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Published 17/02/04
Bill Viola: The Passions
The National Gallery, London
22 October 2003—4 January 2004
Video artist Bill Viola's work reinforces the
notion that a work of art will only yield its deepest meaning after
long contemplation. The understanding of a work in this view requires
discipline - neglecting to give rightful attention leaves the viewer
with a sense of neglect or guilty of superficiality. The intangible,
deeper meaning seems only available to those prepared to adhere
to such rules. Viewing 'The Passions' by Viola at the National Gallery,
London could take several hours; the slowness of the pieces and
the number on show made the exhibition, for many, to be more of
an endurance test than a captivating experience. Several critics
longed for a fast-forward button.
Bill Viola is the first living artist to be given a major retrospective
at the National Gallery. Director of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Deborah
Gribbon who organised the exhibition first in Los Angeles wrote
in the foreword:
This exhibition of a contemporary video artist is an unusual
event for the Getty Museum and The National Gallery, which are
mainly devoted to showing art of the past. Both institutions,
however, jumped at the chance to present Bill Viola's most recent
works, since they not only give the audience a stirring experience,
but also form a chapter in the long and fascinating history of
artists reinvigorating themselves by studying the works of their
artistic forebears. The Three Pinakotheks in Munich, too, were
eager to take the opportunity to show Bill Viola's work in their
galleries, which cover the history of the visual arts from the
Middle Ages to our own times. Mounting Viola's work amid so comprehensive
a collection provides an especially appropriate atmosphere in
which to consider Bill Viola's dialogue with the old masters.1
Bill Viola's work satisfies the kind of criteria that a National
Gallery audience might require. His work is unquestionably serious
and yet, as video art, it is accessible. By combining new technology
and painted images Viola brings an element of surprise to the Old
Masters. Using actors to recreate great paintings, Viola can construct
what was impossible, even miraculous in traditional media. Where
a painting is always still, an image suspended in time, Viola's
video characters blink, tears flow, reality feels but a breath away.
In the National Gallery's Millennium exhibition, 'Encounters, New
Art from Old', in the summer of 2000, Bill Viola was one of 24 artists
chosen to create a dialogue with a work of art in the gallery's
collection. It was a brilliant, albeit uneven exhibition, exploring
the creative process with art from the past. Viola produced one
of the finest, and indeed most popular, pieces in the show. It was
a slow motion video of a group of five people experiencing a perplexing
and highly emotional state. The juxtaposition and interaction of
five figures against a quite neutral background was filmed under
a painterly light. 'Quintet of the Astonished' was inspired by 'Christ
Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns)' by Hieronymus Bosch. Both works
are included in the recent National Gallery show. In his essay for
the 'Encounters' exhibition catalogue, Marco Livingstone wrote,
In an interview with National Gallery director Neil MacGregor
in August 1999, Viola described Christ in the Bosch painting as
the calm at the centre of the storm, a source of inspiration for
the individual who can stand securely in whatever turbulent situation
he may find himself. He seems to have been attracted to the painting
at least in part because of the way it expresses this state of
being, having himself often proposed self-containment, even to
the extreme of withdrawal from the outside world, as a prerequisite
for self-knowledge.2
The works in 'The Passions' were conceived during Viola's long
residency at the Getty Research Institute in California. 'The Passions',
Viola's most overtly religious show to date, addresses spirituality
in a secular age. Viola bases video works on paintings that, when
they were made, were devotional as well as aesthetic in purpose.
The video works are a supreme affirmation of technological brilliance.
[Viola's] work for some time has been concerned with what might
be called a non-specific spirituality that draws on his own experience
of Zen Buddhism, as well as the sense of profound absence after
his father's death. His work is singular in its insistence that
contemporary conceptual art can have a meaning and significance
in our lives above and beyond the shocking or the ironic, the
social or the purely aesthetic.3
Movement in Viola's video pieces begins so slowly that the images
could be mistaken for large, painterly photographs. In 'The Greeting'
for example, modelled on Pontormo's 16th century altarpiece, 'The
Visitation', 40 seconds is stretched to ten minutes. A smile unfolds
slowly, fabric ripples subtlety. Produced in 1995, this is the earliest
of the artist's work in the exhibition, and the first in which Viola
moved from self-explanatory works to rehearsed narratives and images
created by actors. In 1996 Viola became the first video artist to
be commissioned by the Church of England. 'The Messenger' was the
result of the commission and was later shown in Durham Cathedral.
In 1998 Viola was a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute.
Together with a group of art historians and scholars he took part
in a study programme entitled 'The Representation of the Passions'.
Central to their investigation were the issues surrounding the expression
of extreme emotions. Viola's personal background lay in Eastern
mysticism, Hindu and Buddhist writings. The group studied the Christian
mystics of the late Middle Ages, and the history of Western medieval
art. Viola read Henk van Os's The Art of Devotion, Jennifer
Montagu's essays on the representation of emotion since antiquity,
Darwin's writing on facial expression, and a book by Victor Stoichita
on visionary experiences in Spanish painting. During this period
at the Getty, Viola made many diary entries and long lists of his
interests. He also made copious notes for future projects —
amassing some 70 projects for future development.
Passions - facial expressions in art history - East or West -
compared to Indian rasas. The Sublime - Longinus, Burke.
Christianity - Sorrowing Madonnas, Cult of the Saints. Stories
- The Golden Legend. Iconography - Annunciation, Nativity, Visitation,
Crucifixion, Deposition, etc… Passions of Christ. Tears,
crying - sacrifice, emotion, spiritual (representation). Buddhism
- void, compassion. Light - theories of vision in Middle Ages,
Gothic Cathedral. Al-Ghazzali - the Niche for Lights, Robert Grosseteste.
Space - and sacred architecture, Hindu, Buddhist, Islamic architecture,
sacred spaces.4
The year at the Getty was intense and productive. Viola took part
in weekly seminars, gave talks on his work and regularly visited
the Getty Museum's collection. He was mostly preoccupied with religious
paintings of the 15th and 16th centuries (Dieric Bout, Andrea Mantegna)
and works with which he experienced a mystic intensity such as a
small painting by Casper David Friedrich of a man contemplating
a historic tomb. It was during this time that he was invited by
the National Gallery in London to produce a work for 'Encounters'.
Viola was already familiar with 'Christ Mocked' by Hieronymus Bosch.
He described a possible piece that in fact was very close to the
final piece, two years later:
'Quintet for the Astonished': odd but careful spatial grouping,
horizontal aspect ratio, high-speed film, delicate lighting, wardrobe
character types, Bosch's 'Christ Mocked' in the National Gallery
of London, the shifting surface of emotion and relation. Individuals
run through a compressed range of conflicting emotions from laughing
to crying, shot in high-speed film, displayed in high resolution,
pristine, hyper-real. The emotions come and go so gradually, it
is hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. Relations
between the figures become fluid and shifting.5
These ideas, conceived in 1998 during the intense period of research
at the Getty, later generated many of the ideas and visual imagery
of the work in 'The Passions'. In London, the exhibition
prompted a mixed reaction. A number of critics believed that the
video medium was inappropriate for religious contemplation. Charles
Darwent, a self-professed atheist and hardened Greenbergian believed
that:
things have changed in the 500-odd years between Piero
and Bill, not least in the way we consume our images. The making
of a pre-della panel inspired (and continues to inspire) a kind
of awe in the viewer which the making of an LCD screen just does
not do. Merely grafting the one onto the other isn't going to
rekindle that awe. When Viola does this most slavishly, the results
are so kitsch as to make you blush.6
Viola's narrative of 'Catherine's Room' Darwent describes as forging
an uneasy alliance between the aesthetics of San Marco in Florence
to those of 'Finding Nemo'. Adrian Searle found Viola's comments
on his own spiritual beliefs and religious views unsatisfactory
and unsympathetic.
Viola and his friends lather on a goo of world religion and a
pot-pourri of 'thought for the day' bons mots that I really
don't want to hear about. I feel like I'm being given a spiritual
shakedown. It all just makes me want to run away … to whoever
it was who once called him the Rembrandt of the video age. He
isn't.7
Searle compares Bill Viola unfavourably with Samuel Beckett who
made films and ground-breaking video works for German television.
He was a great artist as well as playwright and novelist. His
work said more about life and art and death than Viola ever has.
And he never told anyone what to think or feel, much less what
- if anything - to believe.8
Dr Janet McKenzie
References
1.Gribbon D. Foreword. In: Walsh J (ed). Bill Viola: The Passions.
Los Angeles: The J Paul Getty Trust Publications, 2003.
2. Marco Livingstone, "Bill Viola", in Encounters: New Art from
Old, The National Gallery, London, 2000, p.314.
3. Sean O'Hagan, The Observer Review, 26 October 2003, p.10.
4. Quoted by John Walsh, "Emotions in Extreme Time: Bill Viola's
Passions Project", in Bill Viola: The Passions, op.cit., p.32.
5. Ibid, p.33.
6. Charles Darwent, "Speed is not of the essence", The Independent
on Sunday, London, 26 October 2003, p.8.
7. Adrian Searle, "Losing my Religion", The Guardian, London, 23.10.03,
p.15.
8. Ibid, p.15.
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