S T R E E T M A E N A D I S M : FE A T U R E S A N D ME T A P H O R S

OF DIONYSIAN RITUAL IN THE WORK EVER IS

OVER ALL B Y P I P I L O T T I R I S T

NAVA SEVILLA-SADEH

The video work Ever Is Over All by the Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist pres-
ents a woman in an ecstatic mood striking forcefully with a staff at
random car windows, hitting some and ignoring others (fig. 1).1 Her ec-
stasy recalls the maenads’ Dionysian frenzy at the height of worship, as
represented in Attic vase paintings (figs. 2, 3) and in Euripides’s Bac-
chae.
Maenadism in antiquity was a phenomenon both manifested in
myth and experienced in the lives of women, in rituals dedicated to Di-
onysus.2 The maenads in the ritual were women of the social elite,
who would enter a state of ecstasy characterized by dishevelled hair

source: notes in the history of art. fall 2017. © 2017 by bard graduate
center. all rights reserved. 0737-4453/2017/3701-0007 $10.00
Fig. 1. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997. Two-channel video with overlapping
projections (color, sound with Anders Guggisberg), 2:45 mins. Museum of
Modern Art, New York, Fractional and promised gift of Donald L. Bryant, Jr.,
241.2000.a–c. @2017 Pipilotti Rist.

and bare feet that symbolized the breaking down of order and the
equalization of class. The ritual was accompanied by the sounds and
rhythms of the tambourine and the aulos, with its high tones, as well
as by increasingly turbulent singing, reaching piercing cries that totally
liberated the participants and conferred an ecstatic atmosphere. The
maenadic dance was of a violent nature, comprising repeated hysterical
shaking of the head and body and loss of the senses. In mythology this
unconstrained frenzy ended in the sparagmos—the tearing apart of deer
and hares—while in the more mundane rituals raw meat was eaten.3 The
height of this activity was the moment of falling to the ground that em-
bodied the total merging with the divinity, and was followed by eupho-
ria—absolute silence and tranquillity.4
Street Maenadism 61
 Fig. 2. Hieron (potter) and Macron (painter), Maenad and satyr on Attic red
figure kylix, ca. 480 BC. Staatliche Antikensammlungen, Munich, inv. 2654.

An apt mythological and literary reference to Ever Is Over All is that

of Euripides’s Queen Auge, who destroyed everything, even her own
son Pentheus, whose head she stuck atop her thyrsus.5 Indeed, the
long-stemmed flower held by Rist’s “maenad” is very similar to the thyr-
sus held by the mythological maenads depicted in archaic and classical
vase paintings: a fennel staff topped with a pine cone. The top of Rist’s
staff is even stained with red, as an allusion to bloodshed.
Rist’s maenad bursts into the street as if she has lost her way during a
ritual ecstasy and found herself suddenly in a different historical time
and space, as a fragment detached from a remote narrative.6 This frag-
mentary scene erupts violently, offering a faint memory of maenadism,
and thus of a “mythical time” or “the Great Time,” in which ritual can-
cels secular time and transfers human experience to a mythical time.7
This maenad invades the secular realm, and thus suspends time, evok-
62 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2017
Fig. 3. Macron, Maenad carrying a Thyrsus, fragment of an Attic red figure cup,
ca. 480 BC. Musée du Louvre, Paris.

ing Mircea Eliade’s discussion on the seeming invasion of the spirits

of the dead that suspends secular time.8 Eliade notes that the wish to
erase the passage of time and to cancel history is inherent in human-
kind.9 Ritual in general includes the nullification of time elapsed, con-
fusion of the social and universal order, reestablishment of the primor-
dial chaos, and repetition of the cosmogonic deed. Hence, cancellation
and Creation occur simultaneously.10 The destruction and restoration
of order were the main features of maenadism in the Dionysian rituals
performed by women, since the god himself blurred boundaries and
confused order, and his cult involved bloodshed and led to catharsis.11
The Dionysian mania was aimed at creating a temporary disorder for
the sake of purification and the restoration of order.12
Street Maenadism 63
 These features appear explicitly in Rist’s representation of an ec-
static exultation held in the street. This maenad seems to be punishing
indiscriminately, and the objects of this violence are the cars she con-
fronts. These cars stand in for the victims of the Greek maenads, the
hares and deer they destroyed during their ecstasy, and specifically Pen-
theus, who was torn to pieces by his mother Auge, as the god Dionysus’s
retaliation for Pentheus’s sin of denying his divinity. What, therefore,
might be the cars’ sin?
The cars would seem to represent the Western world that Guy De-
bord has defined as a society of spectacle, in which the spectacle is both
its goal and its main production, and the language of spectacle consists
in the signs of production.13 Debord defines this society as spectacliste;
the show is its only purpose.14 As a consequence, this society has be-
come materialistic and antispiritual, utilitarian, alienated, morally in-
different, and selfish.15 A very salient manifestation of this selfishness
is the increased experience of instability and temporariness present
in the exploitive forms of contact between organizations and the em-
ployed.16 This society deprives employees of their rights and controls
individuals’ lives according to the needs of organizations.17 Both Pen-
theus and postmodern society, symbolized by the cars, reject god. Pen-
theus ignores Dionysus’s ritual, and thus the human need for conse-
cration and exultation; while the postmodern, cynical, and alienated
society of spectacle has abandoned spirituality for the sake of material-
ity.
This society of spectacle, as indicated by Michel Foucault, has devel-
oped sophisticated practices of supervision and control in order to in-
crease individuals’ output and benefit organizations.18 Foucault’s scheme
of the panoptikon is relevant here: this construction allows only a one-
sided observation: that of the supervisors over their subordinates. While
the subordinates can never know whether or when they are being ob-
served, they are constantly exposed to the gaze of their supervisors.19
This mechanism, which is adopted by many employers in today’s capi-
talistic reality, exploits sophisticated technology such as transparent and
64 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2017
open-space architecture, hidden cameras, and other devices. The de-
clared purpose of such a mechanism is to strengthen the power of con-
trol and to increase production and profit for the company owners.20
Such advantages are gained in postmodern organizations, necessarily,
by the often abusive exploitation of the workers.
Returning to Rist’s maenad and the allusion to ancient maenadism:
The maenads in antiquity were women whose every move in their daily
lives was observed and controlled rigorously, but who were able to ex-
perience freedom, for a limited time only, during the Dionysian ritu-
als.21 Rist’s maenad thus offers a symbolic image of contemporary resis-
tance to suppression. Her subversive act is carried out provocatively,
using the same mechanism typical of a society of spectacle. The police-
woman who passes behind her and salutes the ecstatic maenad stands
in for Dionysus, as the protecting god of women. As a bisexual god, Di-
onysus was the patron of women, who were his main devotees, and the
stimulator of the maenads’ frenzy.22
Considered as a salient feminist work, Rist’s maenad brings to mind
the demand for women’s liberation.23 However, the self-evident meta-
phor here is that of the indiscriminate and unnecessary destruction of
values. Following Luce Irigaray, this suggests a highly crucial issue in
second-wave feminism—the disregard and denial of the physical and
biological differences between men and women that lead to differences
in worldview, perspectives on life, and priorities.24 This denial results
from the misleading nature of the word equality. Equality in the eyes
of the law, in the right to vote, and in fair salaries is one thing. The ob-
jective anatomical differences between men and women are another
thing, and must be taken into account when speaking about equality.
Those differences necessarily lead to different priorities and perspec-
tives and, unfortunately, women have been harmed when they have ig-
nored this.25 As a critical image, Rist’s maenad offers a metaphor of
early feminism on its journey to maturation.
Rist’s ecstatic maenad is seemingly destroying her surroundings by
an artistic, and therefore creative, activity. Creativity is indeed Dio-
Street Maenadism 65
 nysus’s realm. In that sense, the allusion to the Dionysian catharsis sug-
gests a cry for creative inspiration. The saluting policewoman, sym-
bolizing the role of Dionysus, certifies this maenad’s activity, which
is simultaneously destructive and creative. The maenad’s action con-
fuses the sacred with the profane, since it is sacred in its original con-
text, but is now located within a secular time and place. What lies be-
hind this confusion?
As Friedrich Nietzsche noted, in pagan Greek religion everything
mundane aspired to become divine.26 The immanent human wish to
merge with the divine is portrayed poetically in Plato’s Phaedrus dia-
logue, which recounts the yearning of the soul to return to her primor-
dial source, the sublime realm where she had dwelt among the divin-
ities.27 The yearning for the sublime is manifested also in the scale of
beauty portrayed in Plato’s Symposium.28 The divine as an embodiment
of the sublime appears in Plotinus’s Enneads as “the One” (to Hen) with
whom the soul yearns to unite. Plotinus considered the purification of
the soul from its corporeality as leading to a merging with the sublime
or the divine, achieved by entering into a state of ecstasy through the
rituals of a mystery cult.29 Madness was declared by Socrates in the
Phaedrus dialogue as a gift when it was given by the gods: “And we
made four divisions of the divine madness, ascribing them to four gods,
saying that prophecy was inspired by Apollo, the mystic madness by Di-
onysus, the poetic by the Muses, and the madness of love, inspired by
Aphrodite and Eros.”30 Madness is considered as a pharmakon by Plato
also in the Laws. This kind of madness is temporary and positive in na-
ture, and purifies the soul through catharsis.31
The Dionysian mystery cult sought to achieve catharsis by imbuing
the initiates with an illusion of merging with the divine—with enthou-
siasmos. This cult featured vital and unruly activity by which the con-
secrated, or the mystes, became an entheos—one with the god. This ex-
ultation was intended to free the mortal from the burden of corporeal
life, leading to catharsis and thus to the divine realm, and promised
eternal life after death.32 The climax of the Dionysian ritual and ecstasy
66 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2017
was the moment in which the bacchants lay prostrate on the ground in
a complete silence that symbolized euphoria, the total merging with the
divine.33 As noted earlier the Dionysian destruction was intended to
pave the way to redemption and to create an illusion of merging with
the divine. In contemporary reality there is no opportunity for apothe-
osis. As asserted by Jacques Derrida, the absence of god is immanent:
Please be here, open my lips. So the prayer of the prayer, the prayer
which is encrypted or included in the prayer is this address to an in-
visible addressee, God is perhaps not present, I don’t know, I’m not
sure of that, I’m not sure . . . so that the presence of God depends on
the prayer. . . . The possibility that God remains eternally absent,
that there might be no addressee at the other end of my prayer is
the condition of the prayer. If I was sure that my prayer would be
received by some addressee, there would be no prayer. So, that’s
why I would go so far as to say there should be a moment of atheism
in the prayer. The possibility that the God doesn’t answer, doesn’t
exist.34
Nonetheless, it seems that the strong disappointment derived from
the absence of god has failed to eliminate the human primordial need
for spiritual elevation. Despite the sense of the “Death of God,” the hu-
man primeval and fundamental urge for excitement, for divine inspira-
tion and eternity, has never really vanished. The sacred has never been
eradicated from the contemporary, as noted by Foucault.35 Foucault
names the various spaces—the private and the public, the familial
and the social, and so on—and stresses that all of them are still imbued
with a dim holiness.36 This continuity is reinforced in popular culture
by Beyoncé’s video clip “Hold Up.”37 In the beginning of the clip the
singer emerges, with water rushing around her, from a huge building
with giant classical columns. In her golden dress she seems a divine
revelation and recalls the goddess Athena suddenly departing from
the Parthenon. Beyoncé smashes wildly with a baseball bat the win-
dows of parked cars and causes further damage—to the delight of a
Street Maenadism 67
 group of children—breaking open a fire hydrant and later sparking an
explosion. However, it seems that the character played by the singer
enjoys the damage itself, remaining in mundane existence without any
spiritual exaltation, while Rist, in contrast, makes use of the act of mad-
ness as pseudo-ritual for the sake of elevation. Rist herself has pointed
out: “As an atheist I think about the shared rituals we need and those
we should not allow to disappear.”38 This might still be achieved, whether
via the sacred or the secular, whether by ritual or by creativity. By merg-
ing the sacred with the secular, Rist’s maenad seems to authenticate
the primordial human need for ritual and exultation in order to merge
with the divine.

NO TE S

1. Pipilotti Rist, Ever Is Over All, 1997, video, 2:45 mins., https://www.youtube
.com/watch?v5a56RPZ_cbdc. The work was presented by Rist at the 47th
Venice Biennale. See Peggy Phelan, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Elisabeth
Bronfen, Pilpilotti Rist, exh. cat. (London: Phaidon, 2001), 59.
2. For a comprehensive study on maenadism, see Jan N. Bremmer, “Greek
Maenadism Reconsidered,” Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 55
(1984): 267–86.
3. Ibid., 275–79.
4. Ibid., 277–82.
5. Euripides, Bacchae, trans. Geoffrey S. Kirk (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-
Hall, 1970), 137–39, 734–42, 743–64, 1114–43, 1203–17.
6. Jean-Francois Lyotard, La condition postmoderne: Rapport sur le savoir (Paris:
Editions de Minuit, 1988). On the ahistorical society see Frederick Jameson,
Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1992), 18; and Frederick Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Se-
lected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 2009), 7–10.
7. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. William Trask (New
York: Pantheon Books, 1954), ix, 35–36.
8. Ibid., 68.
9. Ibid., 81, 86.
10. Ibid., 55–59.

68 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2017

 11. Louise Bruit Zaidman and Pauline Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient
Greek City, trans. Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1992), 198.
12. Plato, Laws, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed.
Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univer-
sity Press, 1963), 220–21; Steven H. Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in
Greek Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 79–80.
13. Guy Debord, La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet, Chastel, 1967), 32.
14. Ibid., 14.
15. Ibid., 215, 216.
16. Israel Katz, Organizations in a Postmodern World [in Hebrew] (Tel Aviv:
Resling, 2012), 24.
17. Debord, La société du spectacle, 31, 43.
18. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Daniela
Yoel (Tel Aviv: Resling, 2015), and Heterotopia, trans. Ariella Azoulay (Tel
Aviv: Resling, 2003).
19. Foucault, Heterotopia, 248–54.
20. Katz, Organizations in a Postmodern World, 88–103.
21. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 267–86.
22. Zaidman and Schmitt Pantel, Religion in the Ancient Greek City, 200.
23. Phelan, Obrist, and Bronfen, Pilpilotti Rist, 59.
24. Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe qui n’en est pas un (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit,
1977), and Je, tu, nous: Toward a Culture of Difference, trans. Alison Martin
(New York: Routledge, 1993).
25. Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts—a Sociological Explanation, trans. Shiran Beck
[in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Keter, 2013).
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald
Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
27. Plato, Phaedrus, ed. Harvey Yunis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), 251, and The Symposium, trans. Walter Hamilton (Harmondsworth,
UK: Penguin Books, 1951), 203a. See Pierre Hadot, What Is Ancient Philoso-
phy?, trans. Michael Chase (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2002), 47.
28. Plato, Symposium, 210–12.
29. Plotinus, Aeneads, trans. A. H. Armstrong (London: W. Heinemann, 1966),
5.8.10, 11; 6.9.4; 6.7.34–35; 6.9.9–11.
30. Plato, Phaedrus, 264–65.
31. Plato, Laws, 672, 790; Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 79.

Street Maenadism 69
 32. Euripides, Bacchae, 298–301. On the Dionysian mysteries and cult, see Ugo
Bianchi, The Greek Mysteries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1976), 3–7, 13–15; Marvin W.
Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries—a Sourcebook: Sacred Texts of the Mystery Reli-
gions of the Ancient Mediterranean World (San Francisco: Harper, 1987), 63–
65; Walter Burkert, Ancient Mystery Cults (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 1987), 12, 18–24; Susan G. Cole, “Landscapes of Dionysus and
Elysian Fields,” in Greek Mysteries—the Archeology and Ritual of Ancient
Greek Secret Cults, ed. Michael B. Cosmopoulos (London: Routledge, 2003),
93–194, 197–99, 205; Hugh Bowden, Mystery Cults of the Ancient World
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 105–36; Martin Peersson
Nilsson, The Dionysiac Mysteries (New York: Arno Press, 1975), 123, 130,
131; Walter Sorell, The Other Face—the Mask in the Arts (Indianapolis:
Bobbs-Merrill, 1973), 51; Francoise Frontisi-Ducroux, “In the Mirror of the
Mask,” in A City of Images—Iconography and Society in Ancient Greece, ed.
Claude Berard (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 151–64,
156; Lonsdale, Dance and Ritual Play in Greek Religion, 79.
33. Bremmer, “Greek Maenadism Reconsidered,” 281–82.
34. David Shapiro, Michal Govrin, and Jacques Derrida, Body of Prayer (New
York: Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture of the Cooper Union, 2001),
63. See also John Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion
Without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 328–29.
35. Foucault, Hetrotopia, 9.
36. Ibid., 10.
37. Beyonce, “Hold Up,” Lemonade, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v
5PeonBmeFR8o.
38. Pipilotti Rist, Congratulations!, exh. cat. (Baden: Lars Müler, 2007), 21.

70 Source: Notes in the History of Art / Fall 2017