An Interview with Bill Viola

I get the feeling Bill Viola doesn’t 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 Viola’s latest works – The Passions – is currently at the National Gallery in London, and three of his videos went on show yesterday at Edinburgh’s Gallery of Modern Art, kicking off the gallery’s Year of American Art.

At 52 years old, Viola lives with his family at Long Beach, California. He doesn’t 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 Viola’s 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 didn’t 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, I’m going to make a religious artwork now that’s 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.

“That’s a good point,” Viola admits. “It kind of took me by surprise a little bit because I wasn’t 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 father’s death, having learned so much from my mother’s passing, I think in seeing the relatives, and there we were again and everybody’s crying again, I really began to think of acting in a different way. You know that old adage – we’re all actors, the world’s 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 you’re 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 let’s say very harrowing and sad, in order to bring tears to the eyes of the character you’re 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. He’s 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, let’s 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 film’s 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 film’s 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!”

He’s laughing again. “I mean everything was stacked against anything sensitive and small and delicate happening. That’s what movies are – and that’s 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 can’t 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 other’s half of the vertical composition. It transpires that they are nothing but reflections in water, which becomes increasingly disturbed as the emotion intensifies.

“That’s 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 that’s why this idea of the mirror, why the myth of Narcissus, is so powerful. It’s 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 Viola’s work, that however much we strive as human beings to escape isolation, we are inextricably locked inside our own bodies. That’s what I get from it anyway, and I put it to the artist.

“It’s one of the most poignant things about us,” Viola confirms. “You can’t 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 it’s not physical. It’s spiritual, emotional, psychological, it’s anything metaphysical, so that part of it is the ultimate message in that piece. When they dissolve they’re dissolving into the fluid of the fabric of life and existence, and so they’re really becoming not just the other but becoming everything.”

So what can we expect to see next? “Right now,” says Viola, “I’m just spending a lot of quiet time after coming back from my travels about a week ago. I’m 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 haven’t done yet.”

“There’s 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 I’ve been doing – three quarter shots of people in the throes of these emotional states. In the stuff I’m working on now I really want to bring in the body and the context of where people are. In other words they wouldn’t be in some black room or neutral studio space. That’s all I know right now,” he laughs, “but check in with me in another couple of months and let’s see in reality what that actually becomes!”

Catrìona Black, Sunday Herald 07.12.03