American Video Artist Bill Viola Has Been Reinventing Reality For The Past 40 Years

“Time makes my art possible,” insists Bill Viola. He defines his art as “sculpting time”, where time is the basic material of film and video as the artist goes about creating events or experiences that will unfold, captured on a strip of tape or celluloid. In his hands, time may be stretched, condensed, repeated, interlinked, layered, reversed, accelerated or decelerated to reveal to us all its facets, his signature being the slow motion technique that obliges us to look attentively at the image to fully grasp its evolution. The camera becomes a kind of second eye that zooms in on a subject to perceive it more precisely, re-teaches us how to see and addresses the world beyond appearances. He forces us to see directly what we couldn’t or didn’t want to see, to look below the surface, to penetrate the image and risk entering unknown territory. Painting with technological and digital color of his own invention, he creates moving pictures forming a body of work that takes its rightful place in art history.

Born at the same time as video, Viola’s career is also the story of the development of a new medium – video art – which is now omnipresent in contemporary art. His work has proven that video could be a creative tool, contributing to opening new perspectives in art, and he is one of the rare artists to have worked principally with the moving image since 1972, testing a vast range of equipment: the “portapak” portable black-and-white video recorder commercialized in the 1960s, the first audio and video synthesizers, infrared cameras, military surveillance cameras for filming under moonlight in the desert, miniature telescopic cameras for exploring inaccessible zones, devices for filming underwater, digital cameras, high definition, new types of plasma and LCD screens. “Video and I grew up together,” he says. “As the equipment improved over the years, I was able to see some of my pieces finally shown the way that I had envisioned them. And new tools, especially projectors and flat screens, gave me new inspiration, and constantly expanded my palette.”

For the past four decades, Viola has kept a personal journal that he writes in every morning, which now comprises 40 volumes filled with his thoughts, projects and drawings. His mind is chaotic and jumps from subject to subject, but this reflects an extreme openness of spirit, influenced by wide-ranging references, whether mystical (fromSaint Jean de la Croix to Jalal al-Din Rumi), philosophical (from the Greeks to the American Indian Seneca Chief), poetic (from Japanese Zen monks to William Blake) or artistic (from the Buddhist frescoes of Alchi to the Italian Renaissance painters).

Believing that art is a spiritual exercise, Viola’s works are like a meditation on life, death, transcendence, rebirth, time and space. Proposing a new way of seeing while painfully aware of the brevity of life, his digital images give insight into these fundamental questions of human existence and demonstrate the universality of his work, which transcends all art movements and styles. His radical engagement in the exploration of human beings’ multiple dimensions is expressed through a sharp conscience and a mastery of the possibilities of technology. His videos are always conceived as inner metaphysical experiences for him and for the viewer. There is no conclusion or resolution – it’s all about the journey, where walkers who come from nowhere pass by without stopping, sleepers rest, alive or dead, under a thin shroud of water and light unveils obscure landscapes where mystery reigns.

“Humanity consists of three things: the unborn, the dead and the living,” Viola remarks. “The human condition is so powerful and so necessary. The most important thing human beings can do in their lives is to leave something behind. People who came before have left behind something that gives us knowledge. Creativity exists in all human beings; it transcends time and place and it arises from the practice of making something new from something old. Art is the universal language of mankind. I firmly believe that it is especially needed in this day and age of conflict, strife and misunderstanding. It is kept alive by the human presence within all material creations, including video and computers. All art is contemporary art and is born in radical new ideas. And right now for artists out there, we are living in an extraordinary time unprecedented in the history of art. Right now you have the widest range of media styles, techniques and languages to express your inner vision that has ever existed in the history of art-making on this planet. But you still have to tear down something to build something up. It’s what you risk, what you put in to, what you sacrifice from yourself to get that deep. And all the great artists go to that edge.”

There’s undeniable power in Viola’s videos that evoke an intensity of emotion – we are inexplicably drawn into his universe that envelopes us. It is an extremely visceral experience that we feel with our entire body. His works have a deep familiarity and bring us to a place that is normally hidden and secret. We don’t need an explanation like with other contemporary art, as there is an immediate connection that bypasses the mind and speaks to the heart. People tend to intellectualize artworks and over-analyze, but most of Viola’s work is based on intuition, not intellect. He believes that there’s too much thinking in today’s society.

He comments, “For 18 months, we lived in Japan and our Zen teacher would give us good advice. He would always say, ‘Too much head work!’ Zen teachers developed the famous Zen Doctrine of No Mind, and that means get the fucking mind out of the way because that’s the one that plays tricks on you.” One of Viola’s techniques is to look at something for a long time and then allow the viewer to look at it for a long time, and thereafter they can really see the essence of that object or scene. When we finally see a work of art for what it really is, then we see it with our heart. His creations engage us with a surprising experience of time, as he plays with changing speeds. “I realized one day that the object of the shot was moving, but when you slowed it down, emotions kept it going. In the universe, there is no single speed of life. All is in flux. That is one of the most important things we have to work on. We have to let the intuitive side of us come out because it’s locked up.”

Sound is also active in Viola’s work. It can have an editing function, cut a scene, open another, anticipate or reinforce a visual event or constitute an event in and of itself. Sound amplification, sometimes associated with a slow motion, dramatizes and metamorphoses what the image shows. It was in Florence that he became fascinated by sound reverberations in churches and Gothic cathedrals, acoustic spaces whose properties refer to divine principles and that have an undeniable effect on the visitor’s soul. Water is another ever-present element, assuming multiple roles: optical, metaphorical and philosophical. Viola paints with, through and under water, in its reflections and in all its states, whether a drop, mirage, lake, ocean, in a glass or as a curtain.

“Water is such an amazing element,” he discloses. “It represents everything you could possibly think of. Water gives life and takes it away. It’s also reflection, refraction.” He often recounts his near-death experience as a child when he almost drowned in a lake in upstate New York and the aquatic marvels that he had seen. “I completely sank, like a stone,” he recalls. “Then I just sat there like a little Buddha. I remember seeing these amazing shafts of light coming down. And then my uncle’s arm wrapped around me and he pulled me out of the water. This accident was something that gave me a pure gift. I was always fascinated by this beautiful world that I saw at that moment when I fell in the water and almost died.”

Born in 1951 in New York, Viola spent his childhood drawing. After studying painting and electronic music at Syracuse University, he discovered video at the university’s student center. He transferred to the Experimental Studios Department, where he worked on experimental cinema in 8-mm format, creating never-before-seen images, and was a founding member of the Synapse video group, which installed a cable TV system and color studio in the Syracuse student center. “I first touched a video camera in 1970,” he notes. “This was an extraordinary moment in history, for those of us who were just arriving. We were studying these machines and trying to figure out what they did and how they worked. But it was not only the technical aspects that we were interested in. We were free. We just saw infinity, infinite possibilities. We were creating video art from the beginning, from scratch.”

It was the dawn of video art, originating within the circle of influence of a larger artistic movement, Fluxus, which united writers, artists and composers like Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono and John Cage, who sought out a kind of “anti-art”, a non-marketable aesthetic. One of them, Nam June Paik, the founding father of video art, took Viola under his wing, who went on to present his first works intended to reject the flood of images and advertising on television. Video art was militant, an art of resistance against the seductive medium and marketing tool of television. While working as a video technician in a museum in 1972, Viola produced his first videotapes and exhibited them in a group show, before graduating the following year with a BFA and holding his first solo exhibition of installations and videotapes.

Throughout his career, Viola frequently traveled the world. The Mojave Desert and Death Valley in California would profoundly influence future work, and he made trips to exotic locations like the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali and Japan to record traditional music and culture. In 1977, he met Kira Perov in Melbourne, who would later become his wife and lifelong collaborator. They traveled to Saskatchewan, Canada, to record winter prairies and to Tunisia to videotape mirages with telephoto lenses. In 1980, as artist-in-residence in Japan, he immersed himself in Japanese art and culture. The following year, he moved to Long Beach, California, where he has lived and worked since. His studio in Signal Hill neighbors oil drilling fields and the desert, a recurrent theme in his work, which is for him a space of freedom and revelation. He visited the Himalayas in northern India to observe religious art and ritual in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, the southwestern US to record desert landscapes and study archaeological sites and Tuscany to examine narrative fresco cycles of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance.

Viola has shown in the world’s greatest museums: the Whitney Museum in New York in 1997 where he held a 25-year survey exhibition, the MOMA in New York, the National Gallery in London, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Guggenheim Museum (Bilbao, Berlin, New York). In France, his work was recognized by the Museum of Modern Art in Paris as early as in 1983. He held his first private gallery exhibitions in 1992 at the Donald Young Gallery in Seattle and Anthony d’Offay Gallery in London and his first solo show in a private Asian gallery in 2003 at Kukje Gallery in Seoul.

Featuring 20 works spanning from 1977 to 2013 representing many hours of video on over 30 screens, the exhibition, Bill Viola, which ran from March to July 2014 at the Grand Palais in Paris, was the most important retrospective ever dedicated to the artist and the first video art exhibition in the museum’s history. Designed as an introspective spiritual journey and divided into three themes based on three metaphysical questions Viola has been wrestling with for 40 years – Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? – the intention was not to answer these questions, for there is no answer to birth or death, but to ponder and experience them. Audiences were encouraged to dive into Viola’s fascinating imaginary world, the idea expressed by the recurrent metaphor of bodies plunging into water to represent the fluidity of life.

“I expect the visitor to search for meaning and mystery,” Viola states. “The idea of a journey is also important in the sense of movement. I hope people will recognize they have traversed a very interesting landscape, but that there will never be a conclusion, that what we create is open-ended, because the way I do my work is to develop everything up to a certain point and then step back and not complete it in any absolute way. This is the openness I learned when I was living in Japan. If you don’t do that, then you’ve created a self-contained reality just for yourself. The artist’s work is to find something that’s a little on the border, not completely known.” Visitors were free to approach the exhibition in their own way, given permission to choose their own journey and their own timing, whether that be three hours in total or three minutes per artwork. Because of the millions of frames that make up the show, they never saw each piece twice the same way.

There were video sculptures (Heaven and Earth, 1992), intimate works (Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality, 1996), pieces filmed in extreme slow motion where the smallest details and nuances of expression become visible (The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000), videos that encompass the various stages of human life (Four Hands, 2001) and unbelievably-complex Hollywood-scale mega productions (Going Forth By Day, 2002). All his great emblematic series were presented, from “Buried Secrets” of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (The Veiling, 1995) and “Angels for the Millennium” (Ascension, 2000) to “Passions” (Catherine’s Room, 2001), “The Tristan Project” (Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension, 2005) using real fire and water and not digital painting and “Mirage” (The Encounter, 2012).

Inspired by art history and the great masters, the monumental polyptych Going Forth By Day is an ensemble of five huge digital wall panels playing simultaneously in one large gallery, recalling Giotto’s frescoes in the Assisi basilica, which Viola declares the unrivaled summit of art installation and his ultimate reference. His most ambitious piece – produced over a six-month period with 120 technicians, set designers and actors and working with artifice and illusion like in The Deluge, where water pours out of a building with such destructive force that it knocks people over – it explores themes of human existence: individuality, society, death and rebirth. Entering the space was an immersive experience, like stepping into an image-sound world with projections coming from every side. Images were cast directly onto the walls without screens, giving audiences a direct experience of the work, like Italian Renaissance frescoes painted directly onto the plaster of chapel walls. Viewers could discover each image sequence individually or the piece as a whole, and sound from each panel mixed freely together to form an overall acoustic ambiance.

“I think the most important thing is: how can we make the video camera see inside our mind the stuff that we cannot see with our eyes?” says Viola. “When you’re shooting at night, the video camera doesn’t see what your eyes see, but it sees in its own way. So then that becomes a mediated image. Traditionally, painters tried to paint what the eye sees. But looking at Giotto’s works is like a spiritual experience. We can’t even say why we are having this very emotional experience in Assisi. Giotto was not looking with his eyes only. He was looking with his heart or with his unconscious mind. Artists like Giotto, as well as Uccello, Donatello, Ghiberti, realized that instead of painting renditions of the physical objects around them, they could paint the intangible nature of light and its effects directly, just as they saw them. This made the subject less about physicality and more about the mental or spiritual dialogue between the soul and its source, divine illumination.”

The starting point of Viola’s dialogue with pictorial tradition, whether pre-Renaissance or Baroque, stems from intense emotion. He’s not interested in appropriation but wishes to enter inside these images, to inhabit them and feel them breathe. It’s their spiritual dimension and not their visual form that interests him. It’s about seizing the source of his emotions and the nature of the expression of the emotions itself. In his “Passions” series, he shows the example of a look, the power, awakening and sensibility that ancient paintings can retain throughout history. He grabs the essence of what has touched him: not the details, but the light, movement, expressions and composition.

Heaven and Earth is composed of two monitors facing one another two inches apart, each showing a silent black-and-white video image. The upper monitor depicts a close-up image of an old woman on the verge of death, while the lower monitor a newborn baby. A reflected image of the screen opposite can be seen through the surface of each image, as life and death mirror and contain each other. Filmed using a black-and-white infrared bank surveillance camera purchased in a junk store in the 1980s, Nine Attempts to Achieve Immortality performed by Viola himself is a tightly-framed self-portrait, showing him holding his breath and failing in his vow to defeat death, his face communicating a beautiful haunting quality and an other-worldly feel.

The Veiling projects two color videos that were filmed separately – one showing a man and the other a woman as they move towards and away from the camera in different nocturnal landscapes – from opposite sides of a dark room through nine thin veils suspended in parallel from the ceiling. The cloth material diffuses the light and the images diminish in intensity and focus as they penetrate further into the layers of hanging veils, the projections landing on each of them in different ways. Tristan’s Ascension portrays the ascent of the soul after death, drawn up in a backwards flowing waterfall on a 5.8-meter tall vertically-oriented screen. A man’s body lies on a stone slab and small drops of water appear as they leave the ground and fall upward, transforming into a light rain then a roaring deluge. The limp body arches upwards and rises off the slab with the cascading water and disappears above, before the water gradually subsides.

Seven large plasma screens depicting seven individuals with their clothes on lying at the bottom of a riverbed comprise Viola’s recent work, The Dreamers (2013). Eyes closed and motionless, they appear to be at peace in a dream cycle in deep slumber, as water ripples across their bodies and animates their movements. This vision of eternity was a powerful way to end the show. The artist concludes, “I don’t own my videos. They are something that comes through me as a complete gift and they continue to move. These works are moving out to you, what you are and who you are is coming into me and I can feel that, and that kind of passage of things continually moving and flowing is really the essence of who we are. That is our task as human beings: to pass on knowledge.”