Above: high mountains, sharp, rugged and craggy. Remnants of snow cling to the crags, while the sky above is heavy with clouds. Someone has apparently been messing with the colour controls to simulate the way the colours are burned into our inner eye, as everything is bathed in a surreal technical blue, red and green. Below: an artificially dammed lake, trapped in a valley. The smooth surface of the water runs like a horizontal cut through the angular panorama. It, too, has been given an unusual red colour. One level further down, it descends – another cut, this time vertical – into the dark depths, streaked with longitudinal distortions.
The »peak« of artificiality, however, hovers above it all: a picture within a picture, the output from a magnetic resonance scanner. Here, too, we are dealing with another precise cut, this time right through the centre of the abdominal cavity, a still image of a living being. In it you see precisely what you see when you cut open a stomach: that which provides support (the spine), that which functions (the intestines) and that which encloses it all protectively (the torso). In between: nothing. It is your belly, mine, ours. A human belly.
This image with the prosaically descriptive title »Abdominal Cavity Flies Over a Dam« that hangs resplendent on the safety curtain in the Vienna State Opera is a still from a video loop with the same name – and thus once again a cut, one that brings things to a halt, through a continuous and repeatedly cycling motion that has neither beginning nor end. (What is more, two other stills were published in parallel in the newspapers »Die Presse« and »Die Furche«.)
If you watch this film on the museum in progress website, you see how the MRI scan of the abdominal cavity sets off, hovers over pink water and blue meadows, then rises up over a dam wall and finally, now a billowing, oscillating form, flies over the high mountains until it ultimately, to the benefit of the images of colourful meadows filled with flowers and leaves with their veined structure that are overlaying one another, returns to the point with these in the background where its journey began. A vast cycle. These botanic motifs also resemble the vessels of a body – neural pathways that are constantly sending information, or veins that continuously pump blood.
With a cut, movement stops and becomes an image. Cuts (and thus still images) are necessarily artificial, separating what is (supposedly) one and opening up what would (actually) have been closed and whole. In Rist’s work for the safety curtain, the selected motifs themselves already seem artificial, even if it also appears that »naturalness« is almost inherent in them. There are the mountains, the Alps, whose exaggerated bright recolouring almost allows one to forget that even this supposedly picture-perfect idyll, which they have represented since the start of the modern age as the ever-shrinking remnants of the great untouched within a heavily populated, highly industrialised continent, is man-made. And there is the abdominal cavity, into which, thanks to the image-producing high-tech processes of modern medicine, we are able to look without actually having to cut it open.
This, according to the popular view, is the seat of that (gut) feeling that we should allow to guide us – seen as the literal counterpart to the head, as the place where you are true to yourself, as we say, without really being able to put our finger on precisely what that means. The belly: the ultimate place of comfort, of beginnings, of origin, of coming into being; in biology, popular psychology and in mythology, associated with women. Mountains and a belly, then: archetypal places of projection, vessels for feelings and sources of ideas. Places to which to withdraw to really feel something. Here brutally cut open.
In her work to date, Rist has repeatedly found ways to make the inside of a (or her own) body visible or able to be experienced, be that in a cleverly cut looping video such as »Mutaflor« from 1996, in which the camera is apparently initially swallowed and then supposedly travels down through the entire digestive tract to re-emerge lower down; in extreme close-ups of the oral cavity; or through the repeated presentation of various bodily fluids, such as the frequently appearing (menstrual) blood.
A video dating from 1992 is strikingly similar to »Abdominal Cavity Flies Over a Dam« in terms of the form, the structure and the content. »When My Mother’s Brother Was Born There Was a Smell of Wild Pear Blossom in Front of the Brown-Scorched Fireplace« is the exceptionally poetic title, and against the backdrop of an idyllic mountain landscape, it shows pictures of a birth and everything that entails. Resembling the flying abdominal cavity in terms of the form, these drastic scenes are displayed no bigger than a stamp and set in front of a bright, idyllic, picture-postcard mountain scene. But these raw, unadulterated images punctuate and penetrate the media cliché with exceptional force, transmitting the brutal physical reality of a birth, the mother’s pain, the blood-smeared child and the absolutely mind-blowing and irrevocable moment of coming into the world altogether, right from its very heart, so to speak. The images rip open and give birth to another image, the image of a body.
By comparison, »Abdominal Cavity Flies Over a Dam« is almost sublimated, the immediate physicality elevated via the alienating use of colour and the technical nature of the medical imaging process. And yet here, too, it is about transcending borders, about tearing them down – the borders between the body and our sense of self that it contains, and those between this embodied self and the world around it, brought to life, inhabited and shaped by all the other embodied selves.
In a brief text, Rist attributes the belly shown here to the viewer, hands it over to others so that they can project their own self into the cavity that they see before them: »This is you, as our gaze extends beyond navel gazing and past the horizon while your internal organs continue to pump blood and other bodily fluids.« The viewers, me, you, we, join the artist on this journey. The journey, the flight, takes us over a reservoir and high mountains, sharp, rugged and craggy; it takes us beyond the safety curtain to a stage, where real bodies stand and work with sound and stage techniques to inspire strong emotions. Emotions that we all experience together. Emotions that touch us physically. And emotions that can change us, no matter how artificial they might be.