Issue 2: Autumn 2008: Spanish Avant-Garde Film
Bill Viola at Galway Arts Festival
Review Posted: 08 Oct 08
There was much to see of Bill Viola at the Galway Arts Festival. From his oeuvre the organizers had collected an impressive array of videos, spanning from early works, when Viola was fresh out of Syracuse University in New York, to recent works of an epic, even cinematic sensibility that have garnered celebrity for an artist working in a genre that does not usually attract global mainstream attention and long exhibition queues. What is so engrossingly populist about Viola's work?
Early work hints at his incipient popularity. Four Songs and The Reflecting Pool are collections of early works (1976 -1979), experiments in the medium's possibilities. The Space Between the Teeth explores the influence of acoustics on psychological dynamics, as a man screams at the end of a long dark corridor. In a scene in Truth Through Mass Individuation, a man approaches some pigeons and drops a cymbal among them. They fly up, but the motion has been slowed down, so that we see the birds as a flock accompanied by reverberated noise; differentiated components become part of an indivisible whole through conflict. In The Reflecting Pool, a pool of water is shown over the course of a day and a night. A dog barks, a body dives in, people are laughing, all seen only as a reflection in the pool. A metaphor for the observing consciousness, the diving body is shown on the verge of entering the pool, gradually fades over time, and becomes absorbed into the visual fabric formed by the water. Viola cunningly employs video's visual trickery, but technical magic alone would not justify Viola's popularity.
Beyond technical virtuosity, it is apparent that some of his larger concerns-life, death, and spirituality among them-are already at the fore. In Silent Life, babies are shown awake, in repose, crying in a hospital nursery. The institutional frames the exigencies surrounding the aftermath of human birth, but it does not overwhelm the delicate particularity of new life. In Vegetable Memory, after a man plunges into water, scenes from a Japanese fishery ensue, sometimes in slow motion, the rows of dead fish about to be hacked, sawed and numbered possibly a metaphor for the brutal processes that the stuff of all bodies undergoes. Ancient of Days's title refers to William Blake, but is also an ancient name for God, used in the sense that God is eternal, and refers to Viola's interest in the sublime. He uses everyday imagery to convey the way that the sublime works, if only we would see it, and that it works vis-à-vis the banal. We start with a scene of destruction, but it is destruction rewound, as a burning chair and table are restored to their original state. A mountain is obscured and revealed and obscured again while a child plays. Suddenly it is on a screen suspended on a building in a Japanese city; the scene shifts to an ad for Hawaiian wind surfing. Then we are transported to a scene of a white table, a vase with flowers, a clock ticking, while clouds move in a framed picture on the wall. Serious playfulness is part and parcel of our views into the sublime.
The conceptual attractiveness of Viola's work stems, I think, from his aspiration towards the transcendental. This ambition is particularly American in nature, recalling the drive of early American landscape artists to depict the sublime quality of the Western landscape-even as it was being incontrovertibly changed by a succession of pioneers, both individual and industrialist. We may also look to American transcendentalism for clues. This liberal, universalist school of thought extolled nature, explored spirituality beyond denominational Christian boundaries, and promulgated the idea that every individual contained, in the poet Walt Whitman's words, ‘a multiplicity of selves'. The Other was not a shadow to fear, but to understand and even absorb. You can see this in Viola's interest in locales and cultures outside of the Western locus. In Viola-interested in Zen Buddhism and Islamic Sufism-are echoes of Henry Thoreau, who liberally quoted Hindu philosophers and Chinese proverbs. Viola brings the so-called periphery to the Western gaze, not only to entrance, but to arrest the viewer into a certain sense of time that falls beyond our usual ken.
We see this in I Do Not Know What It Is I am Like (1986), named after a verse in the Rig-Veda, a 90-minute epic which, according to the Festival catalog, 'arrives at a transcendent reality ‘beyond the laws of physics'. Time slows down. We are asked to look into the eyes of birds (with Viola sometimes reflected in them), and to observe a fire-walking ritual far longer than we are normally asked to in a hyper-modern, information-crazed world of Youtube surfers, I-Pod DJs, and Facebook fanatics. Neither narrative nor narrator explains these worlds that are shown to the viewer.
I was reminded of the epic non-narrative film Baraka (1992), which used various techniques, such as time-lapse photography and long tracking shots, and showed various landscapes in 154 locations in 24 countries. Obviously this required a bigger budget, but perhaps the impulse was the same as Viola's, with the title meaning blessing in many different languages. It has that sense of ‘timelessness' that belongs to any work of ontologically monumental scope, like the Bible or any other major religious work. Baraka's omniscient vision has no empathy for what is seen; breathtaking images of poverty or grandeur are shown without any historical context, so that we do not have to respond beyond an innocent's wonder. However the difference between the aims of Baraka and I Do Not Know . . . is their respective media; cinema implies a soundtrack that is inserted after the film is shot, such as music by Dead Can Dance (the emotional impetus of Baraka), while video allows you to simultaneously listen to the videotaped image as well. The eye is also the ear. You hear the bison chewing on the grass. You hear the chick cracking through its egg, its faint panting. None of this has been mimicked or recorded outside of the camera's locality and synched. While stunning and cinematic in imagery, I Do Not Know . . . deviates from the exoticism and onerous omniscience of Baraka in the fact that Viola is willing to approach his subject at such an intimate level that he is absorbed himself.
Made after I Do Not Know . . ., The Passing (1991) is the most personal and biographical of all the works shown. Scenes in liminal spaces unfold: a sheet-draped human struggles underwater; a sleeper sighs in a bedroom, at night when dreams begin to bloom; an old woman lies in her hospital bed, close to death. This is her passing that the title refers to, but there are other passings: from birth to consciousness, from consciousness to dream, from dream to consciousness. Reality is ever on the verge of melting against the force of our memories and fantasies; we might wake into a desert, or find that the desert is the dream. What carries us is the dreamer's breath, and simultaneously the breath of the dreamer is our own, which we carry and convey, regardless of who remains in our lives.
Déserts (1994), created to accompany a live performance of avant-garde composer Edgard Varése, is a collage of images that range from the desolate landscape of the Great Salt Lake to empty vast parking lots to a desk overturning, the objects falling only to submerge in water. It is as if he is showing us those spaces where, faced with the vastness of silence and isolation, we withdraw into ourselves.
It was an ambitious programme to include Viola, but Galway's ongoing issue of a dearth of non-commercial, purpose-built art exhibition spaces was once again highlighted. It's surprising that an artist of such high international standing would be relegated to a makeshift space under the stairs in the Box Office, a lecture auditorium on the NUI Galway campus, and a low-ceilinged basement gallery, also on campus.
-Philina Sun