Bill Viola’s art, an art of affect!
Even though experiments in photography and cinema can be detected since the very birth of these forms of communication, it took a long time before artists could fully understand all their potentialities. In fact, both the still and the moving image were regarded as a means to record time or to help define a collective or one’s own personal memory.
Although in the early 20th century there were some exceptionally innovative authors (such as Man Ray in photography, or German and Russians directors in cinema, like Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein, or Dziga Vertov), a consciously artistic approach to the camera can be appreciated only from the 1960’s.
Experiments in montage, double exposure, and alternative film processing, no matter how suggestive they could be, were just away to play with and explore the tools that the image technology offered to its practitioners. They were like cooking a recipe in a different way, without being much interested in its final taste. This attitude went on until the middle of the century, when avant garde cinema spreaded throughout the Western world and sowed the seeds of what would become, in the 1970’s, the first phase of video art. In order not to digress from the subject of this essay, it is helpful to remember what William D. Judson wrote about American video artist Bill Viola’s years at Syracuse University: As an undergraduate in a traditional art curriculum at Syracuse University, Viola was on the verge of dropping out when an experimental studio situation was established in 1970 where he could flourish, pursuing his explorations in electronic music and discovering Super-8 film and video. During 1972-73, while still a student at Syracuse, Viola completed several videotapes and installation works, making more tapes in 1973 than he has in any year since. Viola has remarked: “This was a very unique time for video and I was lucky to be a student just then. While still in school I was showing in exhibitions with people like Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, Peter Campus - all the leading early video artists Video was still very new; we were all discovering it together”.
Not surprisingly, Viola’s earliest videotapes, in keeping with the modernist tradition into which they were launched in the early 1970s (and the McLuhanesque dictum that «the medium is the message»), were explorations of the intrinsic qualities of the primitive video equipment with which Viola and the other early video artists were working. These were, for Viola, exercises that he soon moved beyond. Discussing his 1973 videotape Information, Viola has said: “Up until that point I thought that the raw material of video was the technology, and then I realized that was wrong, or only half the issue. The other half was the human perception system”. Viola also recalls that video itself opened up a lot of possibilities simply because of its formal technological structure.
The kind of things it was calling out for you to do, such as Bruce Nauman being alone in the studio and turning on the camera and walking around and playing the violin for a long time, longer than you were supposed to do for video. That solitary moment of an artist alone in his own space, had never been represented that way before.
This notwithstanding, the new generation of visual artists were soon to master their medium as confidently as possible, thus shifting their attention to the message itself. From urban reporters (Les Levine, Frank Gilette) to artists documenting their performances (Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman) the moving image begun requiring and attaining wider attention than ever before, albeit mainly because the common man was getting more used to it every day through television.
As has been pointed out by Michael Rush, video art, which emerged in the mid 1960’s, must be considered from the perspective of a world increasingly dominated by the media, especially television; and this, to many critics is too far afield from the concerns of art. However, as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art curator Christine Hill notes, «a fundamental idea held by the first generation of video artists was that in order to have a critical relationship with a televisual society, you must primarily participate televisually». Nonetheless, the vast majority of the works produced at the time were all but commercial and, very often, they were dealing with themes and topics which characterized the whole history of art. Such is the case of Bill Viola’s output, rich as it would be of inspirations from Christian religion and Eastern mysticism, as well as quotations from the great Italian painters of the Renaissance. But, on the other hand, he has always born in mind his personal experiences, too.
He has asserted, for instance, that every place he has visited during his various journeys inspired his oeuvre in one way or another: Sense of place has always been of primary importance in my video work. Sometimes the landscape becomes the subject of a work, other times it shares the moment in balance with an action taking place in it, yet, always its energy is present and felt for what it is - the natural raw material of the human psyche My travels have taught me that there is always just one ‘right place’ where an idea can come to life and that what we call culture and the human spirit can be viewed as a collective expression and interpretation of the overwhelming power of the landscape. Moreover, an incident he had when he was six turned into one of the main features of his video installations. When he was still a kid, Viola risked drowning in the icy water of a lake near his family’s house: I was fortunate enough to have experience when I was really young. I almost died when I fell in a lake, I was actually six years old. I don’t want to wish that on anybody, but the idea of life the ones who are blessed are the ones who manage to get through the most serious accidents and circumstances. There is a shamanistic tradition, a prerequisite to being shaman, a requirement to get the ‘degree’, that is to say some life threatening illness, preferably at a young age, where you almost died or perhaps did die for a brief amount of time and then came back with special knowledge. From that moment on, water became a constant element in his career, symbolizing purification and human renovation. In Maria Antonella Pelizzari’s words, water has always signified for him spiritual purification as a constituent element of our physical being.
The Passing explained this connection: we were born from a liquid environment, and we are seeking to return to that element, where our bodily weight will be dissolved. Water also promises the revelation of another realm. When he was six Viola survived the traumatic experience of falling into a lake. The thing - he remembers - is the imagery of this incredibly beautiful, serene blue-green world that I had no idea existed below the surface». A similar experience is visualized in The Reflecting Pool, where a dressed man jumps into the water and resurfaces as a naked figure. William D. Judson has gone so far as to assert that this natural element is the symbol of video art itself: Water itself is a frequent, visible motif in Viola’s work; more fundamentally, it is for him a metaphor for the video medium. Referring to his videotape Hatsu Yume, Viola has said: “Video treats light like water - it becomes a fluid on the video tube. Water supports the fish like light supports man. Land is the death of the fish - Darkness is the death of man”.
Tags: art, artist, Bill Viola, video art
