"Pour Your Body Out"
MOMA
by damali and diedra
I don't usually feel comfortable at MOMA, with all of the nose-in-the-air snobs. Pipilotti Rist's Pour Your Body Out changed that, if only for a brief moment. Having sofas and people taking their shoes off was part of it. Maybe the snobs avoided this installation. Or perhaps it's hard to be stuck up with your shoes off or sitting on the floor. I sat on the floor against the wall, as all the seats on the round central sofa were taken. I sat there for a long time watching the video and watching the people. The vivid colors in the video were entrancing. A woman who also couldn't fit in the sofa area, sat in the middle of the floor and breastfed her child with giant flowers and body parts projected on the wall behind them. This "performance" seemed right at home in this environment.
There were three large walls with projections on them. Flowers. Lots of pink. Clear close ups of eyes, face, body. Some images looked like being inside a jello cube. The contrast in scale of all the visitors and the one body being projected was astounding. You think you are so big, in the moment of looking at the self and then there's all these other people each with their own inside, close up, in the mirror, in the self and then many are brought together under the exaggeration of scale. Many and one. It reminds me of Iyengars yoga meditation inhale with all the people of the world and exhale the self joining with them. One and many. Together. Perspective and scale and moments.
