By Glen Helfand

IT'S EASY TO love the work of Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, but that doesn't mean her work is easy. Rist's video installations almost magically mix splashy visuals, nudity, abundant wit, and positive vibes. They're well regarded on the international art-world circuit but are better known in these parts through the network of art magazines than firsthand experience. Yet Rist's work is all about actual contact, which, thankfully, we can have, since an exhibition of three related installations, "Stir Heart, Rinse Heart: Pipilotti Rist," just opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Rist's work comes from an idiosyncratic pop vision that winds its way from body to mind, from quick smiles to deeper contemplation, and is wrapped in a media-friendly mythology. Her name was devised in art school in the early 1980s, and it combines her childhood heroine, kid-lit icon Pippi Longstocking, with her own girlhood nickname, Lotte. Longstocking, for those who never followed the pigtailed one's adventures, is a nonconformist young woman raised on a pirate ship, a background that imbues her with fierce individualism, magical physical strength, and great generosity – attributes that apply to Rist's project. The artwork also exudes a deceptively youthful innocence. It's bright, colorful, and often comic. Edited with Swiss precision, and featuring a very grown-up seductiveness, however, her art has sophistication at its core.

In person, with a standing-room-only audience last week at a San Francisco Art Institute lecture, Rist comes off as an appealing, unlikely amalgam of comedian, mystic, musician, intellect, and artist. Though her English is spotty – deep, thoughtful expressions play on her face as translations churn in her head – it didn't take her long to endear herself to the crowd. The Zurich-based Rist, who has never before exhibited her work in San Francisco, seems to have an almost rock-star reputation of the Björk-Nina Hagen variety. Rist does have experience playing in an all-girl rock band and, even more important, makes use of pop music in her art, a strategy that expands its appeal. In 1996 she reworked the cover of Chris Isaak's Wicked Game in a lush underwater fantasy of mod bathing suits and submerged teacups she called Sip My Ocean. And like the best kind of band member, she gives hearty acknowledgments, in print and in conversation, to the crew of people who help to realize these brightly hued productions.

The piece that put her on the international map appeared at the 1997 Venice Biennale. Ever Is Over All is something of a fairy tale set on an urban street, in which a woman wearing a frilly blue dress and ruby-red slippers saunters down a city street carrying a deceptively innocent long-stemmed flower. After a few steps, she swings the posy at a car window, smashing the glass to bits and adding a glorious shatter to the soundtrack. The expression on the woman's face is glowing ecstasy, a kind of fresh-faced happiness that might accompany a commercial for a feminine hygiene product, here accented by an accompanying screen featuring a field filled with the orange flowers.

At SFAI, Rist showed clips of this and other works, almost all of them saturated with artificial pigments, consciously inscribed video glitches, extreme close-ups, and wildly tweaked color schemes, as well as a hearty, sly wit. Open My Glade, a wonderful public art piece made for the giant Panasonic screen in Times Square in 2000, for example, is a series of quick spots in which the artist scrunches her heavily made-up face on a transparent surface to comic, sometimes grotesque effect, as if trying to break out, though ultimately, she offers the world a big kiss. She told her lecture audience that it was a "mature work," as the skin of the face gets looser the older you get. (She's 42.) Rist is a master of physical comedy and punctuates her talk with goofy non sequiturs ("Exorcistic positive hysteria!") and endearingly broad gestures while pointing to things on the screen.

The installations and video projects focus on the body, so actively theorized of late in text-heavy art books. Rist knowingly instigates the dialogue at a point of pleasure and sometimes wacky abjectness. In 2000 she created a truly daring installation that involved an infrared video camera positioned beneath a glass-bottomed toilet bowl, with a monitor on the tiled bathroom floor of a New York City gallery. (Titled Closet Circuit, the video footage was fleeting.) In the more poetic and sensual 1992 video installation, Pickelporno (Pimple Porno), Rist employed signature close-up camerawork to convey the feeling of caressing a naked body. It successfully captured that smooth, warm feeling, completely obliterating the notion that video is a "cool" medium.

In such works, Rist, like noted performance artist-turned-architect Vito Acconci, shows her interest in breaking down the barriers between the physical self and the world – particularly the spaces – it inhabits. She uses video to animate ordinary objects and create subjective places that address physicality, domesticity, and particularly motherhood (Rist has a two-year-old). Rist's work may be feminist, but like others of her generation, she feels ambivalent about the label. "I don't have to be a feminist in my personal life, because I don't surround myself with assholes," she told the SFAI audience. Her stated goal is to communicate pleasure and hope, to bring charm and compassion into the world.

Her SFMOMA exhibition, which includes two older works and a brand-new one commissioned by the museum, titled Stir Heart, Rinse Heart, carries Rist's themes into broader spiritual territory. Heart is another loose narrative that plays out in two "stations." The first is an alter with oranges, dangling transparent packaging tubes, and even a breast pump (all part of Rist's ongoing "Innocent Collection" of ordinary objects free of labels). Abstract video footage projected onto these objects creates protozoa-like shadows, elemental forms given life through the application of light. In the second, and much larger, room, a two-channel video creates a landscape of the body's interior and turns the flesh of an orange into a corporeal entity with holy significance. A gleefully menstruating woman causes men to stare in awe and kneel before her.

While perhaps not Rist's most accessible work, it's daringly reverential and unexpectedly mesmerizing (and a timely antidote to Mel Gibson's cinematic religious carnage). In an interview break from installing the piece, Rist said it was partly inspired by the churchlike qualities of the SFMOMA building (designed by Swiss architect Mario Botta) and the ways religious traditions are vanishing. "Religion and rituals seem to have a timeless quality, they mark the evolution of the human world," she said. "When I was a child, religion was imbued with lots of fear – life is a test time, and God will judge you. Deep inside, even if I am not religious, all these fears persist."

The comment resonates with the two older works in the show, both of which are marked by warm colors and ecumenical overtones. Hallo, gutten tag (kussmund) (Hello, Good Morning [Kissing Mouth]) looks at morning makeup rituals with a small screen embedded in a mirror offering abundant kisses with the image of puckered frosted pink lips. In the more widely seen Selbstlos in Lavabad (Selfless in the Bath of Lava) from 1994, a miniaturized video purgatory unfolds on a tiny monitor embedded in the floorboards. A naked woman, Rist herself, yells upward from a molten underworld, screaming for notice and perhaps salvation. It's comic and toylike yet an unforgettable evocation of the limbo that life can be.

Rist admitted that the more pleasurable an art piece is to experience, the more difficult and perhaps even painful it is to create. "Pain is my main motivation, but it should never be the object or the center," she told me. "In my work I want to give hope, and the pain should be around the edges – not should, it is. It's just hanging in the corners." It's an unexpected comment coming from someone whose work is seemingly so playful and vibrant. Looks, however, are often deceiving. "Generally speaking, crazy or wild art doesn't mean that the artist is a wild person. To make wild things you have to lead a normal life," she said. It's difficult to imagine an ordinary Pipilotti Rist life, but whatever that might be, she deserves major thanks for bringing us her sacrifices and gifts.