Bill Viola

The National Gallery of Australia presents Bill Viola: The Passions, a mesmerising exhibition of recent works by the internationally-renowned American video and sound installation artist. Organised by the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles – then shown in London and Madrid – Bill Viola: The Passions is on display in Canberra only, until 6 November. As well as 12 works from The Passions series, the exhibition includes Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, an all-enveloping environment of sight and sound.

Since the 1970s Viola’s videos and installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory and self-awareness. In 1998, during a period of study at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Viola immersed himself in the artistic conventions of expression. The results of this research – encounters with old master paintings, and with theories of emotional expression – led him to the challenge of depicting ambiguous or mixed emotions. In The Passions, an ongoing series begun in 2000, Viola tackles one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of human feelings. Using new technology, he examines the manifestations of emotions, through silence, extreme slow-motion, and psychologically-gripping depictions of the faces and bodies of his performers.

Viola draws on a wide range of sources including both Eastern and Western art, as well as spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. At the Getty Viola was drawn to religious works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to particular paintings in which he perceived a mystical intensity. He looked at an The Annunciation of 1450–55 by Dieric Bouts, and Caspar David Friedrich’s meditative figure in A walk at dusk c.1830–35. [1] Later he considered the style of small, private devotional works intended to focus the viewer’s mediation on Christ’s suffering, [2] and large, multi-panelled altarpieces in which numerous temporal scenes from a single narrative or concurrent events are portrayed, or in which many key figures are compressed within the space. [3]

Viola’s background in music, performance and as a studio engineer also informs his practice. Unlike his early work, where he used the first portable video cameras and often served as his own subject, Viola now commissions actors and employs the sort of infrastructure usually associated with major commercial film projects. His use of digital flat-panel plasma screens produces extraordinarily bright, vivid pictures – the references to everyday life invite a range of entry points – while behind the scenes, the works are made possible by a complex infrastructure of technology. Viola shoots on high-speed 35mmm film: at 210 frames per second, it is almost seven times normal speed, and allows extreme slow motion without fragmentation or loss of continuity. The chosen take is transferred to high-definition digital video and during post-production editing the colour, adjustments to the contrast, textures and other details are completed.

Three works indicate the range of formats within Bill Viola: The Passions, from the small LCD panels, through rear-projected videos, culminating in the full ‘environment’ of the installation work. One from the first group of The Passion series, the free-standing diptych Dolorosa 2000, evokes human suffering. A woman and a man, shown side-by-side and slightly larger than life, are in the throes of extreme sorrow: tears stream down their cheeks. They are independent but related, and in the course of the cycle seem to refer to one another, acknowledging their separate but shared grief. In 2001 he explained:

Filmed in a golden light – with the type of generic background found in commercial photographic studios – Dolorosa at once suggests meditation on the inevitable fate of Jesus as the saviour of Christians while making reference to domestic family photographs. In extreme slow-motion, and on continuous loop, the female and male figures exist in an eternal and perpetual sorrow, a meditation on the Every Man.

In Emergence 2002, a work commissioned by the J Paul Getty Museum, two women who sit and wait witness an extraordinary event: from the marble cistern the head of a young man appears, his pale body rises up, and water spills out and onto the floor. At full extension the women catch the male figure who then collapses and is gently lowered onto the floor, covered with a cloth. Cradling his head, the older woman breaks down in tears, while the younger woman embraces his body, overcome with emotion. The whole cycle last about 12 minutes. In his most direct quotation from earlier art, Viola has taken inspiration from Masolino’s frescoed Pietà 1424 [4] in which the Madonna and St John mourn the dead Christ standing upright in a sarcophagus. However in the twentieth century, a high-definition video rear projection, Viola has staged a scene which is birth, the act of love, an entombment and the resurrection all wrapped into one. Rather than appropriating or restaging, he wanted to ‘get inside’ the pictures – to embody, to inhabit and to feel them breathe – encapsulating a spiritual dimension, rather than the visual form. Emergence promotes a multiple of readings and of the work Viola comments: ‘To our contemporary eye, it’s a drowning; in my inner eye, midwifery. Images have their life because they're untethered and free-flowing.’

Five Angels for the Millennium  2001 is another form of The Passions, described by the artist as ‘the reservoir from which they come’ or ‘an enveloping emotional experience like that of a church’. Entering a large, dark room the viewer encounters five giant, highly-coloured figures: the Departing, Birth, Fire, Ascending and Creation Angels are suffused with a soundscape of water, washed with escaping air bubbles, and punctuated by drips, insects and other aqueous noise. The underwater footage of each of Viola’s performers plunging into a pool, sinking and then emerging from, or hovering above, the water plays simultaneously and on a loop. Visitors are surrounded by the five channels, not all of which can be experienced at once, and the sensory overload threatens to overwhelm. Moreover the angel’s appearances are infrequent: they burst in slow-motion, seemingly weightless and without absolute form, into an underwater domain which is, in turn, translated into the cosmos surrounded by an infinity of stars. Five Angels for the Millennium disrupts and exhilarates through Viola’s effective use of scale, pitch and punctuation, his controlled references to archetypes, psychology and spirituality, becoming an allegory for life in the twenty-first century.

Viola insists on substantial investments of time: only by adjusting his or her schedule to the pace and subtly of the works will the viewer share the power and complexity that is human emotion – in intimacy and silence, and on a far grander stage.

Visually stunning, often highly aesthetic and emotionally intense, The Passions diptychs and polyptychs, projections or installations, offer a new and surprising aspect of Viola’s art, a continuity of his long-term concerns combined with an exceptional use of new media. Bill Viola: The Passions promises to be a ‘must-see’ for anyone interested in art, moving image, performance, technology and the big issues in life.

Lucina Ward
Coordinating curator for the exhibition and Curator, International Painting and Sculpture

Bill Viola and The Passions

Since the 1970s Bill Viola’s videotapes and installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory and self-awareness. Emotions are the subject of The Passions, an ongoing series begun in 2000. In these works Viola grapples with one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of emotion by depicting the faces and bodies of models – specifically, in his works, of performers.

Viola immersed himself in the conventions of expression during a period of study at the Getty Research Institute in 1998. His encounters with older painting and theories of emotional expression – codified in the 17th century by French painter Charles Le Brun – led him to the challenge of showing inbetween states: transitions and ambiguous or mixed emotions.

One of the first works in The Passions series, The Quintet of the Astonished, was commissioned by the National Gallery, London, and was inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of a quartet of executioners surrounding Christ. Shot on high-speed film, permitting the action to be slowed drastically when played back, the video is an intense tableau of shifting and momentary emotions. The relationships between the figures were unplanned and exist in varying intensities over the work’s duration.

In Six Heads a single individual is the subject of study. Nevertheless, a sense of dialogue seems to develop between the figure’s various expressions in the adjacent images. In abandoning the rich colour of the majority of The Passions works Viola makes reference to Le Brun’s engraved studies and perhaps even to later 19th century experiments of a darker nature, including those by Dr Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne de Boulogne. In the French neurologist’s study patients with psychological disorders were subject to electric shocks in order to elicit a full range of facial expressions.

Emotions on Small Screens

At the Getty Viola became more familiar with devotional painting of the late Middle Ages, read Medieval texts and continued his life-long study of eastern mystical writings. He also spent a good deal of time looking at pictures. Inspired by the startling realism of small Flemish paintings intended to move the viewer to pity, Viola made several pieces portraying weeping figures. Partially modelled on Dieric Bouts’ tiny panels, Dolorosa suggests meditation on the fate of Jesus while also alluding to domestic family photographs. In extreme slow motion, and on continuous loop, the female and male figures exist in an eternal and perpetual sorrow, a meditation on Everyman.

As the witnesses to Christ’s death, the Virgin Mary and Saint John are inevitably shown in scenes of the Crucifixion. The graphic nature of the Crucifixion by Siennese painter Giovanni di Paolo makes Christ’s suffering immediate and real to the viewer. The triangular structure of the composition focuses attention on the Christ figure: the deathly pallor of his skin and the ethereal quality of the loincloth are dramatically contrasted against the colour, vibrancy and earth-bound nature of the witnesses below.

Many of Viola’s previous video installation works involved projections in dark galleries, but in 2000 he began to use small screens that can be seen in ordinary light. He drew a link between small, devotional paintings of the 15th century and his use of LCD screens: ‘When you got to your inn, you could open it up and do your prayers; it was like everyone getting their own laptop, basically.' Books of Hours – small, portable compendiums of devotional texts – were made for personal use and in large quantities; the ivory diptychs produced in France during the Gothic era were a kind of Book of Hours in relief. The 19th-century example in the National Gallery of Australia’s collection was produced with an enthusiasm for this period and shows the scenes from the life of Christ, from the entry into Jerusalem to the Crucifixion.

Gesture and Detail

Four Hands suggests another focus. Four sets of hands – a young boy’s, two middle-aged people’s and those of an elderly woman – run through a gamut of gestures; some are familiar and others rhetorical, some are associated with prayer or supplication, while others resemble Hindu and Buddhist mudras. The use of a range of ages implies a continuous tradition, the teaching of the young by the old, the sequence of gestures complementing but also departing from one another. Elsewhere, in his earlier video work The Passing, by paring back to the simplicity of black and white Viola reminds us of the inevitably of life, which should be cherished and celebrated.

Four Hands and other works from The Passions are also reminders of the complexity of the communication that is possible through our hands – from deaf signing and narrative sequence to traditions of gesture in three-dimensional form. Viola’s use of extreme close-up draws attention to the elegance and sculptural qualities of this part of the human body. The hand gestures of The Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara represent a visual vocabulary that is seen and understood by adherents of the Buddhist and Hindu faiths. Just as Christian saints serve as intermediaries between humans and God, a bodhisattva postpones Buddhahood in order to guide those seeking enlightenment, thus embodying compassion and benevolence. Viola references diverse art historical traditions and the history of human societies and cultures.

Water, Tears and Transcendence

Water and fire – both potent and perennial symbols in the artist’s repertoire – dominate Interval, an earlier major installation that was part of Viola’s Buried Secrets project for the 1995 Venice Biennale. It is the kind of environment of sight and sound for which the artist is well known. On one side of the room a lone, naked man washes himself carefully and calmly, while on the other side violent images of fire and water are intercut with stifling close-ups: the camera seems to crawl all over human skin, blindly nuzzling body orifices. The computer-controlled sequence of images is progressively sped up, accelerating to a torrent of pictures and sounds in a screeching climax that endures, then cuts to nothing.

Water remains a frequent metaphor for death and renewal in Viola’s oeuvre. In Surrender water reflects two increasingly anguished people who immerse themselves repeatedly. The heaving deformation of their images expresses their deepening agony. Five Angels for the Millennium is a work that occupies an entire gallery and is described by Viola as ‘another form of The Passions, the reservoir from which they come’. In this work he slows down projected images of a man plunging into a pool, spacing them with intervals, and variously replaying them backward, forward and upside down. Ordinary human beings become divine apparitions; explicable earthly events are transformed into a drama of sudden spiritual transcendence.

Ordinary and Extraordinary

‘Make a piece for nuns,’ Viola wrote in his notebook, ‘for the woman who takes comfort in herself, who finds companionship in an empty room’. He is fascinated by Christian ascetics and Buddhist hermits, whose renunciation of companionship and comfort makes possible a life of pure devotion. In Catherine’s Room a woman’s devotions are the ordinary activities of the days and seasons, performed mindfully. Domestic or interior scenes within Indian miniature paintings show a similarly masterful control of the inner sphere and a concentration of action in minute form. For Catherine’s Room Viola has adapted the format of the predella, the decorated base of an altarpiece, but he also refers to a tradition of portraying multiple, temporal scenes to communicate the lives of Christian saints and martyrs. Another contemporary serial work, by American photographer Duane Michals, suggests at first an everyday scene. By using the dream scenario Michals also portrays a life touched by an ethereal presence.

Long Lens, Deep View

With Albrecht Dürer’s Four Apostles in mind – taut compositions of full-length saints compressed into narrow panels – in Observance Viola imagined a scene of mourning, a kind of wake. Each of the eighteen actors moves to the front of the line, confronts a disturbing sight that we cannot see, struggles with emotion, then moves away. The scene was shot using high-speed film and a lens with a deep field of focus; slowing down the image produces a restless weaving of bodies and faces. In this work Viola exploits the theatrical capabilities of his medium, especially the ability of a lens to compress space and the use of slow motion to expand the passage of time and produce a dreamlike ritual of pain and empathy.

Madonna and child enthroned with saints by Florentine Jacopo di Cione presents a highly formal face to the viewer: the Virgin sits regally beneath a richly decorated canopy, her stance mirrored by the Christ child, with the saints pressed tightly around them. The outer panels of the Cologne School triptych display a similar compression of figures within the space. On the left wing a portrait of the donor, with Saints Henry and Helena, is set against the cityscape of Cologne, minutely rendered, and showing the main sites. The shutters frame the central image of the Madonna in the Heavenly Garden who is in turn surrounded by six female martyr saints flanked by angel musicians. The simplicity of Observance stands in stark contrast. By removing the cause of distress, placing the ‘subject’ of the work outside the frame, Viola questions the causes of individual and collective grief. He seems to be counselling each and every one of us to examine what is at the centre of our lives.

Making Emergence

In Emergence, commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, Viola created an extraordinary event: inspired by Pietà by Masolino, a fresco of the dead Christ standing in a sarcophagus being mourned by his mother and Saint John, Viola staged a scene evoking entombment and resurrection. A young man emerges miraculously from a well as water pours from it and he is laid to rest by two women. The action is charged with associations of death and birth, grief and pity. The pale, elongated form of the male figure recalls both early Christian models and later Mannerist works, such as Appollino de’ Bonfratelli’s Pietà. A sheet from a Vatican missal produced for Pius IV or Pius V, Bonfratelli’s composition was influenced by Michelangelo’s sculpture in Saint Peter’s, Rome.

The apparent simplicity of The Passions is deceptive, for each piece required the technical prowess and talents of many specialists. For Emergence Viola used performers he had worked with before. The set was built at his studio in Long Beach, with an elaborate hydraulic system to produce and recycle the flood of water. Other professionals designed the lighting, operated the high-speed camera, and coordinated wardrobe, makeup and other elements of the production. Except for the calm atmosphere, for three days the studio resembled a Hollywood movie shoot.

The action was shot on 35 mm film at 210 frames per second, almost seven times the normal speed, to create slow motion in playback. Nine takes were made, each lasting ninety seconds. The best take was then transferred digitally from film to high-definition video and edited in two different post-production studios with a film colourist and editor. Since the action was captured in a single take, editing did not consist of the usual process of cutting, but rather of countless subtle adjustments of contrast, colour, texture, reframing and speed of replay. The work – as painstaking in its way as a late medieval artist’s painting – was executed with Viola’s exacting technical standards and attention to detail.

The Artist

Born in New York City in 1951, Bill Viola has a background in music, performance, video and sound engineering, and has used video to make works of art since 1970. From his earliest videotapes, made with the first portable video camera, he has explored the inner landscape of consciousness and perception. Using direct camera recordings rather than special effects, Viola selects and edits his images to draw out deeper meanings and hidden relationships. He intends his work to be a means of transformation, both for himself and for viewers, through a heightened experience of the world and the self. Since the 1980s Viola has become best known for his video installations – image and sound environments using multiple channels of video projection, loudspeakers and physical objects.

In 1995 Viola was the US representative at the Venice Biennale, where his exhibition Buried Secrets included a projection piece entitled The Greeting. Based on an altarpiece by sixteenth-century painter Pontormo, and using actors and extreme slow motion, it opened up new expressive possibilities for Viola that eventually led to the series known as The Passions. In 1998 he was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute, where he focused on the representation of emotion in the history of art. Drawing inspiration from earlier devotional paintings, in 2000 he began The Passions, his series that explores extreme emotional states. In 2002 Viola completed the large installation Going Forth by Day, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, and in 2005 he collaborated with theatre director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on a major new interpretation of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde for the Paris Opera, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Viola lives and works in Long Beach, California, with Kira Perov, his wife and long-time collaborator, photographer and executive director of Bill Viola Studio. She has worked with Viola on every piece since 1979, organises the exhibitions and is studio editor of all publications. They have two children, Blake and Andrei.

• J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles | 24 January – 27 April 2003
• The National Gallery, London | 22 October 2003 – 4 January 2004
• Pinakotheks of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Munich | Spring 2004