Pipilotti Rist - A Project for Times Square

Rist features her dreamlike videos on the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic Video Screen in the heart of Times Square

New York, NY - For the center of media-frenzied Times Square, Pipilotti Rist has created a series of videos for the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic that overlooks the traffic jams, flashing lights, high-tech screens, and billboards of this famous New York crossroads. Visitors to Times Square will see one-minute segments that comprise Rist's new artwork Open My Glade, as part of NBC and Panasonic's programming at a quarter past the hour, every hour from 9:15 in the morning through 12:15 at night. Times Square's rhythm of uncoordinated flashing, grabbing attention from one advertisement to the next, one news broadcast to another, neutralizes all this visual input into a memory of electronic overload. Rist's series of videos, set against this backdrop are subjectively slowed down, literally in slow motion, relaying poetic, philosophical and political statements through her idiosyncratic super close-ups, flying camera work and intense colors.

Pipilotti Rist is internationally known for her rich vocabulary of sensual images, often focusing on the body, that articulates an open-ended vision of truth and identity. She is engaged in a deep dialogue with disrupted harmony, exposing the darker underbelly of her utopias and manipulating video to reveal her agenda. With her project for the Public Art Fund, Rist continues this direction in her work, realizing snapshots that glorify the ordinary, the hidden, the longed for, the ugly and the awkward as expressions of urgency and desire.

Commissioned by the Public Art Fund, Open My Glade presents a series of videos created especially for the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic screen. Pipilotti Rist understands Times Square as an overwhelming space full of "electric blossoms and electronic twinkle" that hit visitors like "a slap across the face." Rist uses the energy of this "slap" to fuel her video segments and once an hour for 60 seconds, 16 times each day her videos will be broadcast to the public. Among them are ten different sequences of a woman flattening her face against the screen as if she wants to break out of the Astrovision board and come down into Times Square. As emotion, beauty, laughter, and life experience come through the square of the television, computer, or movie screen with increasing frequency in contemporary life, this woman tries to break through this 2-dimensional glass screen into 3-dimensional space. The six additional sequences feature singular moments that are at once familiar and strange such as rays of sun shining through the flesh of an ear making it appear red and orange, a woman bicycling while the camera sweeps from her bicycle's tires to far above her head, and a tall, generic residential building with a lone woman standing looking out her window as the camera looks back at her from an impossible height overlayed with spring flowers. These diverse sequences come together to create Pipilotti Rist's Open My Glade-a collection of filtered poetic images that make Times Square a "glade" within the "forest" of Manhattan, and Rist's artwork a "glade" within Times Square.

For another "Glade" on the Internet, visit www.squaretimes.net

Created by Pipilotti Rist, the structure of this homepage is:

1. Welcome page: like all subsequent screens with a countdown to quarter past each hour when "Open My Glade" can be seen at Times Square.

2. The second screen features a panorama of Times Square with real and invented billboards, in addition to thoughts and statements running on a ticker by participants invited by the artist. For this second screen there are links to:

a.  a link to a picture level with poems by Rist (click on the Panasonic screen)

  b. a link to Tibor Kalman's masterplan of Times Square (click on "master" on the truck)

  c. general links around Times Square (click on "master" on the truck)

  d. a link to a postcard tool to create your own postcards and send them to your friends (click on "send a postcard")

3. And at quarter past every hour the site "explodes" into chaos for one minute while a segment of Open My Glade is playing in Times Square.

History of Public Art Fund in Times Square and Advertising Media Pipilotti Rist was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create an artwork specifically for Times Square. This project continues the Public Art Fund's long-term commitment to media-based artworks. Messages to the Public, a Public Art Fund program that began in 1980 and ran for nine years, featured a series of artists' projects created specifically for the Spectacolor board at Times Square. Messages to the Public encouraged artists to take advantage of this large LED screen, and artists such as Jenny Holzer, Keith Haring, and David Hammonds created their first public works through this program. In the 90's the Public Art Fund continued this exploration of media outlets through projects like Gregory Green's Gregnik, an installation of a Sputnik-like radio transmitter tower broadcasting artists' messages, Barbara Kruger's Bus, featuring a regular NYC bus fully covered with a vinyl wrap imprinted with her signature black, white and red texts, and Grennan and Sperandio's Invisible City project which retold the real-life stories of people who work the graveyard shift on subway placards and in comic book form. All of these works provide a different context in which to explore contemporary artistic practice, and address advertising as a form of public space to engender public discourse.

Rist's new video commission for the NBC Astrovision by Panasonic screen also utilizes a traditional vehicle for advertisement as a site for contemporary art, not only bringing her work to a wider public, but also providing an unexpected and thought-provoking break in the stream of commercialization of the urban landscape.

About Pipilotti Rist Born in the Swiss Rhine Valley, Pipilotti Rist is known for her incisive, provocative and compelling video work. Her work has been exhibited at international venues including Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu, Japan (2000), Fondazione Prada, Milan (2000), Musee des Beaux-Arts, Montreal (2000), Museum Ludwig, Cologne (1999), Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1999), Site Santa Fe, New Mexico (1998), and the Venice Biennale (1993, 1997, and 1999). Pressetext

Pipilotti Rist - A Project for Times Square