Pipilotti Rist.

Growing up in a small Swiss town in the late '70s, Pipilotti Rist - a John Lennon fan and inveterate Yoko Ono groupie long before Ono's ascension to art-rock diva status - came to art by way of pop music. While studying video at Basel's Schule fur Gestaltung, Rist began designing sets for rock concerts and making videos for local bands; eventually she joined an all-female group now known as Les Reines Prochaines (The next queens).

Rist's video work takes us on a curious journey, via pop (she also composes and writes her own songs), into the furthest regions of the female psyche. One of her first tapes, I'm Not the Girl Who Misses Much, 1986, is part homage to Lennon, part manic self-parody. It takes its title from the opening line of Lennon's "Happiness is a Warm Gun," with a slight modification from third to first person. In this video, a recording of Rist repeatedly singing this lyric is sped up, mimicking the quality of her own blurry, distorted image, as, bare-breasted, she dances frenetically around the room. Then the music slows and Rist slides down the wall - almost disappearing from the frame - as if momentarily overcome by self-doubt before regaining control as sound and image return to their former, unnaturally accelerated level. Rist's humorous take on female angst sets the tone for her later work and allies her with singers like P. J. Harvey and artists from Sue Williams to Cheryl Donegan who have recently gained recognition for their irreverent visions of sex and gender.

Over the last decade her tapes and installations have unabashedly explored sexuality and the accoutrements that conjure "femininity," through a formal language that borrows heavily form MTV's esthetic: frequent jump cuts, overexposed colors, jittery images, and static interference. In her most notorious video, Pickelporno (Pimple porno, 1992) - which first brought her to the attention of the art world - Rist attempted to give visual form to the sensations experienced during sex. With a tiny surveillance camera attached to the end of a stick, she filmed, mostly in extreme close-up and slow motion, a man and a woman in a fluid embrace. The resulting sequence of exaggerated, often abstract images includes a brief journey into an unidentified orifice set to a repetitive backbeat that quickens at the moment of climax. The images of nature that are spliced in - fruit, flowers, cacti - read as metaphoric, sometimes absurdly funny, equivalents of the bodies in motion.

Most recently, Rist has concentrated on video installations that attempt to collapse the physical and psychological space between viewer and monitor, by hiding monitors inside objects or, eschewing them altogether in favor of images projected inside boxes dotted with peepholes. In Yoghurt on Skin, Velvet on TV, 1994, tiny monitors were fitted inside seashells or handbags which were placed on pedestals. Peering inside one could see body fragments - an oversized eye, toes covered in a thick, blood-red liquid, and a female torso - floating by; all were shot at odd angles, in slow motion, and in garish colors. A similar piece from the same year, Eindrucke verdauen (Digesting impressions), comprised a sphere-shaped monitor suspended inside a woman's bright-yellow swimsuit. Through the fabric one could just discern an endoscopic camera's voyage through human intestines. In both of these works, Rist evokes usually private feminine domains ("a woman's world is revealed in her handbag") and pries them open - an invasion that confronts us with our own voyeuristic impulses. This nod to scopophilic pleasures was most evident in Rist's Perlen der Zeit (Pearls of time, 1994), a group of six pyramidlike structures with holes in the bottom that she attached to the wall. To see the images projected inside - which ranged from slow-motion, underwater shots of a woman moving through a seascape to a woman performing an elaborate striptease - required entering these miniature peep-show booths by poking one's head through the openings underneath.

The 1994 Selbstlos im Lavabad (Selfless in a bath of lava) takes an ironic jab at traditional religious prohibitions. First shown at the Kunsthalle Basel in the group exhibition "Welt-Moral" (World morality, 1994), this work was later and more effectively installed under a sculpture of the Madonna and Child in the medieval art gallery at the Kunsthaus, Zurich. A tiny monitor embedded in the floor showed the artist standing naked in a bed of hot lava, reaching outward in supplication, and crying (first in German, then in French, Italian, and English), "I am a worm and you, you are a flower. You would have done everything better. Help me. Excuse me." Not without humor, Rist presents herself as a lost soul suffering the consequences of what one presumes are pleasures of the flesh.

Though Rist has clearly drawn heavily from women's performance, film, and video art of the '70s - particularly the work of Joan Jonas, Valie Export, and Friederike Pezold - it is their celebration of the body that interests her rather than their critique of male hegemony. Like her contemporaries Elke Krystufek and Sarah Lucas, Rist remains at a respectful distance from early feminist debates while reclaiming the graphic representation of women's bodies in order to affirm female sexuality. Rist has said that "it takes a load of skill to make up for every iota of innocence that we lose" and in her quest to recapture this elusive state of grace through a low-tech "look," she has produced a body of work whose youthful spirit and technical sophistication make it as visually engaging as it is adventurous.

Elizabeth Janus is an independent curator and critic living in Geneva. She contributes regularly to Artforum.