This spring the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York launched a major
retrospective of video artist Bill Viola. The show closed in New York on May
10th, and will travel to Amsterdam, Frankfurt, then back to the US and to
Asia. To discuss the show RHIZOME organized a virtual round table of
curators, artists, and critics including former Whitney Director David Ross,
Jon Ippolito of the Guggenheim Museum and New York artist Tina LaPorta.
Below is an edited transcript of that discussion. Complete participant
information is included at the bottom.

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A Virtual Round Table on the Bill Viola Retrospective

+bigness+

Issa Clubb: I wasn't really prepared for the massiveness of the Bill
Viola retrospective. By "massive" I don't mean the quantity of works,
nor even their size, so much as the overall immersion it afforded. Maybe
this is a function of the museum's darkness–I felt I had been
miniaturized and was walking around inside a TV.

At other times, the achingly slow videos projected onto large panels
seemed to attempt a sort of moving painting, as the materials of the
work recombined themselves into something new.

Rachel Greene: I too was stuck by the power of the installation–I know
that viola is very particular and works on the scale of centimeters.
there isn't much flexibility with each piece, plus, the Whitney is a
small space… overall, i think the installation is incredibly
successful.

In particular, I liked the immersiveness of the experience. i like how
looking happens on a different scale and how time moves at different
speeds.

Gloria Sutton: While there have been numerous articles on Viola's tight
control over the layout of the exhibition–his educating the security
guards on how to direct people through the exhibit for example–nothing
can understate the high level of production value that went into the
show. In fact, this "air-tight" mode of presentation reverts the
viewer's attention back to the formal elements of the exhibition which
seem to contradict Viola's desire for viewers to "interact with the
content." In several multi-channel video scenes, Viola's formal
technique clearly outweighs his endless quest to illustrate the
dichotomy between life and death.

+why now, why Viola+

Issa Clubb: What does it mean for the Whitney & others to put on such a
huge retrospective of video art? Why Viola and not someone like Nam Jun
Paik?

Gloria Sutton: There are several factors at play. First, there is the
rise and fall and rise again of video and multimedia installation.
Second, there is the pressure for museums to compete in the leisure
industry for entertainment dollars, hence the propensity for museums to
create spectacular shows that provide the opportunity for residual sales
and increased viewership.

I think Bill Viola himself offered some interesting insights when he
commented on the subject, by saying that video technology has become
almost quotidian (I am paraphrasing here) that when people walk into the
space and see a 9 foot video screen, they are no longer overwhelmed and
can begin to examine the subject of the work. He also cited the fact,
that just due to a shift in generations among those in power, that more
and more curators, directors, etc. are familiar with video and
multimedia and see its relevance to their lives than even five years
ago.

Tina LaPorta: I think that it was an important jesture for the Whitney
to sponsor such a thorough presentation of this artist's work. But, I do
not see this type of exhibition occurring often within New York museum
spaces–these institutions are just too conservative and territorial.
There is, for example, the Chuck Close retrospective at the Museum of
Modern Art where the curators completely avoided Close's photography for
the sake of elevating the medium of painting to a "higher" and "more
pure" artistic level.

Ari Kambouris: It was indeed good that the Whitney created the
opportunity to take in a great number of Viola's works at once. I have
seen single works in various places where they were exhibited, heard
about some of them without being able to experience them, and this show
provided an opportunity to experience and consider the development of
his perspective and work over time.

In some sense, and in response to Issa and Tina, the show served to
validate Viola's work and in a larger context, the idea of video as an
acceptable form of art to the type of audience that the Whitney reaches.
(This audience is not the same as that for people who are producing
video/multimedia that is being seen in galleries/installations/websites
and other venues, virtual or concrete, around the world outside of the
museum context.) I don't think that a smaller or less prominent venue
would have had the same effect, and in essence, it was like some kind of
annointing that raises his status. (To my mind, Paik is already up
there.)

Rachel Green: i think we have come up with some good responses–as
Gloria outlined: the familiarity of equipment to the average person,
museum's need to compete with entertainment, and the current trendiness
of video art.

I also think network technologies are putting pressure on, or speeding
up, the legitimization process of more technically sophisticated video
work. Many museums/galleries are struggling to cope with the Internet,
and the Whitney's Bill Viola show is a way for the museum to identify
itself as being new media friendly and literate.

But why a major video retrospective now instead of 2, 3, 5, 20 years
ago?

David Ross: The Viola show happened today rather than 3 or 5 years ago
because of simple circumstances. Bill was ready for the project (it has
taken 3 years of his work-life to prepare for the show, re-construct
works, work on the book with me, plan the installation with Peter
Sellars and me, etc.), and it took me three years to raise the funds
necessary to support the show and arrange for the tour of museums whose
participation fees provide half of the budget.

At first I thought that we should wait another few years, but there was
such a groundswell of interest from my colleagues at other museums that
it just seemed right. This all took a great deal of planning, but also
had to happen at a time when the artist (and the rest of us in support)
was willing to devote the time.

By the way, the Whitney (with John Hanhardt) did a great Nam June Paik
survey exhibition in 1984. I wrote a piece for the catalogue while still
working at the ICA in Boston. John's working toward another Paik show at
the Guggenheim in 2001 or so.

+site-specific+

Rachel Greene: I heard Bill Viola speak recently and he said that he
considered the show a "site-specific meta-installation," and that the
transitions from one piece to another, the halls, the corridors, were
very much part of the experience. (It's like a Disneyland experience,
isn't it?) To me this is a very interesting moment of transition for
museums–how they are going to show time-based, large scale,
technologically complex pieces instead of static works. For me it very
much changed the museum experience. I saw the "fire water" ["The
Crossing"] show at the Guggenheim last year, and I had a more
traditional "art" experience–saw the videos, two pieces, was very aware
of being at the museum and looking at 2 pieces (even though they weren't
static, they were very contained).

Ari Kambouris: It is intriguing to hear you mention that Viola
considered the entire thing a "meta-installation," because I found this
to be the weakest aspect of the installation. The sensory bleed from one
work to another, despite the myriad of hallways and tunnels (and yes, I
did feel like a rat in a maze) that were supposed to isolate each work,
was detrimental to the whole exhibit. Viola uses whispering and mumbling
extensively, and hopes, I would imagine, that the viewer listens closely
to what is being said and associates the sound with the video images.
This is extremely difficult to do when the background noise of popping,
pinging, and banging is audible throughout all of the installation
space. This happened visually as well in the case of "The Crossing" and
"Anthem." I'm not sure that the ability to see both at once worked to
the advantage of either piece.

+audio+

Tina LaPorta: Can you recall the audio portions in each work? I can.
"Slowly Turning Narrative" is one piece in particular where the audio is
just as prominent as the imagery. The repetitive nature of the spoken
word plays well within the dreamy and transformative images projected
and layered over the reflection of my own image in the room.

I always tell my students that video without sound is a flat 2-d image
which moves. Once audio is included into the scene the work becomes
active, occupies a space and has a more sculptural quality to it. In
other words, it has a presence.

Issa Clubb: This makes total sense. It's an old saw in video production
that audio quality is significantly more important to the overall sense
of quality of a work than video quality.

That's why I didn't mind the audio bleed from one room to the next in
the Viola exhibit–I almost imagined a Venn diagram (those are the ones
with the overlapping circles, right?) of sound. A sort of map, a map of
a realized environment that I was immersed in and walking through. I
really appreciate that type of experience, whether through art or
recently gained historical knowledge or what have you, of being aware of
the environment and its map at the same time. (It reminds me of the term
I've heard bandied about recently in computer OS discussions: "hardware
abstraction layer.") I think Web Stalker has a similar effect, in a
certain way.

+commercialization+

Rachel Greene: One detail we haven't brought up yet is that the show had
one big corporate sponsor. I don't have the Viola catalogue with me, and
i don't know if it was a tech-company, but i know at the Guggenheim, it
has been financially beneficial for the museum to curate shows that
companies such as Deutsche Telekom would want to sponsor.

Jon Ippolito: At the Whitney's Viola site I found only one mention of
the corporate sponsor amidst a welter of other text on a single page,
without any link or other explanatory text as to what the company
actually produces. (I still don't know to this day.) So much for public
institutions on the Web as ripe marketing opportunities–better to stick
to analog billboards!

If you think today's artists who work with technology have to jump
through hoops to get their work seen, pity the artists of the
Renaissance. Viola hides his Barcos and Sonys behind gallery walls,
while Piero and Botticelli had to paint their donors right alongside the
adoring magi. I guess the equivalent would be to have Bill Gates
kneeling alongside the burning figure in "The Crossing"–a frightening
thought indeed.

Alex Galloway: The Viola show was sponsored by VEBA. Says the show
catalog, VEBA is "the world's largest utility-based conglomerate and
Germany's fourth largest company."

Rachel Greene: Soon, if not already, familiar names such as Sun,
Microsoft and Dell will be some of the major corporate art sponsors. For
lots of reasons, including their own marketing needs, and that they have
the money and the hardware and software, the tech biggies will be the
patrons of net.art and new media art shows in the next few years.

Tina LaPorta: I understand why you would see the sponsorship issue from
the point of view of the museum. But I suppose it isn't so unusual for
me to be curious about how Viola was able to make each piece… Was he
trading his meager teaching salary for video stock? Did he get grant
money from the NEA? Where did he test out his physical "experiments"–if
at all. If you have ever worked with video and video/audio installation
then you know that it is near impossible to create the work without a
physical testing ground.

Rachel Green: The fact that these tech giants are patronizing the arts
is commensurate with the rise of media and software industries, indeed
the rise of media culture and industry.

It will be increasingly important in the next few years for wealthy
companies to be taught how to support art and culture responsibly.
Calvin Klein and Tom Ford of Gucci are more obvious candidates to
sponsor the arts than Bill Gates (not least because he hordes his money,
and doesn't sponsor the arts) because of the nature of their work, but
in terms of the market, tech and software companies are the financial
giants of this decade. They will be the new legion of sponsors.

So then, Hugo Boss's brand becomes intimately associated with Matthew
Barney, Deutsche Telekom with Bill Viola… but these aren't devastating
problems in my view. We live in a culture where subjectivity and
consumption are so closely linked that I think the public in general has
developed awareness and skepticism of advertising and brand cultures. It
is somewhat facile and naive to think that art is straighforwardly
corrupted by these corporate associations. With regard to software
companies sponsoring art shows, this villification also bleeds into this
paradigm where technology is either the great white hope or this
incredibly sinister, colonizing force.

On the other hand, there are those (and BLESS THEM) who are more
critical than me: artists i know from RHIZOME, like Heath Bunting and
Daniel Garcia Ajudar, are taking on these issues in their artwork. They
have been moving closer to information and corporate terrorism–or
tactical media art practices. They have also formed organizations and
collectives, or represent themselves as such (Bureau of Inverse
Technology, irational.org, vuk.org, and Technologies for the People),
since individual artists get lost on an information superhighway
increasingly dominated by corporations. Their work tends to either
target or satirize the commercializing forces on the net.

Whether we are talking about sponsorship or the net, a useful plan is to
think about new kinds of patronage, activism, collaborations–ones that
are neither naive nor compromising.

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+participants+

Issa Clubb produces packages and interface design for the Criterion
Collection. Alex Galloway and Rachel Greene represent RHIZOME. Jon
Ippolito is Assistant Curator of Media Arts at the Guggenheim Museum
(New York) and has collaborated on www.three.org. Ari Kambouris is an
artist working to integrate digital and photographic media. He is the
principal of the Metaphor Group, Inc., an information architecture and
project management firm. Tina LaPorta is a media artist who has created
works on the net, produced a television series on cable, and has
organized panel discussions on the themes of women and new media. David
Ross is former Director of the Whitney Museum (New York). He currently
is Director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Gloria Sutton is
a critical studies fellow in the Whitney Museum Independent Study
Program and the Marketing Manager for Interview Magazine.