For close on three decades, Southern California artist Bill Viola has been wielding a video camera -- arguably the most "objective" of recording tools -- as others employ a paintbrush or sculptor's tool.
The result is a series of haunting, spectacular video installations, 15 of which are chronicled in a major touring retrospective organized by New York's Whitney Museum of American Art. The exhibit will end its six-city tour next year at the Art Institute of Chicago.
Currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through 12 September, the works showcase Viola's talent for utilizing sound and moving-image technology to create meditative, immersing experiences that force the viewer to confront the mysteries of being human.
See also: Artist Has 'No Time to Lose'- - - - - -
In The Sleep of Reason (1988), for example, viewers stand in a gallery meant to evoke a bedroom. On a wooden dresser, alongside a lamp, an alarm clock, and a vase of flowers, a small black and white TV shows a close-up of a person sleeping. Every so often, without warning, the lamp and TV shut off, and the viewer is surrounded by giant video images -- an attacking dog, a skeleton making chewing motions -- projected onto the gallery walls. A soundtrack of disturbing moans accompanies these jarring images, which seem to be culled from a databank of collective nightmares.
David Ross, director of SFMOMA and former head of the Whitney, co-curated the show with the internationally renowned theater director and producer Peter Sellars.
Ross himself was a pioneer of video art, serving as the country's first curator of video art in the 1970s at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York.
"From Viola's work, one can learn how to use time, how to engage people so that their heartbeats slow down and they breathe differently," says Ross. Viola illustrates "how to use sound to create sculptural spaces, how to avoid the traps of blank irony."
Wired News asked Viola to share his thoughts on the state of video and multimedia art.
Wired News: In your 1982 essay "Will There Be Condominiums in Data Space?" you predicted the convergence of video and computer technologies. Have you been working with both lately?
Bill Viola: I use computers in terms of editing. I haven't done much digital art, though, except for a piece on a growing tree.
I'd always wanted to set up a camera [in front] of a tree, taking single frames for 20 years. Then I realized I didn't need to do that, but instead [could] make a digital simulation of a growing tree. Viewers controlled the growth of the tree image as they walked toward it, and it died when the viewer reached it. It was based on an algorithm and was on view at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany. That was my first full-blown digital piece.
What was significant was that this piece wasn't made with a camera. When you're in the world where things are made without a camera, you're getting away from a necessity to record or present things. You're in a mental space. When you move away from physical objects and light, you really are as free as your mind is to create things. In general, it's an area I'm really interested in. WN: Although your traveling retrospective represents 25 years of work, many of the pieces seem very fresh. How and why do you think your artwork has the ability to appeal to both older audiences for whom video is a "new" art form as well as to younger audiences weaned on video games and MTV?
Viola: In my experience, the timeless aspect of art and human creative work is content, even though McLuhan pointed to the structure of the way in which things are delivered -- which is useful when we talk about framing and naming.
But ultimately it's what is coming over the airwaves, over the Internet, through the cables, what's actually being transmitted that really makes the difference and that's going to last.
It's why all of the old masters paintings in the Louvre still speak to us, even though the style is so outdated visually. It's not about the medium at all. That's the container. It's like needing to drink from a glass. Whether it's a plastic cup or a crystal goblet of any shape, size, or form, that's fine. I'm more interested in what's in there that I'm going to drink.
I think the younger set coming to see my work is very fascinated and interested in the technology. Large rooms filled with large moving images and sound are very familiar for a lot of younger people today.
I think for older people coming to the show, there is still this edge and it's very new. But what's going on in the images? What the images are saying is really what artists have been dealing with since the beginning. It's just transmitted in an electronic form. And in 100 years, the same things will be transmitted in another form.
WN: Although you don't create religious icons, there is definitely a spiritual side to your work. How difficult is it to create a sense of the spiritual via electronic art?
Viola: "Spiritual" is simply one term that is more common in usage today. Many people are describing their experience in terms of much broader, inner, subjective psychological/spiritual states that aren't tied to any one religion.
There's literally a web of global communication that's encircled the world. People are feeling that larger connection, one that's much more universal and generalized than the specifics of any one religion or even culture.
We've focused on -- at least in the West -- perfecting the material world. And that's why computers have such a really important place today, in this transition from outer to inner, from the hard objects of the world to the soft forms of the inner world.
They are -- as physical, material objects, as tools or instruments -- connected right back to the first spear points, but they also operate in a nonphysical world. They embody the larger transition that's going on. It's phenomenal. WN: Has the ubiquity of video -- in the form of TVs, camcorders, VCRs, and RealVideo files -- made it harder for museums and collectors to accept it as an art form?
Viola: Video's period of acceptance is still going on. For the most part, video has arrived, in the last eight years, in the '90s. That's been very satisfying to see. It's never complete, though, and there's more to be done.
When popular art forms began to be employed in art -- which was started in the '60s by pop artists like Lichtenstein and Warhol -- the path was blazed for those of us who came later.
The form of video itself was problematic, though. Television wasn't something you put in a museum. It didn't seem to belong, until it made it into a museum as an appropriated object, as in work by Nam June Paik, who modified and intervened with the physical set itself. That seemed acceptable, because it could be qualified as sculptural practice.
Museums don't know quite what to do with films and videos, particularly videotapes. Why aren't the great masterpieces of cinema in large survey exhibitions? They're in the auditoriums and side galleries, despite their tremendous impact on art and culture.
WN: Sometimes you place your work directly in an art-historical context. Your video and sound installation The Greeting, for instance, refers directly to a 16th-century oil painting by the Italian artist Jacopo Pontormo. Were you hinting that media artists should be included in the art-historical canon?
Viola: You know, you look at images like those at the Prado in Madrid by Velasquez or Goya and you don't think about canvas and wooden stretcher bars. When I use a video recorder, though, I'm interested in the destination. People need to get the tool out of the way, and see through the technology, which many people think takes center stage.
The telephone and email, to an extent, are falling away: People look through them. They're all about contacting people you love and want to be in touch with. That's a very healthy sign. WN: Do you see parallels between video's reception in the art world and the evolution of Web art's acceptance?
Viola: It's a real similar thing. The Web has a lack of place in established art institutions, other than the Web sites that museums have. I think the bigger question today vis-à-vis the Internet and art is whether it is necessary to have a relationship at all with museums.
We see that center stage in the music world, with big groups like Korn putting out their stuff and letting you and me download it. What does that mean for the big corporations that control the content?
The Internet's not only a creative, artistic medium with lots of potential; it's also a revolution in distribution and delivery. Videotape was a little like that: When I started, there was a lot of talk about people making their own TV shows, because everyone suddenly had the same tools. You didn't have to accept what was on ABC, NBC, and CBS. You could make something on your own and share with other people. And it was content that you wanted to see. There was a real awareness that this was a political as well as a social and cultural change.
People began to set up video distribution systems to bypass the whole commodity-based gallery system. That's happening in a much more widespread and powerful way today.
