Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage. Installation view at the Hayward Gallery. Administrating Eternity (2011) Photo Linda Nylind

I’ve been a fan of Pipilotti Rist’s exuberant artwork since I first saw an exhibition of her work at FACT in Liverpool back in 2008. I think I would find it difficult not to be drawn to any artist who, as a teenager, renamed herself Pipilotti in honour of Astrid Lindgren’s Pippi Longstocking; but more than that, there’s something distinctive and very charming about the dizzy, colourful, visceral and provocative world that Rist’s artwork brings to life.

Given this, I was excited to see Rist’s new solo exhibition at the Hayward Gallery – the playfully-named Eyeball Massage – on Friday night, a treat at the end of a long and stressful week. This show brings together over 30 works from the mid-1980s to the present day, including some which have been created specially for the Hayward.

This is an exhibition which is always unexpected. Before we even enter the gallery, we are greeted outside by drifts of smoky bubbles and strings of illuminated underpants, like unlikely bunting crossed with a washing line; inside, a video installation is secreted in a cubicle in the ladies’ toilets. Meanwhile, in the galleries themselves we are invited to lounge on semi-sinister cushions in the shape of headless bodies, and watch sensuous, dreamy projected images rippling over a labyrinth of gauzy curtains. Like Alice in Wonderland, we are repatedly confused by shifting perspectives: in Mutaflor the artist's immense mouth seems to swallow the viewer whole; but a moment later in Selfless in a Bath of Lava we peer through a tiny hole in the floor to glimpse her in miniature, naked and surrounded by molten lava, shouting messages to us.

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage. Installation view at the Hayward Gallery. Photo Linda Nylind. Selfless In The Bath of Lava (1994)

Physicality is hugely important throughout this exhibition: the human body is celebrated everywhere, from Blood Room, a ‘visual poem’ in praise of menstruation to Digesting Impressions which takes us on an endoscopic journey through the oesopaghus, stomach and intestines. We as viewers have to engage physically with the works on display, from poking our heads through the viewing holes of A Peek into the West – A Look into the East (or E-W) to allowing our own lap to become the screen for a video projection in Lap Lamp.

Perhaps because my expectations were so high, Eyeball Massage didn’t quite deliver everything I wanted it to. Some of the works in the show, like Your-Space-Capsule and Ever Is Over All I had seen before, and others, like Yoghurt on Skin – Velvet on TV in which tiny LCD screens are hidden inside handbags and seashells, didn’t grab me as much as I might have expected. However, much of this show was all that I have come to expect from Rist’s work – a fizzy blend of hypnotic, uplifting, unsettling and invigorating.

Pipilotti Rist: Eyeball Massage. Installation view at the Hayward Gallery. Administrating Eternity (2011) Photo Linda Nylind

The New Yorker critic Peter Schjeldahl has described Rist as an ‘evangelist of happiness’ and interestingly, Adrian Searle (who in my review of the FACT show I cite as criticising Rist’s work as ‘mak[ing] me feel as if I'm stuck inside a vegan, possibly even fructarian, new-age indoctrination video’) has apparently been converted too, stating in his review of Eyeball Massage: ‘You have to be a miserabalist… not to take pleasure in Rist's warm baths of light and nature, her sunny fertile fields and underwater rebirthings, her gleeful swooning mischievousness.’ It’s this, ultimately, that makes this exhibition a delight – the sheer joyfulness of Rist's work.

Eyeball Massage is at the Hayward Gallery until 8 January. Take a look at an interview with Rist about the show, below:

I had mixed feelings about going to see Tracey Emin’s new solo show, Love is What You Want, at the Hayward Gallery last week. It’s difficult not to feel slightly bored by Emin, who along with her fellow YBAs, often just seems overexposed. Endlessly characterised as making work that is cynical and crass, more concerned with the pursuit of notoriety than artistic integrity, Emin is overdone. Every detail of her life – from the traumatic events of her childhood to her political views – is well-known and well-documented. What is there left to discover about Tracey Emin?

Yet in spite of these misgivings, I also found myself unexpectedly interested in this new opportunity to engage with Emin's work, as opposed to her media persona - especially given that I hadn't previously seen much of her work in a gallery setting. Love is What You Want provides the ideal opportunity for a re-appraisal, being a comprehensive and beautifully-curated survey of Emin’s entire career to date, bringing together work in a wide range of different media.

It was this incredible variety of work that initially struck me about this exhibition. Emin is well-known for making certain kinds of work, perhaps most famously her distinctive quilts and other embroidered pieces such as the 'tent' Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963-1995. However, there’s a much broader range of work to explore here, from film and video pieces to sculpture to photography to painting to printmaking.

I was also struck by the recurring use of text throughout so many of Emin’s work: this is an exhibition rife with language and storytelling, from the bold, mis-spelled appliquéd slogans of her blankets, to her glitzy neon lettering, to her handwritten texts. It’s interesting that Emin isn’t often thought of as an artist who works with language, given that this exhibition proves her to be a powerful storyteller: as she herself points out ‘it’s my words that actually make my art quite unique’.

Throughout the exhibition, it is clear that Emin’s own life is always the starting point for her art, which is confessional as often as it is confrontational. Although some of the subject matter of these highly personal, hard-hitting works remains for me difficult – pouring over ephemera related to traumatic events such as her botched abortion can’t help but leave the viewer with an uncomfortable (and no doubt, deliberately so) sense of grubby voyeurism – there’s no doubt that these are thought-provoking pieces. However solipsistic and manipulative her work sometimes seems, there is a playful sense of humour at work here too. It’s difficult not to admire Emin’s strikingly irreverent and often self-parodic approach to making art, which certainly sets little store by the conventions of the fine art world.

Ultimately though, it was the jaunty, hand-crafted, down-at-heel yet exuberantly girly aesthetic of Emin’s work which engaged me above and beyond its subject matter. There’s something particularly appealing about the rainbow colours of her blankets and upholstered chairs, the delicate embroidery, the fuzzy quality of the films, the scribbly but elegant handwriting, the cluttered ephemera, and the graceful line drawings.  From the ramshackle wooden structures of Knowing My Enemy to her spangly neon lights, the influence of Emin’s upbringing in Margate is clear – this whole show has something of the sleazy faded theatrical glamour of a seaside town.

Although I left this exhibition still with mixed feelings, I also found myself engaged, surprised and unexpectedly intrigued: for me at least, it seems that there is something new to discover in Tracey Emin's work after all.

Love is What You Want is at the Hayward Gallery until 29 August 2011. For more information visit: www.southbankcentre.co.uk/tracey

I recently went to check out the Hayward Gallery’s newest exhibition, Walking in My Mind. Described as “an adventure into the artist’s imagination” this installation-based show brings together work by ten contemporary artists to investigate ideas of creativity, consciousness, perception, thought, emotion and psychological space. It’s certainly an exhibition full of surprises: walking through the galleries feels like tiptoeing through a surreal wonderland of imaginative spaces.

The exhibition kicks off with Yoshitomo Nara’s delightful installation My Drawing Room - a down-at-heel wendy house complete with a sign announcing ‘Place Like Home’. Peeping through the tiny, dolls-house windows, we can observe all the minutiae of a perfectly-realised personal space: a muddle of scattered drawings, comic books, childhood treasures, and kitsch kawaii figurines. Inspired by the artist’s student room, and infused with a nostalgia for the past, it is both an intriguing insight into Nara’s influences and creative processes, and a compelling vision of the artist’s mind as a private, detached, personal space which we can glimpse from the outside but never actually enter. In the same gallery, Studio Wall Drawings, an ongoing series of works on paper by Keith Tyson, occupies similarly personal territory, creating “a space somewhere between a map, a poem, a diary and a painting’” Presented in a single vast expanse, these colourful and extrovert drawings are like a series of mini-narratives, allowing us to glimpse the artist’s lively thought process at work.

Things take a stranger turn as we head upstairs into the upper galleries, alongside works from Charles Avery’s fascinating project The Islanders: the systematic and detailed investigation of an imaginary island invented by the artist himself. Here, maps are accompanied by drawings and “specimens” of the island’s bizarre flora and fauna presented in a series of vitrines, whilst outside on one of the terraces is the Eternity Chamber - a sinister funfair kiosk with a mirrored interior which we glimpse through tightly padlocked doors. But all this looks positively ordinary compared with Thomas Hirschorn’s Cavemanman - a fascinating sculptural environment consisting of a network of tunnels, all constructed from cardboard and yards of brown parcel tape. Clambering through these hidden spaces, encountering cave-like chambers papered with found images and philosophical writings is a truly otherworldly experience: bundles of silver ‘dynamite’ are wired-up to tinfoil-covered shop window dummies, creating a strange and deeply disorientating vision of inner space oddly reminiscent of the set of a long-forgotten episode of Doctor Who. And next up is another weird and discomfiting representation of cerebral space - Jason Rhoades sprawling installation The Creation Myth. Here, the brain is figured as a control centre surrounded by a chaos of computer screens, televisions and sound systems, linked by a complex network of circuit boards and intertwining cables, and interspersed with all manner of unexpected elements from plastic buckets to pornographic images to a toy train to a massage chair.

So far, so Freudian. But Yayoi Kusama’s playfully trippy polka-dot installation provides a welcome change of pace: her red and white landscape is a dizzy, joyful Alice-in-Wonderland space, spilling out onto an outdoor terrace where on undulating toadstool-spotted structures are scattered across a surface of brilliant green artificial grass. The same childlike fairy-tale feel is reflected in Chiharu Shiota’s After the Dream, albeit with a nightmare twist: in this space, an intricate spiderweb of black thread surrounds a circle of five long white dresses which appear to hold hands as they float above ground like a malevolent cat’s cradle.

Finally, Pipilotti Rist provides the perfect conclusion to the exhibition - a strange, dark, dreamlike space where starry lights float by accompanied by a succession of projections of giant, disembodied body parts which drift aimlessly by. As these images appear and disappear, a spectral voice coos a sequence of phrases like “you are a butterflower,” “you are a molecule,” and (our particular favourite) “you are a woman-mouse” in an enjoyable parody of recorded relaxation sequences. Like the rest of the installations in this offbeat exhibition, experiencing Rist’s imaginative space is both uncanny and bewildering, yet here the unearthly atmosphere is nicely balanced by the artist’s characteristic sense of humour.

For me, Walking in My Mind is a compelling exploration of the artist’s imagination, and an exhibition I’d definitely recommend to anyone. Interestingly though, the show has won mixed reviews: Laura Cumming for The Observer dismissed it as little more than the “summer blockbuster” of the contemporary art world, characterising it as “a lacklustre funfair”. However, there has been plenty of praise for the exhibition from the blogosphere: webcowgirl calls it “deliciously trippy and completely worth the cost of admission” whilst Susie Bubble also gave the exhibition a thumbs up. I’d agree with them both: Walking in My Mind is a brilliantly bizarre encounter - the utterly strange experience of walking out of the exhibition into the gallery shop, feeling giddy and peculiar, is worth it alone. Truly mind-altering, in every sense.

[photo via ffffound]