Bill Viola
Los Angles County Museum of Art
November 2, 1997–January 11, 1998
The medium of video has never seemed as simultaneously exhausted and
energized as it does right now. MTV's churning image factory and the
trippy light shows of rave/techno/tribal/etc. have stripped the novelty
factor from video art; streaming dynamic audio-visual material via the
Internet is clearly the emergent moving image medium; and the World Wide
Web–with its facility for community building and teleconferencing–is
gaining ground on video as a tool for social intervention.
But just as Cindy Sherman and others re-invigorated photography in the
1980s without calling themselves "photographers," Pipilotti Rist, Sam
Taylor-Wood and Jennifer Steinkamp use the medium of video without
claiming (or wanting) to be known as "video artists." Paradoxically,
these artists' video installations are among the most exciting work of
the 1990s in any medium, and tend to make most of the single channel
pieces from the archives of video art seem incomplete or irrelevant.
Bill Viola's major retrospective at LACMA thus takes on added weight, as
he is one of only a half dozen or so who can lay claim to the title,
"major video artist." So, how do curators David A. Ross and Peter
Sellars fit Viola into both the history and the future of the medium?
Intriguingly, they say very little: in the museum's darkened and
labyrinthine galleries, the 15 installations and single channel works
are arranged without titles, dates, or any explanatory wall texts at
all. This savvy choice–which might elsewhere seem somewhat cynical,
making a spectacle of curatorial reticence–works to foreground the
visceral impact of works like "The Stopping Mind" (1991), a room built
with four screens that features the abrupt transition from the still to
the moving, from the whisper to the roar; and Viola's signature
installation, "Room for St. John of the Cross" (1983), with its
dialectical play between the Saint's tiny cell and the projections of
sweeping landscapes in the larger room containing it.
Nor is any explanation needed for "He Weeps for You" (1976), which
features a lens tightly focused on drops of water slowly leaking from an
elegant brass spigot, which then fall onto an amplified drum head. Here,
the drops are projected wall size; spectators are reflected within them
upside-down, bulbous, and blurry; and the sound booms through the room
with a powerfully elongated rhythm. Concision and clarity, however, are
too often overwhelmed by Viola's didactic populism. He regularly
redeploys, but never reinvents, the ancient antinomies of life and
death, nature and culture, the material and the spiritual. "Heaven and
Earth" (1992), for example, is a wooden column interrupted in the middle
by two monitors facing each other closely: a baby is seen on the lower
stalagmite, and Viola cannot resist, on the stalactite that practically
kisses it, an image of an old woman on her deathbed. Single channel
pieces like "Anthem" (1983) and "Angel's Gate" (1989), and installations
like "The Sleep of Reason" (1988) and "The Sleepers" (1992) are likewise
marked by an obviousness that differentiates them from the
sophistication Gary Hill's work regularly attains.
Yet at his best, in a piece like "The Greeting" (1995), Viola astonishes
even the most jaded viewer. In this large scale projection of two women who
are joined by a third, Viola radically slows down the motions of the
figures, surrounding them with a rich though equally estranged soundscape.
The colors are startlingly vivid, the draped clothing–inspired by that in a
particular Mannerist painting–moves with a luxuriant ease, and the artist
endows every gesture with a hyper-signficance. "The Greeting" creates one of
those rare experiences in which the very apparatus of the technologized
moving image is rendered magical again–thrilling, impossible, and utterly
brand-new.
[This article was originally published in art/text no. 61 (May-July,
1998).]
