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| Video clips from Bill Viola's 'Ascension' |
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To say that Bill Viola is fast eclipsing Nam June Paik as the world’s most famous video artist may be a bit of hyperbole, but just a bit. On the other hand, it is certainly no stretch to say he is the hottest young video artist on the scene today. I remember that at the turn of the millennium one of the major art magazines asked a number of artists and critics to pick the artists to watch in the new millennium, and Bill Viola’s name came up more than any other (closely followed by Cindy Sherman, if memory serves me right). His videos are part of many museum collections around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Tate Museum. He has received numerous honors, including a John D. and Catherine T. McArthur Award (commonly known as the genius award) and a Getty Research Institute Scholar-in-Residence award. And he represented the United States in the 1995 Venice Biennale.
After seeing images of his work in magazines for years, I have been dying to see them full size and live. Finally we have a chance. The Tacoma Art Museum presents “Bill Viola: Something Above, Beyond, Below, Beneath” through September 15. This exhibition includes three video works: “Ascension,” “Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat),” and “The Reflecting Pool.”
Wall text in the gallery provides critical and historical information on Viola’s work, philosophical statements from Viola, and information about the history of video art, and a number of tools to help visitors understand the medium. Included in the wall text is the statement that it is impossible to describe a Bill Viola video. Experientially, philosophically and spiritually this is absolutely true; no amount of description begins to explain a Bill Viola video. But factually they are easy to describe. By way of example, I shall describe one of the three videos in the exhibition, “Ascension.”
You step behind a black curtain into a dark and empty room. On a wall-size video screen you see a figure of a man underwater, his arms outstretched, elbows bent, as if in supplication. His clothes billow out. There is very little color. The water, a dark blue; his clothes a dull off-white; bubbles silvery as stars at night; rays of white light beaming in from the top left side of the screen. Is the man dead or alive? It is impossible to tell. He does not move, but the water moves him. He remains under water and motionless longer than would seem to be humanly possible, but this can be accounted for by the editing process, or it could be an illusion of lengthened time created by the video’s hypnotic quality.
Bubbles ascend as light flows downward. The figure rises ever so slowly. Bubbles and figure move at the same snail’s pace. There is sound, impossible to describe but vaguely reminiscent of the songs of whales. It is a symphony of light, sound and movement with the kind of repetitive pace one associates with a Phillip Glass composition.
The figure rises until his head reaches the surface of the water. Then he sinks until he disappears below the bottom of the screen. The speed at which the figure moves matches the speed of the bubbles, which matches the tempo of the sound track. When the figure vanishes there is nothing left but rising bubbles, light and sound. The quiet is loud. Sound seems to fade, but this may be an illusion. The viewer is lulled almost to sleep. Then suddenly the figure plunges into the water again with a shocking explosion of light, sound and movement, as the video loops again and again.
Similar themes and techniques can be seen in “The Reflecting Pool.” In it a man walks out of a forest and stops by a body of water. He jumps, and time stops. The image is seen as reflected in the pool. After a moment, the man emerges from the water without ever having fallen in.
By carefully crafting sequences of images and sounds, Viola produces videos that hint at the enormity of our world and the human condition beyond what we see in front of us. He zooms in and out of vast landscapes, focuses on details, slows or speeds up time, and juxtaposes different scenes, urging viewers to trust their intuition and discover multiple levels of awareness in the world. Everything in a Viola video presents a balancing of opposites. What comes to mind is placid violence, an obvious contradiction in terms. His subjects have to do with the basic elements of earth, air, fire and water; and humankind’s interaction with these elements over time. Perhaps we should not so much analyze or even think about his work as simply experience it