An
Interview with Bill Viola
I
get the feeling Bill Viola doesnt go in for small talk. He has
all morning free, and I have the luxury of delving into the mind of
the famous American video artist. A major exhibition comprising 14
of Violas latest works The Passions is currently
at the National Gallery in London, and three of his videos went on
show yesterday at Edinburghs Gallery of Modern Art, kicking
off the gallerys Year of American Art.
At 52 years old, Viola lives with his family at Long Beach, California.
He doesnt actually use the word dude, but I can
definitely spot that West-Coast chilled out swing in the way he talks.
Since its very beginnings in 1970 Viola has been making video art,
and in the 1980s he became known for his large-scale, wrap-around
museum installations using imposing walls of video and sound. In 1995
he represented the U.S. at the Venice Biennale, and three years later
the Getty Institute invited him to spend a year researching representations
of the passions, work which led directly to his current exhibition.
These works from the last three years are based on late medieval and
Renaissance paintings, and in contrast with the grand scale of Violas
earlier installations, The Passions are far more intimate and devotional,
making full use of the possibilities offered by flat-screen technology.
The screens hang like paintings on the walls, or sit hinged together
like domestic photo frames. Inside them actors writhe in slow-motion
convulsions, their silent agonies and ecstasies subject to scrutiny
like altar-pieces gasping for life.
This is intense stuff. Viola dispenses quickly with the chit-chat
and we launch into an extensive discussion about life, death, art
and God. The artist is well-known for his love of Eastern philosophies
such as Zen Buddhism, so I ask him why he has quoted so whole-heartedly
from Christian images in his recent work. All of those images,
to be honest, I had rejected at a certain point of my life when I
was at university, Viola explains, with a hint of defensiveness.
I was vastly interested in Buddhism and meditating, and my Christian
up-bringing didnt seem to make a lot of sense to me at the time,
so I looked away from that stuff. Later in life, having had children,
and particularly losing my parents in the 1990s, gave me a deeper
insight into the nature of those works. Those kinds of connections
for me are the way that I got into it rather than to think okay,
Im going to make a religious artwork now thats going to
transmit the Christian message.
Since 1995 Viola has been using performers to create intense emotions,
under meticulously prescribed studio conditions, and some critics
(including the omnipresent Matthew Collings) have protested that this
contrived aspect of his work conveys an air of insincerity.
Thats a good point, Viola admits. It kind
of took me by surprise a little bit because I wasnt really thinking
about that. Then of course I had to remind myself Yeah, you
were so adamant for 20 years of not staging anything or not working
with any actors. Then my mother died in 1991 and my Dad passed
away in 1999, and by the time I got to my fathers death, having
learned so much from my mothers passing, I think in seeing the
relatives, and there we were again and everybodys crying again,
I really began to think of acting in a different way. You know that
old adage were all actors, the worlds a stage
is true in a way.
This might seem a little harsh on the relatives, but Viola explains
that in his youth he disdained certain social norms such as
small talk and now he sees these choreographed public exchanges
as an important part of human interaction.
Working with performers in this day and age, he goes on,
means youre working with a whole particular process that
many of them use for their craft, which is method acting, which means
that you go into a memory from your own experience, your own life,
of something lets say very harrowing and sad, in order to bring
tears to the eyes of the character youre performing at that
particular point in the play. And so, in a way the emotions are real,
but the context is the artificial part of it.
Viola begins to laugh. Hes enjoying a mental image of his actors
attempting to be harrowed and sad while surrounded by a battery of
technical equipment.
If you ever knew, he says, those close-up portraits,
lets take a piece like Dolorosa, these two people crying. If
you were ever there you would just be shocked. There were fifteen
people in the room, the person was sitting on a chair, she was about
four feet away from this huge big 35mm camera, which when it gets
turned on (and of course the films going through at 300 frames
a second) it sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner roaring away. And
there were these panels, and reflectors and lights, and when you shoot
high-speed film you need a lot of light because the exposures are
so short, the films going fast. So we probably had 10,000 watts
of light on her. Then on cue the camera roars up to speed and I call
action and then they have to cry!
Hes laughing again. I mean everything was stacked against
anything sensitive and small and delicate happening. Thats what
movies are and thats why there are so many crappy movies
the odds are so against anything genuine happening with this
massive apparatus. So it was pretty crazy, and when I look at that
work now I just cant believe it.
Another deeply emotional work, recently bought by The Scottish National
Gallery of Modern Art, is Surrender. In it, the figures of a man and
a woman reflect each other, as they dive slowly towards each others
half of the vertical composition. It transpires that they are nothing
but reflections in water, which becomes increasingly disturbed as
the emotion intensifies.
Thats a very primordial image, that one, says Viola.
If you consider that as human beings, our ancestors back in
the prehistoric world, the first time they saw their own image would
have been in water, kneeling over a side-pool in a stream. Reaching
in to cup your hands and drink it you would have seen yourself, and
thats why this idea of the mirror, why the myth of Narcissus,
is so powerful. Its one of the first real deep stories and expressions
in humankind of the notion of self image and what that means.
Surrender also bears the powerful message, apparent in much of Violas
work, that however much we strive as human beings to escape isolation,
we are inextricably locked inside our own bodies. Thats what
I get from it anyway, and I put it to the artist.
Its one of the most poignant things about us, Viola
confirms. You cant squeeze yourself into the pores of
another living being and meld together. Sex and love would be the
closest times when we approach that idea of union but there is another
way that we do that, and of course its not physical. Its
spiritual, emotional, psychological, its anything metaphysical,
so that part of it is the ultimate message in that piece. When they
dissolve theyre dissolving into the fluid of the fabric of life
and existence, and so theyre really becoming not just the other
but becoming everything.
So what can we expect to see next? Right now, says Viola,
Im just spending a lot of quiet time after coming back
from my travels about a week ago. Im kind of relishing this
time for the next couple of months to really go into some of the ideas
from the work of the Passions the last couple of years that I havent
done yet.
Theres a whole series of ideas, projects called Unexplained
Figures and Simple Actions, and it really deals with the whole
full body nature of the person rather than a lot of this close-up
stuff that Ive been doing three quarter shots of people
in the throes of these emotional states. In the stuff Im working
on now I really want to bring in the body and the context of where
people are. In other words they wouldnt be in some black room
or neutral studio space. Thats all I know right now, he
laughs, but check in with me in another couple of months and
lets see in reality what that actually becomes!
Catrìona
Black, Sunday Herald 07.12.03