ESSAYS / COMMENTARY

ON BILL VIOLA, September 2010

This essay was originally commissioned 2010 by ‘Blast’ journal, ed. LK Holt

So many wonderings arise when witnessing the artwork of contemporary American video artist Bill Viola. One is tempted to remain in silence. Viola makes such a fundamentally intimate offering to each viewer, one that racks their sense of what it means to be human now, in this moment of perception and the myriad thought-sensations and emotions of that experience.

Tacking strongly, his grand yet pivotally human boats of imagescapes and soundscapes keel along the thresholds that divide the breathing and not-breathing, the vital and the deposed, the defiant and overwhelmed human subject, the visible and the subtle.

To care so much for humanness – his work of over 35 years has done so – implicates it is worthy of this tenderness, that there is a majesty to the human experience. He tells us it is also a fraught, individual dynasty – each human life - that demands the utmost, conscious attention.

“Being is the firstborn of emergency,” writes the magnus French critic and poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Viola’s work gazes into the possibilities of being when it is placed within this terrific imperative.

His subjects are on high-alert. They are impressively aware and present to the challenges Viola has created for them to experience, and for we to experience by transmission, almost intravenously. Viola’s work imposes and asserts itself. It is activated by and activates the courage of a spiritual inquiry.

In ‘Silent Mountain’ (2001), the male character is silently screaming, vorticised, pressured by an immense force. Says Viola: “Probably the loudest scream I have ever recorded is in the soundless work ‘Silent Mountain’.”

Very slowly, in most cases his work is stilled slow-motion to the elongation of the eternal. He seems to enunciate, visual syllable by syllable: so you are alive and if so, preoccupied with what? Let me suggest that you are mortal and being so, it is your mortality that is the essential ground of your making meaning. It is your mortality that is also key to the door of immortality, indeed, of what survives, transplants life.

Viola followers have the opportunity to witness his work at an intensive scale in the upcoming Melbourne Festival (October 2010).

 ‘Fire Woman’ and ‘Tristan’s Ascension’ are presented in a 20-minute continuous loop. Both were commissioned originally for Peter Sellar’s production of Tristan and Isolde. His ‘The Raft’, an interpretation of Theodore Gericault’s ‘The Raft of the Medusa’, is to be shown at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the artist is also involved in a single ‘Conversation’ session at ACMI.

Unfortunately, the permanent installation of his ‘Ocean without a shore’, produced for the 2007 Venice Biennale, and purchased by the National Gallery of Victoria International collection (one of only three international editions of the work), has been de-installed during the festival duration and will not be remounted until later in 2010.

Go to Bill Viola to see more of his work.