Pipilotti Rist is better than George Condo. And the Hayward under Ralph Rugoff (great name) is consistently putting on wanna-see shows. That's the good news.
Rist's kitchy videos are funny and beautiful and trippy when projected on great drifting curtains, zonky enough to send a few people to sleep on the bits of people cushions, which are also very comfortable. The smaller onse, very Tony Oursler (who came first) in handbags and seashells and dollshouses are entrancing in a lillipution way. There are kinda of- don't really neeed to work out exactly what they are- themes of nature, sex, women, animals which flit between dream and nightmare.
Condo, the much feted painter's painter, didn't turn this painter on. His takes on Picasso, and general knowingness are repetitive and dull, the paintwork looks expensive but not beautiful, and the single figure portraits all have the figure plonked statically in the bottom two thirds of the canvases. They are not funny or clever or lovely. What is the point, and why do people like them so much? Perhaps the cartoon eyes and brushy paint work please in their consistency, indicating some direction I am missing.
So who'd have thought it. Video art better than painting. Perhaps I was dreaming.