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Art in America
March 1998

Bill Viola: Altered Perceptions

By Michael Duncan
Bill Violas extraordinary, theatrically conceived 25 year retrospective of video
installations and single-channel works, organized by the Whitney Museum and curated by
museum director David Ross and stage director Peter Sellars, offers a rich, convincing
alternative experience for those disturbed by the self-indulgence, cynicism and thinness of so
much contemporary art. Viola harnesses and manipulates perceptual reality in his work, using
as a foundation startlingly vivid video sequences of events or phenomena such as a babys
birth, a torrent of falling water, a wall of fire people sleeping, people floating in water, birds in
flight, and the death of an elderly woman. In his installations he highlights these elemental
images, using dramatic ploys such as extreme slow motion, contrasts in scale, shifts in focus,
mirrored reflections, staccato editing and multiple or layered screens.
Sensory perception is for Viola a spiritual activity, one that leads to a heightened
awareness of both nature and culture. In his eloquent catalogue essay, David Ross makes a case
for Viola as a new kind of realist engaged with the actual processes of life. Indeed, the real-life
concerns of Violas work can be said to speak particularly to those of his own generation whose
eye-opening, hands on experiences with the AIDS crisis in addition to midlife responsibilities
for aging parents and troubled children have made the previous decades Neo-Expressionism
and irony-laden art-about art seem irrelevant.
Violas interests are outside the typically narrow confines of the art school and
kunsthalle. Inspired not by Foucault or Baudrillard but by figures such as St. John of the Cross
and the 13th Century Persian mystic Rumi, Viola instills his work with a spiritual view of
human nature and what Rose calls an absolute belief in the transformative power of art. Largely
missing since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, such faith marks a radical break with the
dominant assumptions of contemporary art, best characterized perhaps by the blistering
negativity of Bruce Nauman or the willfully hollow showmanship of Damien Hirst.
Violas quest for spiritual enlightenment is inspired by his serious study of Buddhist,
Christian, Sufi and Zen mysticism as well as his travels in Italy, Bali, Tibet, Japan and the Fiji
Islands. Although schooled in the self-reflective experimentation of early video artists such as
Peter Campus, Nauman and Nam June Paik, Viola seems to bypass postmodern skepticism
about the nature of perception and image-marking. Video segments recording, say, the flight of
a night owl, a Japanese fish market, open-heart surgery or the death of the artists mother have
visceral punch that obviates deconstructive analysis. At his best, Viola employs universally
understood images to create complex perceptual experiences.

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The image and soundtrack sequences are dramatically juxtaposed and poetically
structured. Most of Violas installations, 15 of which have been brought together for the
retrospective (including, in Los Angeles, three off-site works), aim to heighten sensory
experience, and in some cases to call it into question. The almost entirely darkened exhibition
eschews wall labels; pinpoint spotlights and museum guards with flashlights direct visitors
through. In the oddly shaped Robert O Anderson Building of the Los Angeles Country
Museum the first venue on the exhibitions tour the mazelike configuration of the show
further disoriented viewers, adding to the sense of the unexpected. Always stimulating and
often participatory, it is life an extraordinarily sophisticated theme park; one dedicated to
altered states of consciousness.
With its reflected and rotating images, Slowly Turning Narrative (1992) transformed the
exhibitions first gallery into the stimulation of a ruminating, self conscious mind. While the
whispered voice of man whom we see projected on one side of a central rotating screen chants
a mantra of varying self-definitions (the one who discerns the one who softens. the one
who erodes.), the reverse, mirrored side of the large panel receives chaotic images (of a
carousel, fireworks and a house on fire) from another video projector mounted on the gallery
wall. The rapidly shifting images interact with viewers mirrored reflections and shadows as
they walk through the gallery, caught up in the installations bewildering swirl of images and
skewed perspective.
Familiar from William Blake and hermetic philosophy, the classic idea of the
microcosm epitomizes Violas desire to concentrate on paradigmatic, self-contained (or
compact) worlds to downshift the gears of conscious perception. In He Weeps for You (1976)
a video camera focuses on individual drops of water that form under a small brass valve. When
viewers stand in front of the spotlit valve, they can see on a large screen in huge close-up of the
forming water drop which dimly contains their inverted reflection. Each drop slowly gathers,
ultimately falling onto a drum, amplified to boom out the obliteration of each microcosmic
world. The 40-second experience is both exhilarating and shocking, fraught with anticipation of
each drops doom.
Similar dramatic climaxes structure other installation. In Reasons for knocking at an
Empty House (1982), viewers are invited to sit in a heavy, ominous-looking wooden chair
facing a video monitor which displays a closeup of a seated man. Headphones attached to the
chair emit sounds of the mans breathing and swallowing, along with inscrutable voices
mumbling in the background. At random, unpredictable intervals, another man suddenly
appears from the shadows and, from behind, whaps the seated man on the head with a rolled-up
magazine. Two loudspeakers in the gallery loudly transmit the sound of the blow. The viewer
in the chair is jolted out of intimacy with the video and slapped back into awareness of the
outside world.
The viewer anticipates the return of the act of random violence as a welcome break
from the babbling interior monologue and face-to-face communion. Fraught with psychological
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complexity, the installation provokes a kind of knowing paranoia. It seems a disturbing
paradigm for the unpredictability of misfortune and the uncertain nature of human
communication.
Viola does not always rely on dramatic payoffs to structure his works. Several
installations achieve their impact through relentlessness and repetition. In Room for St. John of
the Cross (1983), unsteady, roving footage of a mountain range projected on a large screen in
gritty black and white is contrasted with the serenity of an intensely colored mountainscape
seen on a tiny monitor on a table inside a playhouse sized hut Roaring winds outside contrast
with the sounds inside the cubicle of a calm voice rapidly intoning St. Johns mystic poetry. Lit
by a bare bulb, furnished only with a table and pitcher of water, and carpeted with rich smelling
earth, the hut represents the prison cell where the 16th century Spanish mystic wrote most of his
work. The installation honors his transcendence against all odds with its representations of a
cordoned-off poetic mind finding serenity in a chaotic landscape.
Viola most directly evokes participatory transcendent state in Passage (1987), a video
of a four-year olds birthday party shot at low angles, from a childs point of view. With its 26minute length stretched to seven hours through extreme slow-motion, the video is projected on
a 12-by-16-foot screen in a compressed space at the end of a narrow 21-foot corridor. Viewers
are forced to stand close to the wavering, brightly colored mages that represent a childs largerthan-life, over stimulated vision of the world. The abrupt scale-change pulls the viewer into the
realm of childhoods mystery, where every new sensory perception registers with an intense
impact. The seemingly endless party induces a hallucinogenic state perpetuated by dizzying
close-ups of red balloons and by the garbled, slow motion audio track. The revelry peaks with
the heightened push of playmates and the miraculous arrival of a candle lit birthday cake. Like
a Renaissance chapel, the confined room encourages contemplation of large sacred images,
here seemingly dedicated to Edenic memories. Viola ritualizes and redeems our collective
pasts, transforming the birthday party into a celebration of sensory development and cognitive
enlightenment.
Interspersed among the installations are several single-channel video works whose more
conventional use of time acts to slow museum-goers down. Like many of his single channel
works, the densely packed 11 minute Anthem (1983) consists of poetically conceived
montage of disturbing images. Organized around the audio tracks recurring use of a young
girls slowed down scream, the video represents a kind of dark night of the soul, including
sequences of a full-body X ray, pumping oil rigs and open-heart surgery. Violas most
fantastical work The Reflecting Pool (1977-79) depicts another microcosmic space: a pool of
water with reflections that have a life of their own. While the figure of a diving man hovers
above the pool in freeze-frame, the waters reflection features a changing scenario including
inexplicable ripples, the sudden appearance of a pair of phantom figures, and instantaneous
nightfall. Finally, a naked man emerges from the pool and disappears into the lush surrounding
greenery. Viola seems to endorse a kind of ritualistic baptism into a world of sensuous mystery.

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The Greeting (1995) is a beautiful, oddly moving video enactment of The Visitation
(1514-16) by Jacobo da Pontormo that borrows the paintings narrative, vivid color scheme and
overbearing architectural setting. Presented in extreme slow motion so that its 45 seconds are
stretched to 10 minutes, the scene dramatizes the moment when the Virgin Mary interrupts a
conversation between her cousin Elizabeth and another woman to confide her pregnancy. In her
surprise and excitement, Elizabeth forgets her friend, who in the videos extreme slow motion
seems to agonize over the social awkwardness. Finally Elizabeth remembers her and introduces
her to Mary. Embarrassed smiles are interchanged and the tension of the moment dissolves.
The real drama of the video comes from this seemingly trivial social encounter.
Corroborating the humanizing theme of The Visitation, Viola translates a classic Catholic
narrative into the body language of the everyday. Since there are no wall labels or didactic texts
in the exhibition, the work communicates by means of its own narrative dynamic. That it is
enhanced by its art-historical provenance seems an added bonus.
In Los Angeles the three off-site installations (Schedules for all of the exhibitions
venues) confirmed Violas ability to communicate to viewers outside of the art world. With its
real-world bustle, the lobby of the ARCO Center proved to be a perfect location for Threshold
(1992). In this paradigmatic juxtaposition of exterior and interior worlds, a horizontal electronic
LED band displaying current world news circumstances the outside of a dark room which,
when entered, displays large video projections of three sleeping people. An empty room in the
downtown Los Angeles Public Library was the property contemplative setting for Nantes
Triptych (1992), an installation juxtaposing huge video images of a woman giving birth, a submerged drowning man and an aged dying woman.
Most effectively, The Crossing (1996), installed on an empty mezzanine level of
downtowns Grand Central Market, mesmerized shoppers and passers by with its cathartic
display of the power of water and fire. In two companion videos, projected simultaneously on
both sides of a large double-sided, floor-to-ceiling screen, a man on a dark set approaches in
slow motion. When his body almost fills the frames, he stops, facing the viewers. On one side
of the screen, drops of water begin to fall on his head; on the other side, a small flame starts up
under his feet. For the next few minutes, the water and fire gradually increase in intensity, until
an overpowering torrent and a wall of flame subsume his images. The sound of the water and
fire increase to a defending roar. After climaxing, they both gradually subside and disappear.
(This piece is sometimes presented on two separate screens, as it was at the Guggenheim SoHo
in 1997).
With its 1940s neon, sawdust floor, and crowds of Latino shoppers, the Grand Central
Market is one of L.A.s most stimulating locations like the Bradbury Building across the
street, it was one of the inspirations for the luridly surreal sets of Blade Runner. Measuring up
to its location, The Crossing delivers two simultaneous spectacles with an intensity, candor and
focus beyond the scope of Hollywood. On a rainy Sunday, families totting fresh tortillas, fish,
onions and carrots stood there for the works duration, astounded by the physical power of the
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elements. In the dark recesses of the space, a steady leak of rainwater, courtesy of El Nino,
added a touch of realism to the experience. No one especially in Southern California needs
a gallery guide or wall text to tell them that fire, water, earth and air can be overwhelming,
annihilating forces. Viola presents excesses of water and flame that inspire a pure state of awe
and wonder. In its clarity and direct appeal, The Crossing stands in marked contrast to the
ludicrous inappropriateness of much public art and site-specific sculpture.
Violas exhibition arrives at a moment when the video revival of the 1990s seems
staved for content and new ideas. Too many installations from here and abroad have offered
one-note formal gimmickry or fuzzily conceived rehashes of 1970s experimentation. With his
roots in visceral reality and sensory contemplation, Viola will never lack subject matter. His
technological repertoire and formal control seem rivaled only by those of Gary Hill, whose
video investigations of language and cognitive processes operate on a kind of parallel esthetic
frequency. Video artists today have the opportunity to use the technological advances of their
medium to connect with audiences craving what is largely missing in movies and popular
culture; content and poetry inspired by the real world. Violas engaging retrospective proves
that he is already brilliantly accomplishing this mission.

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