Issues/interests: art and technology — video as an art medium; art and nature — landscape, natural elements of fire and water; art and the body — the artist’s body as subject; art and belief — religion and philosophy, both Western and Eastern
Forms: videotapes, video and sound installations
Frames: Postmodern in its use of technology and interactivity; Subjective in the mood and sense of personal memory of the artist
Conceptual Framework: His works have personal significance but are presented to a public audience using mass media technology. His videos, by their size, slow motion, sound and context (as installations), have an intentional impact on the audience. Viola’s videos draw the viewer into them, engaging both visual and auditory senses. They encourage private contemplation and can be interpreted in various ways by the audience. Viola’s works are of international significance, as they reflect issues of concern to all humanity. Viola explores perceptions of the world and our particular place within it.
The Messenger (see above) was a video originally commissioned to be shown in Durham Cathedral, England, although it has since been exhibited in various art museums around the world including the Art Gallery of New South Wales. There is often a spiritual aspect to Viola’s work, as he seeks to draw connections between our inner and outer lives. His influences include various philosophies and belief systems, such as Taoism, Zen Buddhism and Sufism, and poetry.
The Messenger 1996 (above)
colour video projection on large vertical screen mounted on wall
in darkened space, amplified stereo sound
7.6 × 9.1 × 9.8 m
Installation view: Durham
Cathedral
Photo: Kira Perov
The work consists of a continual action video disk showing the slow rising to the surface of a naked male figure in a body of water. As he emerges, slowly twisting at an angle, the sound increases and the camera zooms in so that you focus on the head and upper body. He slowly opens his mouth and takes a breath. His eyes stare blankly, but not directly at you. His face never totally breaks free of the lapping water. He sinks again while exhaling from his right nostril. The cycle appears inevitable, yet it is not a struggle for survival. The silvery reflections and clarity of the blue of the water create a feeling of spirituality, not doom. The accompanying sound effects, with their underlying regular beat, suggest a heartbeat. The recurring ‘ping’ sound suggests bursting bubbles or an underwater sonic detector representing the life force.
As Viola slowly submerges, the zooming out of the camera gives the impression of great depth. The body not only straightens but also moves away from you. At first there is an accompanying feeling of loss. The figure appears to disintegrate into vibrating particles of light. The reflections seem to shimmer like angel’s wings. Matter has become spiritual, the bubbles now representing the essence of the person. Although you have been distanced from the body, you still feel connected. The viewer remains transfixed to the screen as the particles of light slowly begin to merge and the body gently floats to the surface. The cycle continues with subtle variations. It is a metaphor for birth, reincarnation, renewal, emergence of an individual and personal journey. One is left tcontemplate the meaning of life, as well as to dwell on memories and, perhaps, fears.
The concept of submergence in water occurs in several of Viola’s works, stemming from a personal experience of nearly drowning in a lake when he was 10 years old. Yet his memories of the experience are of the sense of mystery and peace below the surface.
video/sound installation
Screen size: 320 × 427 cm
Photo: Kira Perov
In The Fall into Paradise , Viola combines the real with the
imaginary world, taking as his ‘subject matter’ the epic love story of Tristan
and Isolde. In this work, the couple’s love is so spiritually profound that
their desires can never be fulfilled in this world. Viola represents them making
the ultimate sacrifice to live an ethereal existence as they fall into Paradise
in an eternal embrace. The action, as is often the case in a Viola video, is
almost painfully slow. You watch a dot of light that gradually grows, forming
into an entwined couple drifting slowly upwards until with a crescendo of sound
they burst through a seemingly invisible barrier to slowly float and descend into the blue luminous water. Reaching a point of equilibrium, they climb back
up to the surface as if defying gravity. This video explores the question raised in many narrative traditions in both East and West, including Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: would you be willing to die for love?
Viola’s art often deals with such threshold decisions between life and death, joy and sorrow, waking and sleeping and, more fundamentally, day and night.
The Fall into Paradise was shot underwater in high-definition video. The three videos from the Tristan Project that visited Sydney in 2008 required a crew of 60 people, including the performers, chief cameraman Harry Dawson and his crew, lighting, grip stunt coordination, special effects teams, and the editing and sound design team.
videotape, colour, mono sound; 7 minutes
Photo: Kira Perov
The Reflecting Pool explores Viola’s expression of the beauty of nature
and his singular vision of being in the world. It is structured around a
solitary movement of plunging into a pool. The figure slowly becomes apparent in the landscape, poised at the edge of the swimming pool, itself a reflection of
the lush green surrounds. One blink and you have missed the figure plunging into the pool and you wait and wait for it to reappear, only to see a reflection. The viewer is ‘forced’ to slow down and look carefully to try to decipher the rift
between reflection and reality, waiting for the figure to reappear and return to
the foliage. The audience is left in awe, trying to unravel the richness of
meaning, its poetic resonance, and anxious to revisit the video to make sure
they have not missed the subtle nuances of seeing and being.
video/sound installation
90 × 840 × 1740 cm
Two channels of colour video projections from opposite sides of
large dark gallery onto two large back-to-back screens suspended from ceiling
and mounted to floor; four channels of amplified stereo sound, four
speakers
Performer: Phil Esposito
Photo: Kira Perov
In The Crossing, the two elements of fire and water appear not only as destructive forces but also as agents of renewal and spiritual liberation.
This is a double projection work (two screens are positioned back to back, as displayed in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao). A larger-than-life male figure walks slowly towards you, his image gradually filling the screen. In one screen flames begin to gently lick his feet. As you watch, mesmerised, the flames slowly rise and grow until they engulf the figure. In the other screen a small trickle of water gradually becomes a powerful downpour, submerging the figure in a torrent of water. The slow movement and accompanying sound draw the viewer into the experience.
Viola’s video work heightens our awareness, making us realise what we already know, helping us to assess our fears as well as our place in the world.
ALSO CHECK OUT THESE WEBSITES
http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features/1
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/viola.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/viola_transcript.shtml
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTakwOpWqG4
Artist’s Practice
Intentions/influences
Viola’s video installations investigate life itself, unfolding the layers of human consciousness and self-knowledge. His approach to life and his work has been especially influenced by Eastern philosophy, which places humanity in the context of nature’s ongoing cycle and recognises the whole as being represented in the parts. He sees nature’s power in interacting opposites (the Chinese Taoist idea of yin and yang), light and dark, fire and water, spiritual and physical, life and death. The illusions create a sense of grandeur, with a hint of romanticism. His installations move one to stand in patient expectation, watching, contemplating for a long time.
Viola creates a link between dreams, the imagination and reality as he investigates the functioning of human sensory systems. His works often suggest violence and death, but the violence is inherent to life itself, as in the birth of a child. His work is often linked with beauty. Death in his videos is always interpreted as a state of transition and transformation, as in the blowing out of a candle — as his mother dies, his child is born. Viola is thus
concerned with issues of creation, death and renewal, the links between the divine and the mundane, and the knowledge that is contained in every small space and particle. He uses imagination as the key to reveal or heighten our perceptions.
Materials/methods
Bill Viola has been a pioneer in the use of video and the moving image since the 1970s. He uses state-of-the-art electronic technology, his multimedia installations exploring the phenomenon of sense perception.
Viola uses elements of painting (space, colour, movement) transformed into the video medium. His use of double projections (two or more screens arranged in a room), in suggesting a narrative (story), reminds us of multi-panel altar paintings. He strives for technical perfection in his chosen medium, in the way an oil painter might. His manipulation of focus and sensual colour effects creates an aesthetic experience for the viewer just as a painting does.
Images are left on the screen just long enough to be unsettling and to challenge viewers’ expectations. Time is often slowed down so the viewer
feels drawn into the experience. The accompanying sounds often become deeper and more obvious as time and the image are expanded or compressed. Shifts in scale are another technique used by Viola to overwhelm or disconcert the viewer. The viewer is placed in the elusive area between the present and the timeless as images dissolve, objects and people slowly appear, come into clear focus, then resubmerge into the landscape, water or some unexpected end point, such as a billboard or the eyes of an animal, gradually disappearing again.
Viola always uses the medium of video with restraint and dignity, rather than as an opportunity to display tricks. The effect is one of grandeur and deep understanding.
As part of his artmaking process, Viola keeps a collection of notebooks in which he records and develops his ideas. These include quotes from writers and philosophers and transcripts from books on history, memory and religion, as well as his workings for his videos and installations.
Symbols
Structural Frame
Viola represents the world through symbols, ideas and spiritual phenomena, searching for a greater understanding of the spiritual heritage of
humankind. His main symbols are fire and water. Yet simple, everyday images, such as chairs and buckets, and simple actions, such as crying and laughing, are important to the reality of his dramas.
Conceptual Framework — Subjective Frame
Viola draws upon the audience’s imagination, as well as their memory, dreams and subconscious. He shows us reality through his poetic vision in such a way that we re-evaluate our perceptions of reality and realise that we are looking at something out of the ordinary. The physical is transformed into the psychological as we become more aware of ourselves and of the many layers of human consciousness, as the rational and the intuitive are combined in his
videos.
Postmodern Frame
In a sense, artistic creations make references to every other artwork that has ever been made. Artworks derive meaning through built-up systems of codes, conventions and traditions. Postmodern artists frequently break these traditions or purposely recontextualise the codes in order to challenge our perceptions. The following are some of the ways in which Viola breaks with tradition:
• He works with new media and a new form — the video installation.
• He has developed a new interpretation of the concept of the ‘timeless art object’. Viola manipulates the viewer’s concept of time. He uses sequences of events, but not in the conventional narrative form.
• His art is a programmed experience that appeals to all senses and the subconscious.
• Viola’s works are neither two-dimensional nor bound by a frame. He creates a new spatial dimension.
• He uses landscape, a traditional subject, not as a representation of nature but as a trigger to the imagination and experience of the spiritual.
• Instead of the female nude, he features the male nude (himself) as subject (e.g. in The messenger).
• His works often operate at the edge of consciousness, which may waver between dream, memory and the subconscious, so meaning is derived from the response of the viewer.
Artist’s statements
‘Recording something, I feel, is not so much capturing an existing thing as it is creating a new one. I want to have more of an input in this process of creation than simply to determine where to point the camera. An active position enables me to exceed my own physical limitations and manifest my imaginings, which then serves more to really transform myself than just to change the images existing within the confines of the monitor screen. Each time a tape is finished it is like the release of a long-held breath, and with it, naturally, is signalled the need for another …
‘The spectrum of electromagnetic energy vibrations that make up the universe at large far exceeds the narrow band-width, or “window”, open to us through our sensory receptors. As philosophers through the ages have stated, the human senses can thus be considered “limiters” to the total amount of energy bombarding our beings, preventing the individual from being overwhelmed by the tremendous volume of information existing at each and every instant. Imagination is our key to the doorway of perception. The television medium, when coupled with the human mind, can offer us sight beyond the range of our everyday consciousness …
‘I want to look so close at things that their intensity burns through your retina and onto the surface of your mind. The video camera is well suited to looking closely at things, elevating the commonplace to higher levels of awareness …
‘This sense of seeing — or seeing the sense of an object — is what I have been after …
‘My interest in the various image systems of the cultures of the world involves a search for the image that is not an image. This is why I am not interested in “realistic” rendering. Sacred art seems very close because of its symbolic nature. Its intrinsic interwoven meaning on other planes makes it more “conceptual”. I am interested not so much in the image whose source lies in the phenomenal world, but rather the image as artefact, or result, or imprint, or even wholly determined by some inner realisation.’
Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973–1994, Thames and Hudson, London, 1995, frontispiece and pp. 33, 40, 60, 78, 79, 85.
Historical Practice
‘Though the tools Viola uses are at the cutting edge of technology, his work is firmly rooted in the history of art, both Western and Eastern. Viola argues that the most powerful frescoes in the churches of Renaissance Florence could be seen as “a form of installation; a physical, spatial consuming experience”. However, in today’s culture, with electronic images omnipresent, his work surprises us with its emphasis on the symbolic. Viola explores the suggestive power of the image and man’s metaphysical relationship with his surroundings. Connections can be seen between Viola’s work and such figures as Bosch, Goya or Blake, artists whose work plays on the crossover between the real and the fantastic.
‘Some of the earliest artists to make use of video — such as Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci — were drawn to the medium as a means of documenting their performance work. Soon, however, they began to perform for the camera. An early Viola video, The space between the teeth 1976, shows a similar spirit of self-inquiry and some of the confrontational elements of Acconci and Nauman.
Here the writer places Viola within the wider context of art history.
‘Viola’s extraordinary achievement, however, lies in his ability to sculpt sound and image in such a way as to stimulate within us an awareness of our physical and mental presence.’
In his last paragraph the writer informs us of Viola’s relationship to the history of video art. The writer has switched to critical rather than historical writing, as factual statements and historical significance are replaced by opinion and value judgements.
Quoted from exhibition catalogue Bill Viola: Unseen Images, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 17 December 1993 – 13 February 1994, p. 1.
SHORT RESPONSE QUESTION
Artist’s practice
Refer to one of Viola’s artworks and a quote from the artist to explain the intentions and methods in his artmaking practice.
http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/multimedia/interactive_features/1 – Bill Viola website with Interview
http://www.designboom.com/design/designboom-interview-bill-viola/ – Bill Viola artworks and interview
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/johntusainterview/viola_transcript.shtml – BBC interview with Bill Viola
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