Pipilotti Rist,  Open My Glade (Flatten) , 2000 (still). Single-channel video installation, silent, color; 9 min. © Pipilotti Rist. Courtesy the artist, Hauser & Wirth, and Luhring Augustine

To view Pipilotti Rist’s Pixel Forest with levity is to see only the bubbles and not the thing under the surface releasing the air. The New Museum survey of Pipilotti Rist’s work, Pixel Forest, which ended in January after being extended past its original closing date, seemed to gather more and more people to it, tickets selling out and lines stretching around the block. Once inside Rist’s show, however, the overwhelming majority of museum-goers were concerned exclusively with the phones fused to their hands. Their fingers moved only to crop and slide and curate the limited dimensionality of their world.

The surprising sensuality of Rist’s Pixel Forest reminded me of White Nights In Split Town City, a gutsy new novel by Annie DeWitt. Both artists work with a flat medium to make it flesh. An attention to texture is prevalent, and more specifically, the body’s texture. Now, the rate at which we are losing our connection to the physical is accelerating, what with our increasing reliance on and “participation” in the digital universe. Sensuality is losing traction to technology. There is a war on people, caused by people. Both Rist and DeWitt remind us that something is missing.

Annie DeWitt’s debut novel was released by Tyrant Books this past summer and her forthcoming collection of stories, Closest Without Going Over, was short-listed for the Mary McCarthy Prize.  DeWitt’s language takes words on a page and plumps them up into a multidimensionality that moves the sensate body through space. DeWitt’s work, like Rist’s, is completely centered on the body. The not quite pubescent girl-body of the girl, Jean, comes up against the heavy textures of horse hair, the gray chest hair of an old neighbor, swampy creek beds, grass stuck to a sweaty body and the pressure of the summer hose washing it all off. The unbearable heat of the morning sun through floor-to-ceiling glass.

Roberta Smith, writing about Pixel Forest in The New York Times makes a profound observation on the 30-year trajectory of Rist’s work: right from the get-go, with her mid-eighties piece I’m Not The Girl Who Misses Much, all the way to 2016’s Pixel Forest, through her use of video technology, Rist’s oeuve has become a historical record of the body-digital.

Rist, like DeWitt, uses the elements, and positions the body in relation to them, in all kinds of textural moves. Water and weather, fire and rot, work...