See how the spirit moves her

SAN FRANCISCO —  Pipilotti Rist entices visitors into her multimedia exhibition by blowing kisses. Over and over -- on a tiny video monitor embedded in a bathroom vanity-style mirror -- her plump, pink lips pucker up and smack the air.

Being air-kissed by videotaped lips while looking at one’s reflection is a weird experience, but “Hello, Good Day (Kissmouth)” is only the beginning of this high-spirited Swiss artist’s first major West Coast show, at the Museum of Modern Art. Just around the corner from the animated mirror, a miniature monitor is seamlessly inlaid in the floor of a dark gallery. Attracted by a burst of light and a pleading voice, visitors approach the source and stare down at “Selfless in the Bath of Lava,” a videotape of the nude artist. She seems to have fallen into a tropical grotto, where she churns around in a pool of psychedelic color, throws up her arms and calls for help in English, French and German.

These two works, created about 10 years ago, are signature pieces of the 42-year-old Rist, who lives in Zurich and is known for infusing high art with the popular appeal of commercial television. The diminutive pieces pack a big punch, but they also provide a retrospective context for the main attraction, “Stir Heart, Rinse Heart,” a new installation commissioned by the museum.

“It’s a visual poem, the whole thing,” Rist says of the ambitious project. Part travelogue, part social commentary, part scientific journey, the new work envelops viewers in a two-gallery spectacle of sights and sounds that evoke a state of weightless reverie.

In a corner of the first gallery, shadows of passing spectators and of transparent plastic objects suspended from the ceiling play across peaceful views of the Pacific Ocean, videotaped in Los Angeles last year when Rist was a visiting professor at UCLA. Plastic oranges, placed on the floor under the dangling bags, bottles and tubes, are transformed into rocks in the landscapes as their shadows mingle with projected footage.

In the next room, a long wall is filled with two, partially overlapping video projections. One segment is a staged urban scene that follows a woman through a city street and into a sumptuous dining room. Loaded with religious and social symbolism, the scene is a fairy tale, Rist says, and it deals with the phenomenon of rituals that vanish or are transformed into new rituals as people relocate and cultures merge. The other, larger projection mingles Swiss landscape footage with magnified images of human organs in what Rist calls “a collage of inner views.”

Computer-generated music ebbs and flows as the continuous video loops -- one nine minutes, the other about six minutes -- spill out an ever-changing feast of imagery. The soundtracks are different lengths as well, so the possibility of encountering exactly the same multimedia composition twice is extremely remote.

To immerse oneself in the many-layered artwork is to take a dreamlike tour through an imaginary world, unconstrained by gravity or logic. And many visitors seem to be entranced, if not mesmerized. They sit on a bench and smile, lean against a wall and muse, or stand with friends and whisper.

“I love very much that the art world is a kind of protected space,” Rist says. “The super thing about museums is that they are places where people consciously go and take their time. But you have to be careful. I always start off with much too much material, then reduce it and make a lot of garbage. People come here with time, but you should not spoil or waste it.”

Born Elizabeth Charlotte Rist in Rheintal, Switzerland, the artist renamed herself by combining her nickname, Lotti, with the first name of Pippi Longstocking, the heroine of Swedish author Astrid Lindgren’s children’s books. The daughter of a country doctor, she traces her interest in medical imagery to her having accompanied her father on his rounds. But that is only one aspect of an encyclopedic array of subject matter that has evolved over the last 20 years.

She studied graphic design in Vienna at the Institute of Applied Arts, then worked with animated films and stage design. When she returned to Switzerland, she took classes in video to gain access to the equipment, but she is largely self-taught.

“I love machines,” she says. “And they have become smaller, more accessible. I used to share a cutting table with a lot of other people, to make it affordable. Today, you can have less money and have machines that are quite professional.”

A self-confessed control freak and an obsessive collector, Rist gathers objects and images wherever she goes, often using tiny, unobtrusive cameras. Although she went to UCLA to take a break from her work, she left with a lot of video footage. Back in Zurich, it joined masses of other material.

“She’s got this incredible ability in collaging and reassembling things she has accumulated to create meaning,” says Benjamin Weil, the San Francisco museum’s curator of media arts. “I think her work is extraordinarily compelling, but it’s so unworldly that it’s very difficult to understand why one is infatuated or completely enveloped by these installations she makes.

“Having jumped inside her mind for a few weeks, I see a couple of preoccupations,” he says. “One is the life of a woman in the 21st century in the Western world, which is increasingly permeated by non-Western cultures. The other thing is the notion of reconstructed reality and the mediated images -- the difficulty today of telling fiction from reality. The news on television can be as spectacular as movies. Movies try to look as real as possible. And we’ve got reality TV. We live in a world where the boundaries between these things are so blurry.”

Even figuring out how to describe Rist’s work can be a problem, Weil says. “When we were writing the wall labels for the new work, we called it a video installation with sound and objects. But the more I look at it, I realize that it’s a sound and video installation with objects. I could even go as far as saying it’s a sound and video sculpture. The way she works is also a little bit like stage design. She choreographs the viewer’s experience. There’s a gradual immersion into her world that is completely planned and organized.”

Rist is quite willing to let others interpret her work. She just wants to be free to make it.

“I have no person who orders it,” she says, “and I don’t have to please a client. I can use it for pure poetry or philosophy.”