxically transgressive—way, for to pay attention to, show and simultaneously set limitations from the inside is seriously conspiratorial and encroaching. And the word and the phenomenon of "encroachment" are lent a whole new, nearly euphoric meaning in the empire of Pipilotti Rist, known here as the Queen, just as terms and bodies in general are lightly pried out of their respective semantic realms, with cages of meaning being tipped over or wobbled about. Observe: the body of Pepperminta is the Alps. Colors are instruments of hypnosis to be employed against fear. Please just catch the visitors on the fly and ask to see the colors of their socks, because this will help persuade them to take off their shoes. Take your spiritual helpers by the hand and instruct them and thank them right where they are, even at the museum. Thanks for plunging me back into uncertainty. Thank you for guarding things. How to move about here? Pour your body out. Be able to presume a bit more in life, with these poured-out bodies. Such statements and things can be seen here engaging in osmosis and other activities familiar to us from physics class.

This documentary is a decidedly favorable dispatch from the royal court. There are inner chambers for the child, the playmates, other things, lots of things, and that is and they are taboo. The mistresses of ceremony are in pink. The Queen is shy, weary, agitated, cordial, wonderfully costumed—for the most part in pantskirts—and boyish, Scottish, knightly … I don’t want to look sexy, she says, and imitates a seafarer, tomboyish and fragile, or a refurbished housewife from the refrigerator ad, subversively and teasingly provocative, exhausted, cheerful and sad, courageous, particularly super-courageous and cocky, they are so nice, it’s like I’m a baby, she says amicably, a true feast for the eyes, an "eyeball massage," stimulating the cones on one’s retina, as is said of the recipe for eyesight in Pepperminta, an interplanetary meta-exorcism via the material itself. The court of this Queen is self-confident, capable of a lot, learns a lot, goes through a lot, is supportive, a bit proud and simply delightful, and when they are out and about on projects as a gang of little rascals (and soon-to-be business-class passengers, should the museums visited get bigger), then this Queen—defying dyspepsia and other minor aliments—holds court herself with her own court at the foreign court with a natural, quintessentially blue-blooded, brazen, seductive and graceful air, inspired by hipsters, tricksters, other friends and Nirvana, flickering and sparkling. A glimpse into these journeys, manners, tunes is provided by this documentary. Rock your eyeballs baby, see me, says she, truly Pipilotti.

Birgit Kempker