I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much (1986)
Colour, sound. 7’ 46”
Pipilotti Rist. I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much
Rist created I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much when MTV was at the height of its cultural influence. Here Rist takes on rock music with its own tools, pushing pop's repetitive strategies and representations of women to absurd lengths. Footage of the artist chanting the piece's title (a line adapted from The Beatles' song Happiness is a Warm Gun) is replayed at high and low speeds, with obscuring video effects, blurring into an almost painterly procession of images. Rist's manipulation renders her voice into a parody of female hysteria and her body into a grotesquely dancing doll. Through obsessive mimesis, she exhausts any possible legibility of the words, only to finally deliver John Lennon singing the "real" song.
