Video art of Bill Viola
Viola pays extreme attention to the response of the viewers, and therefore is deeply concerned about the way his works are experienced: I was very happy when Bob Stein, an LA media entrepreneur guy, approached me and my colleagues in the early 70’s and 80’s to release our work on VHS tape so people could take it home.
I thought that was great because then people could actually see it in the comfort of their own homes, in their own space, on their own terms, when they wanted to see it… When my parents started to age I became more sensitive to elderly people who might need to sit down than young people who might come in and sit down and camp on the floor. But this is not all, since the artist’s concern about the audience is not limited to their comfort, but to their active involvement as well (I guess in the end what’s important for me is that experiences then get shared.
The sharing is essential: it imparts life to the work). Such participation is attained by stimulating both the psychological and the cultural background of the viewer, in order to attune their mind and soul to those of the author himself. Again, a clear explanation of this aspect of Viola’s working method has been provided by William D. Judson: In the installation Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, the viewer is invited to sit directly opposite a monitor showing Viola’s head and shoulders and enter Viola’s psychological, interior space through a dramatic amplification of Viola’s physical sounds (the microphone is hidden in his mouth). From time to time a barely glimpsed figure hits Viola over the head, and the observer hears the booming sound of the impact echoing in Viola’s head through earphones provided at the viewing chair. Viola has dedicated this work to Phineas R. Gage, the nineteenth-century railroad foreman whose head was penetrated by a thirteen-pound iron bar during a dynamiting accident and who suffered no sensory or memory damage, but whose character was completely shifted toward the antisocial (the bar and Gage’s skull are preserved at the Harvard Medical School).
Viola thus specifically grounds Reasons for Knocking in the interface, still mysterious in this modern age, between the electrochemical biology of the brain and the consciousness that emanates from it. At issue for Viola is not only the physiological basis of Gage’s behavior but its cultural nature - its ‘appropriateness’ - as well. Viola further expanded the perceptual context for Reasons for Knocking in 1986, when he exhibited this work in a room in a medieval building in southern France, evoking the historical moment of the Inquisition. This reinstallation was, precisely, a readjustment to the balance of consciousness and conscience in the work. As has been noted by Judson, sound plays a major role in the communication process.
That is because Viola was drawn to electronic and experimental music since his early years at Syracuse University (a common trait in video artist; see, for instance, Nam June Paik’s interest in John Cage’s compositions or his Concerto for Tv, Cello and Video Tape of 1971, in collaboration with Charlotte Moorman). This made him conceive and redefine the concept itself of audio in video art: not just a soundtrack to projected images (as it happens at the cinema), but a further means to stimulate, trick, and play with the whole sensorial system of the audience. Therefore, as audio turns out to be an irrefutable element of video art, the experience of Viola’s works goes far beyond the simple act of looking at them. As he himself has stressed out, looking at the technical development of both video and film, we immediately notice a profound difference: as film has evolved basically out of photography (a film is a succession of discrete photographs), video has emerged from audio technology.
A video camera is closer to a microphone in operation than it is to a film camera; video images are recorded on magnetic tape in a tape recorder. Thus we find that video is closer in relationship to sound, or music than it is to the visual media of film and photography. This, from Viola’s perspective, implies getting rid of the modern rationalistic attitude (Western science has decided it is desirable to isolate the senses in order to study them, but much of my work has been aimed at putting it all back together) in order to ascend to a higher spiritual level about which artists do not care any more (the video image has been transformed into a sound image; Viola does not differentiate them. He writes: “By images I mean the information that comes through sight, hearing, and all the sensory modalities”. Since the early 1970s, when he made a series of recordings in pre-Renaissance religious architectures in Florence, Viola came to realize that “sound seemed to carry so much a part of the feeling of the ineffable like a vital link between the unseen and the seen, between an abstract, inner phenomenon and the outer material world”).
Finally, to put it in Marjorie Perloff’s words: «We usually think of the camera - says Viola - as an ‘eye’ and the microphone as an ‘ear’, but all the senses exist simultaneously in our bodies, interwoven into one system that includes sensory data, neural processing, memory, imagination, and all the mental events of the moment. This all adds up to create the larger phenomenon we call experience». In I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, reflection plays a central role: the artist sees his reflection in the chrome of the kitchen faucet, in the eyes of fish, buffalo, and birds, in a glass of water on his desk that turns out to have a miniature tree in it - everywhere there are black pupils that give the artist his self image even as the sounds of water and wind, intermittent barking and chirping create a disquieting counterpoint to the visual.
<h3>In Viola’s work, sound and image are never fully in sync</h3>
But what is Bill Viola’s role in today’s art world, one might ask? Even though he is considered one of the major artists working with video who have not become too commercial or too intellectual (like Chris Cunningham or Aernout Mik), his opinion of the artistic scene does not look to be very optimistic. He thinks that many of his colleagues have diverted their efforts from the true scope of art to a sterile process of creation which lacks any inner research of the self, being too related to the outside world. I don’t read art magazines, it doesn’t interest me too much. And the art of recent times has become very theory driven, I am more interested in practice… The hallmark of any major transition is the awareness of a context or a frame around this. What you are in now is something that you never saw before, and if you step back you can see that. We haven’t actually made that part of artistic practice, but I think that we are coming even through that further now, which is a healthy thing. Because art did sort of become by the 90’s very much about what you might just call, in another way and in another situation, social studies, the kind of effects of art on the society.
All good questions, important ones, but in terms of art making they pose the danger of the self consciousness of the makers, who might be looking at the effects of what they are making, rather than the inner journey one takes and must necessarily take to complete and to lose oneself in the creative process of making something. Otherwise, if you don’t do that, it’s going to be just some ego expression. This notwithstanding, he does not behave like a visionary possessed by mysticism, living on a far ideal island set apart from the daily concerns of common man. His point of view on tv and visual communication, for example, is a result of a personal analysis that is all but superficial, and can compete with the ‘sociological’ efforts of other contemporary artists. And, perhaps most important of all, it restores hope in the power of art to go through any dark age: they learned now, the powers that be, how to get into the images and manipulate those but artists will always, masters of images that they are, will always come through, will always go through that, will have that power and be immutable and undeniable. I think as for what is going on right now, I think we are going to move into an age where the mistrust of the visual image will grow, not recede, its happening already, a lot of people don’t believe what they see on CNN. That disconnect from the visual which has so defined our era now I think is, as digital tools extend, the advantage we have is, the reality is a code, not an image, and those codes are the underbelly of the infrastructure of what we are experiencing. So I think the artists of the future are going to understand the image as a surfeit and their work as artists will be in the subterranean levels beneath the image, where the real reality is… The big responsibility right now is to develop an understanding and awareness of the effects these images have.
We are in a situation now culturally whereby the people who have created this huge, giant image machine which is inundating us, flooding us with images, every night every hour every day all around us, have no knowledge or awareness or understanding of the real effect those images are going to have on us. It’s like someone who is so focused on the food you are eating and getting the taste to be right, and the food hits your mouth but hasn’t got a clue about nutrition, about what happens after the food comes in and goes into your body. I mean hamburgers are going to give you cancer. And it is the same thing with images, they go in there and they live in you, all these things you’ve seen, these presences, are living in you and continuing to affect you.
Bibliography
Michael Rush, Video Art, Thames & Hudson, 2003
Michael Rush, New Media in Art, Thames & Hudson, 2005
Bill Viola, Statements, Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, 1985
Bill Viola (ed. Robert Violette), Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994, Thames & Hudson, 1995,
VV.AA., Bill Viola, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, 1983
VV.AA., Bill Viola: a Twenty-Five-Year Survey, Whitney Museum of American Art, 1997
Melissa Feldman & Ashley Kistler, Bill Viola: Slowly Turning Narrative, 1992
Jean de Loisy, Bill Viola: the Sleep of Reason, Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, 1990
Barbara London, Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes, New York Museum of Modern Art, 1987
Uta Nusser, Bill Viola: Stations, Lannan Foundation, 1996
Rosanna Albertini, Bill Viola: l’oeil de la separation, Art Press 223, 1998
Deirdre Boyle, Post-Traumatic Shock: Bill Viola’s Recent Work, Afterimage 24, 1996
Michael Duncan, Bill Viola: Altered Perceptions, Art in America 86, 1998
Michael Nash, Bill Viola, Journal of Contemporary Art 3, 1990
Maria Antonella Pelizzari, Experiencing Bill Viola’s Buried Secrets, Millennium Film Journal 29, 1996
Bill Viola, The Porcupine and the Car, Image Forum 2, 1981
William D. Judson, Bill Viola: Allegories in Subjective Perceptions Video Artists, Art Journal, Winter 1995
Clayton Campbell, Bill Viola Interview, Res Artis, 2004 (www.resartis.org)
Marjorie Perloff, The Morphology of the Amorphous: Bill Viola’s Videoscapes, 1998
Tags: Bill Viola, camera, modernism, video art
