The ‘Nature’ of Sex: Parafeminist Parody in Pipilotti Rist's Pickelporno (1992)

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Notes

1. Amelia Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms: Exploring Female Desire in Feminist Film and Video’, in Resolutions 3: Global Networks of Video, ed. Erika Suderburg and Ming-Yuen S. Ma (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 264 (my italics).

2. Peggy Phelan, ‘Survey. Opening Up Spaces Within Spaces: The Expansive Art of Pipilotti Rist’, Pipilotti Rist, ed. Peggy Phelan et al. (London: Phaidon, 2001), 36.

3. Catherine Elwes, ‘Introduction: From the Margins to the Mainstream’, in Video Art, A Guided Tour (London: I.B. Tauris, 2005), 1–21.

4. Pipilotti Rist, ‘Aus Der Produktion von Pickelporno’, in Wie es Ihr gefällt: Künste, Wissenschaft & alles andere, ed. Silvia Henke and Sabina Mohler (Freiburg: Kore Verlag, 1991), 61 (English translation of this article by Elena Benthaus, 2013).

5. See Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978).

6. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms’, 264.

7. Phelan, ‘Survey’, 32–77; Elizabeth Bronfen, ‘Pipilotti's Body Camera’, in Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage, ed. Stephanie Rosenthal (London: Hayward Publishing, 2012), 116–123; Elizabeth Bronfen, ‘Focus: (Entlastungen) Pipilottis Fehler’ (‘Absolutions: Pipilotti's Mistake’), in Pipilotti Rist, 78–93; Christine Ross, ‘Fantasy and Distraction: An Interview with Pipilotti Rist’, Afterimage 28, no. 3 (2000): 7–9; Christine Ross, ‘Pipilotti Rist: Images as Quasi Objects’, n.paradoxa 7 (2001): 18–25; Nancy Spector, ‘The Mechanics of Fluids’, Parkett 48 (1996): 83–85; Kate Mondloch, ‘Pour Your Body Out: On Visual and Other Pleasures in Pipilotti Rist’, Feminist Media Studies 10, no. 2 (2010): 231–6.

8. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms’, 259.

9. Ibid. Jones has elsewhere theorised art's ability to decentre the Cartesian mind/body split: see Seeing Differently: A History and Theory of Identification and the Visual Arts (London: Routledge, 2012); and Body Art/Performing the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998).

10. Amelia Jones, Self/Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject (London: Routledge, 2006), 212.

11. Tarja Laine and Wanda Strauven, ‘The Synaesthetic Turn’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 250.

12. The term ‘methodology’ to describe this theoretical application of synaesthesia is borrowed from Laine and Strauven, ‘The Synaesthetic Turn’. For another excellent analysis of feminist art through the lens of affect, see Susan Best, Visualising Feeling: Affect and the Feminine Avant-Garde (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011).

13. Jones, Self/Image, 265.

14. Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). Jones also draws on Vivian Sobchack's book, The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Other examples not cited by Jones, but which are instrumental in recent theoretical developments concerning embodied vision, include the work of Mieke Bal, Maaike Bleeker and Erin Manning.

15. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms’, 272. Jones refers to a quote by Rist in which she describes the experience of viewing video as being ‘swallowed’: Pipilotti Rist quoted in Hans Ulrich Obrist, ‘I rist, you rist, she rists, he rists, we rist, you rist, they rist, tourist’, in Pipilotti Rist, 15.

16. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms’, 266.

17. Jones, Self/Image, 213.

18. Ibid.

19. Ibid., 217.

20. Ibid.

21. Ibid., 218.

22. Rist, ‘Aus Der Produktion’, 61.

23. Ibid., 61–63.

24. Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: Teachings of Twentieth Century Art Forms (New York: Methuen, 1985), 32.

25. Pipilotti Rist, ‘Pipilotti Rist lecture on “I'm Not the Girl who Misses Much” and “Pickelporno”’, YouTube video, 7:01–8:28 mins, from a lecture at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Netherlands, posted by ‘Museumboijmans’, January, 8 2010, http://youtu.be/5NqLgIaL7eg?t=7m1s. Accessed 2 June 2012.

26. Rist, ‘Aus Der Produktion’, 61.

27. Kerstin Mey, Art & Obscenity (London: I.B. Tauris, 2006), 119.

28. Bronfen, ‘Pipilotti's Body Camera’, 120.

29. Laura Mulvey, ‘Pandora's Box: Topographies of Curiosity’, in Fetishism and Curiosity (London: BFI Publishing, 1996).

30. Bronfen, ‘Pipilotti's Body Camera’, 120.

31. Ibid., 120, 123.

32. Rist, ‘Aus Der Produktion’, 61.

33. Julian Hanich, ‘Dis/liking Disgust: The Revulsion Experience at the Movies’, New Review of Film and Television Studies 7, no. 3 (2009): 299.

34. Ibid., 300.

35. Ibid.

36. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982).

37. Sigmund Freud, ‘Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious’ [1905], The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. VIII, trans. and ed. James Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1960).

38. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 8.

39. Hanich, ‘Dis/Liking Disgust’, 306. The latter parenthetical comment is mine, to alter the specificity of Hanich's subject of examination, the film director Pier Paolo Pasolini, to a broader statement that encompasses the work of Rist.

40. Ross, ‘Fantasy and Distraction’, 9.

41. Rist, ‘Pipilotti Rist lecture’, 7:01 mins.

42. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticisms’, 264.

43. Ibid.

44. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 32.

45. Linda Williams, Hard Core: Power, Pleasure and the ‘Frenzy of the Visible’, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 101.

46. Ross, ‘Fantasy and Distraction’, 9.

47. Spector, ‘The Mechanics of Fluids’, 84; Elizabeth Mangini, ‘Pipilotti's Pickle: Making Meaning From the Feminine Position’, PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 23, no. 2 (2001): 1.

48. Mangini, ‘Pipilotti's Pickle’, 1.

49. Ibid., 2.

50. Ibid.

51. Ibid., 1.

52. Phelan, ‘Survey’, 48 (my emphasis).

53. Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 10.

54. Mangini, ‘Pipilotti's Pickle’, 1.

55. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984), 175.

56. The superiority theory is considered to have its roots in the writings of Plato and Aristotle; however, the theory took its most concrete form in the work of seventeenth-century theorist Thomas Hobbes: Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan [1651], ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 43.

57. Jack Halberstam, Queer Art of Failure (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 2–4.

58. Jones, ‘Screen Eroticism’, 272.

59. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 34.

60. Ibid., 32.

61. Jones, ‘Genital Panic’, 294.

62. Ibid.

63. Ibid.

64. Ibid.

65. Ibid.

66. Jones, Self/Image, 213.

67. Jones, ‘Genital Panic’, 294.

68. Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody, 32.

69. Jones, Self/Image, 213.

70. For explication of this idea, see my article: ‘Performing Feminism “Badly”: Hotham Street Ladies and Brown Council’, n.paradoxa 36 (2005): 23–31.

71. Jones, Self/Image, 217.

72. Ibid., 213.