As the world shrinks we will see a realisation that the different streams of humanity are part of a greater whole, video artist Bill Viola tells Aidan Dunne.
HOW TO DESCRIBE the American video artist Bill Viola? Well, he does not resemble the stereotype of the sort of video artist we all dread, ie one who produces interminably long, poorly edited, technically shoddy, self-indulgent home movies.
Rather he is someone who has, from the beginning of his career, meticulously used the newest, cutting edge technology to explore some of the oldest, most profound questions posed by the basic conditions of our existence. He does so with a certain dramatic rigour and with an attentiveness to visual quality that borders on the obsessive - in a good way.
His affinity with technology stems in part from the fact that he came to art in a technological context, studying at the Syracuse Experimental Studios when videotape recording was in its infancy, and going on to work as a technician and technical director, so that his use of video has developed in tandem with the exponential advances in the medium, advances that have, as he is quick to point out, led us to a current high-point in terms of digital imagery. Advances in imaging technology can work retrospectively. Recently, he says, he worked on restoring a work made 25 years ago, translating original three-quarter inch (1.9cm) videotape to digital. "I could see immediately that there's about 40 per cent more detail in the images." That might explain his attitude to video, but what of his attitude to his subject matter? Speaking from his studio in Long Beach, California, he points to a couple of early, formative experiences. "Even when I was quite young, I remember wondering what was beyond the limits of our own senses. I'd lie in bed staring at the ceiling as the light was fading and had this sensation that it was falling away before me, that it was opening out into the heavens." More seriously, and decisively, he almost drowned when he was six.
"We were on holiday, on a lake, and I just slipped through the middle of a flotation tube and sank right to the bottom. And I had a kind of vision of the most beautiful world I've ever seen. I felt totally at peace and I was quite happy there." Luckily, his uncle took a different view, dived in and plucked him out of the water. "I can still recall that feeling of serenity right now," Viola says, and he laughs. "Let's face it, of all the death scenarios you can imagine, that's not a bad one to go out on."
He is keen on lots of things about water. For one thing, he points out, its particular properties make life possible. He is also interested in the myth of Narcissus, who was smitten by his own reflection in water. Viola feels the myth has its roots much further back even than classical antiquity, to the earliest stirrings of human consciousness. "For our remote ancestors that must at some point have been a novel and pretty startling experience."
In his videos figures are more often than not seen in relation to water: plunging into it, immersed in it, emerging from it. The absence of water, in desert settings, is also a feature is several pieces. The symbolically charged actions of falling and rising feature recurrently. The extremity of his early misadventure obviously affected him deeply. He is drawn to the fringes of consciousness, as evidenced in the mentalities and experiences of, for example, mystics and ascetics, and to the boundaries manifested in birth and death, both of which are documented in his work.
It's typical of Viola that when he and his wife, Kira Perov (who has worked with him since the late 1970s) spent time in Japan at the beginning of the 1980s, they delved into Zen with the guidance of a master, Daien Tanaku, while he also worked as artist-in-residence at Sony's Astrugi Laboratories - an experience that was, he says, fantastic. The combination of spirituality and electronic technology seems almost paradoxical, but is central to his world view.
One of the most striking features of his work is its exceptional visual quality. He embraced high definition eagerly, though he is not doctrinaire about it. His view is that different projects call for different technical approaches, and his palette, as he puts it, encompasses everything from the grainy black-and-white of security video cameras to 35mm HD digital. It often seems that he sets out to imbue video with something of the same level of considered presence as can be achieved in painting, and it's true that his relationship to painting is central to a great deal of his output. "I feel closest to painting of all the traditional art forms," he says. But he has very definite ideas about the status of the image per se, about where it stands in the world.
"Images exist somewhere between the physical and the ethereal, between the spiritual, internal, imaginative world and external physical reality. When I see a piece of sculpture I'm very touched by how physical it is: it is a real object in the world. But the images I work with are not physical in that sense. In fact, today, they are less and less so. Today they hardly exist at all other than as vibrating patterns of electrons on our screens. The fact that the image has one foot in the spiritual and one in the physical world defines its particular ontological character."
Through reading Henry Corbin, a professor of Islamic studies, Viola came across the writings of the Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi. "In discussing the structure of the world, Arabi, talks about the space between the physical and the immaterial worlds, which he says is occupied by what he calls the imaginal world. Note the word image in there. For Arabi, the category of the imaginal is the currency of exchange between the two. I thought, yes, that is very much the way it is with these strange things, images. Some days I'm utterly devoted to their power, and some days I'm very suspicious of them."
DOES HE ENJOY his working process? He laughs. "Oh, that's a tricky one, enjoyment. Let's see. I enjoy a good glass of wine. I enjoy ice cream. But I don't enjoy work in that way at all. Obviously I like having achieved something, but for me it entails a lot of struggle, a lot of setbacks. One of my favourite accounts of what it's like to make art is Van Gogh's description of drawing. He said drawing is like working your way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stands between what you feel and what you can actually do." Certain projects, he observes, pushed both himself and Kira to breaking point. "Tristan and Isolde (related to a Peter Sellers production of Wagner's opera) almost broke us in every sense, financially, emotionally, creatively. It was a shattering experience." A great deal of his output over the last 15 years or so has been closely related to classical Western painting. For an artist so immersed in "new technology", that is in itself fairly unlikely.
Indeed, he says: "Out of nowhere in the 1990s I started to get interested in Renaissance and late Medieval devotional art. I don't know why. The first thing I did was a piece very closely based on Pontormo's The Visitation, titled The Greeting, and I've gone on from there. I could have chosen not to go that way. It was one of those moments we all have where you're presented with a choice at a crossroads. Are these devout, spiritual paintings like Pontormo's remote from us now? I don't think so. They were made at a time of phenomenal change, in the theory and technology of painting, in philosophical and scientific thought, in trade and economics. A lot like now in fact." While a great deal of devotional art was didactic in intent, his own is not. It is open in terms of possible meanings, leaving it up to the individual viewers to take what they might from the work, encouraging people towards self-realisation. Perhaps surprisingly, he takes a very optimistic view of the future. "I know things are a bit bumpy right now, and that my own country is responsible for a lot of it. But I think that the process of globalisation in communications technology is something much larger than, you know, trade agreements.
"The world is literally shrinking and I really think what we'll see as a result is a realisation that the different streams of humanity are part of a greater whole."
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Several works by Bill Viola are showing at Galway Arts Festival until July 27. They are: The Reflecting Pool: Collected Works 1977-1980, The Passing, I do not know what it is I am like, Four Songs, Chott El- Djerid (A Portrait in Heat and Light) and Déserts"
