User:Grizma/I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much

I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much is an early multimedia installation by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist from 1986.

Description
In this video, Pipilotti Rist appears as a singer. Her breasts deliberately spill out of her black dress while she jerks her body across the screen in front of a red background. The protagonist sings parts of the song Happiness Is a Warm Gun several times, which was created in 1968 by John Lennon and Paul McCartney for the Beatles' White Album and dedicated by John Lennon to his partner Yoko Ono. However, Rist changes the verse ″She's not the girl who misses much″ to ″I'm not the girl who misses much″. In this way, the artist does not leave the description of her being to other people, but defines herself and thus shows herself to be powerful and self-determined.

Image and sound are distorted in different ways: The image is blurred, the white lines of the electronic sound signal constantly move from top to bottom over Rist's body or through it in the first part of the video. Later, the image distortion occurs through jagged vertical lines that cause the part of the image to their left to stand still and shift further and further to the right until the image stands still while the sound continues and then the whole thing starts again. In this phase, the background is no longer red, but beige-white. The sound is usually distorted by playing it too quickly, which creates a kind of Mickey Mouse voice. Later, the sound is muffled by playing it too slowly and the text can hardly be understood.

At the very end, John Lennon can be heard singing part of the song, but here with the original lyrics She's not the girl who misses much. You can still see the singer, but now against a blue background.

Creation I'm Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986) is a single-channel video, the artist's first video work. She developed the video alone in her studio, as she later did Selbstlos im Lavabad (1994). The video lasts 5 minutes.

Art historical classification and interpretation Representation of the body Jonas sees a reference here to the first depictions of hysterical women by Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris in the 19th century, in which the women acted out their seizures for the camera. However, Rist does not sing She's not a girl, as in the original, but I'm not a girl. By switching from the third to the first person, the artist redefines the relationship between subject and object. In her later work, this became a recurring theme, and by breaking with the devaluation of the female body in the media common at the time, she appropriated this theme. In this way, the audience is also encouraged to pay attention to their own bodies.

In this early work, Rist presents the voyeuristic camera view of the female body according to Elisabeth Bronfen, but at the same time destroys its effect in three ways: dance movements and voice appear distorted, and the body is darkened by a color filter and blurred throughout the work. Although the breasts are visible, there is no erotic pleasure. In the few bars of the song that can be heard at normal speed in the original, John Lennon's voice acts as a counterpoint to the female vocals.

The distortions inserted in post-production prevent the body from becoming an object. In this way, Rist avoids the fetishization of the female body and is thus in line with other female video filmmakers such as Nan Hoover, who used close-ups of body parts for deobjectification and desexualization in works such as Landscape (1983). Rist developed this line further in later works such as Pickelporno (1992).

The question has often been asked whether Rist is only making a personal statement here or whether the depiction also applies to other women of her generation and should therefore be read in a political and social context. Laura Leuzzi tends towards the second possibility. She justifies this by saying that Rist deliberately undermines common beauty norms and ideals, i.e. creates a social reference, and alienates herself strongly through the distortions.

Media criticism Rist takes her cue from the length and playful, erotic soundtrack of advertising clips and music videos of the time. However, she clearly distinguishes herself from these genres by sometimes reducing the speed of the image, sometimes speeding it up and repeating the song line several times. In addition, the image is disturbed by the lines that distort the image.

In an interview with Jane Harris, Rist described her movements in this work as an "exorcistic dance". She gives the impression that she wants to break the boundaries of the screen. The movements of her arms and legs are reminiscent of dolls and can be read as a hint to the audience to think about whether they are still in control of their lives or whether identity is already represented and interpreted by the television images. The video has often been interpreted as a commentary on the remote-controlled human being, but the distorting, line-distorted presentation also draws attention to the monitor and the inadequacies of the video technology.

The performance becomes one with the electronic impulses, Rist is breathless and appears hysterical. Image and sound, video and electronics flow together here. Rist's frequent use of surveillance cameras and the constant close-ups turn the medium into content.