In 1993, the artist Pipilotti Rist used the Swiss band Sophisticated Boom Boom’s 1982 song “Yeah Yeah Yeah” as the soundtrack for her video Blutclip (Bloodclip). Unlike her earlier videos I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much and Sexy Sad I, in which she reinterpreted songs or used them in fragments, Blutclip adheres strictly to the original music track and matches its duration. In making Blutclip, Rist borrowed all the stylistic conventions of the music video genre, reworking them to honor menstruation and aligning herself with feminist artists of the 1960s and 1970s who had previously explored this theme in their art.

Lasting two minutes and thirty seconds, Blutclip presents the phenomenon of menstruation in a playful way, set to cheerful, catchy music whose beat is captured on the screen by a camera in perpetual motion. The video opens with a tightly framed long take, a mobile camera traveling down Rist’s body from the top of her head past her pubic area as she lies on a forest floor, entirely nude apart from some colorful glass beads. The following sequence, set against a pitch-black background, showcases flowing menstrual blood. After the artist reveals the inside of her red-stained underwear, blood begins running down her legs and back up again, eventually streaming across her entire body. Next, a video overlay shows her floating dreamily through space, hovering above planets and circling the earth. For Melissa Rérat, Rist’s choice to stage the female body in the cosmos created “a visual parallel between the menstrual cycle and the cosmic cycle, between woman and universe, microcosm and macrocosm.”
[1] The artist thus shifted the issue from the individual to the universal level.

Although she designed Blutclip as a music video, the visuals are not merely an accompaniment to the song. On the contrary, she selected the track (released over ten years prior) to celebrate the video’s central theme. “The rock music by Sophisticated Boom Boom . . . is lively and upbeat, bringing lightness and humor to the performance,” explained Mathilde Roman. “It makes this piece similar to a music video, though its visuals are entirely at odds with what we’re accustomed to seeing in that format. Rist subverted the aesthetic codes of music videos by mimicking their format and style, yet inserting the image of a female body that contrasts sharply with those of the typical seductive dancers.” [2] The artist’s camera angles and approach to filming her body thus departed significantly from conventional depictions of the female form in music videos, and she addressed a subject absent from television at the time due to the taboos surrounding it. [3] She used a camera set-up—developed the previous year for her video Pickelporno [4]—that distorted and stretched the image of her body. Despite its unfiltered depiction, the artist’s body is nonetheless sublimated by the aesthetics of its footage, “trapping the viewer’s gaze by acknowledging their desires while confronting them with images of the body usually hidden away from their sphere of vision.” [5]

With Blutclip, Rist sought to change society’s perception and present menstruation in a positive light, free of stigma: “The idea is to get blood out into the open, to show this red fluid, this marvelous liquid, this flesh-clock,” she said. “Society has the tendency to hide menstrual blood as if it were dirty and diseased. I think a girl should shout for joy the first time she gets her period, because it is a symbol of creative power, of life. Blood, our lifeblood: it’s the cleanest thing in the world. . . Menstruation is a sign of good health, but every conceivable thing is done to keep it out of sight, to make it invisible. So it’s never been possible to give menstrual blood positive associations. The potentially positive conceptionood as a life force can only be transferred to menstruation by bringing it out the open, making it visible, as I do in my work.” [6] Rist explained that in her view, the best way to change people’s ideas on this issue is to make art, given that images reach people more directly than scientific arguments: “This is the statement I want to make in Blutclip—if I transform the positive aspects of blood into images, I can, for example, challenge preconceived notions such as ‘unclean days’ more effectively than a scientific study ever could. Images find the clearest path to the subconscious, where prejudices lie dormant, which means they have more impact than words.” [7]

Marie Vicet, December 2024

Translated by Elisabeth Lyman

[1] Melissa Rérat, L’art vidéo au féminin: Emmanuelle Antille, Élodie Pong, Pipilotti Rist (Presses polytechniques et universitaires romandes, 2014), p. 58.

[2] Mathilde Roman, Art vidéo et mise en scène de soi (L’Harmattan, “Histoire et idées des Arts,” series, 2008), p. 122.

[3] Note, however, that the artist originally filmed the Blutclip video footage for a teen-oriented Swiss television program on the subject of menstruation. She then decided to reuse it in this video. See Michele Robecchi, “Interview: Pipilotti Rist,” in Contemporary, no. 92, June 2007, pp. 54–57. The artist also later created two installations using the same visuals: Blauer Leibesbrief (Blue Bodily Love Letter), (1992/1998) and Blutraum (Blood Room), (1993/1998).

[4] For the video Pickelporno (1992), Rist devised a shooting set-up composed of a small surveillance camera attached to a rod, which she moved along the bodies of a couple simulating sexual intercourse.

[5] Mathilde Roman, Art vidéo et mise en scène de soi, p. 122.

[6] Quotation from the artist in Christoph Doswald, “‘I Am Half-aware of the World’: Interview with Christoph Doswald,” in Pipilotti Rist (Phaidon, 2001), p. 126.

[7] Quotation from the artist in Marie de Brugerolle, “Les couleurs, comprenez-vous les douleurs? Où allez-vous Mademoiselle?,” in Premières critiques (JRP Ringier, 2010), p. 214.