How Pipilotti Rist Made Menstrual Blood Mesmerizing

In her first year of art school, the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist made a piece that would soon become a textbook example of feminist video art. Titled I’m Not the Girl Who Misses Much (1986), the glitchy seven-minute work—her first video ever—is washed in pink, then blue, and it shows Rist frantically dancing around, her breasts flopping out of her dress. She sings the titular line again and again, her voice pitched up quite high, in a riff on a lyric from the 1968 Beatles song