Worcester Week: NOTES/ RESEARCH VIOLA

YOUtube video: Bill Viola: Reflecting Pool

The Reflecting Pool seems to be a full circle. Starting from the woods and ending in the woods. Is this an analogy for life--starting at one point and ending at another with many strange things occurring in between? Sometimes there is no explanation for incidents, just like the reflections and you don't necessarily need to see the splash to believe that when you jump you eventually are going to land. The person getting out of the pool was a way of answering whether or not he was in that pool. This film made you think about the process of human thought. How everything doesn't need to physically be shown to know they are there. Faith.

During Viola's time in Japan he created Ancient of Days (1979-81). This film begins with the sound of cars and an image of fire. You view the fire and when it is extinguished a man nails something to the table which was in the fire. This section seems to be displayed backwards from the original firing. After the nailing a cup, clock and teapot appear. The shot then switches to a monument. Now the sounds of wind entertain your ears. Much time is spent viewing the monument. As in The Reflecting Pool, the shot is at the same viewpoint the whole time. You are left viewing different skies, background of pastel purple, pink and blue. White clouds increase as the film advances. As it progresses you see different groups of figures walking around to the monument in the distance. Then the shot goes to night and you are left with the view of a city and cars driving. Defiantly a unique angle atop of a building and moving till you are viewing it upside down. There is a great contrast of light sky and dark buildings. Then you are taken out of the city back to the country with a snow covered mountain and a kid squatting playing in a bush. There is a sound of something and the kid runs away. The color changes over the whole screen. That view of the mountain is now placed on the side of a building on a television in the city. The image changes to windsurfing. The shot moves into the crowd with the sound of someone singing. This all slows down, then stops and goes to a room inside with the view of a clock ticking, a picture on the wall and flowers. You hear people talking, someone sneezes and then the picture disappear and the shot fades.

There is an interesting bond between the beginning and then end of this film. The beginning shot has a clock which appears again in the ending. This seems to have a huge correlation with the title being Ancient of Days. Viola connects both the physical and mental landscapes allowing you to spark feeling you may not always be connected to. There is a feeling of losing the simpler things the way he goes from the lush landscapes to the obscure angle of the fast paced city. Also the way this film ending in a house where the frame goes black really brings the point back home.

Viola's 1976 film The Space Between Teeth was the last film viewed. It again begins with this use of running water and then the man sits in the chair. The guy screams and then sits back to a relaxed position. This is repeated as the shot is slowly moved down a long hallway. He still screams with a repeated break in between. After he screams you can still hear the echo as if it is trapped in the hallway. With the camera shooting the view at the end of the hall way you can see in the distance the man still sitting in the chair. On the left side of the hallway the windows cast light that looks like gaps in between teeth. There is a black shadow cased from the walls which look like teeth. I find that interesting and would like to find out if that is where the name came from. For a good portion of the rest of the film the camera zooms back into the guy's mouth each time he screams then zooms back out. Each time the zoom doesn't go as far back until you are close to the starting point in which there is shots of the kitchen. It zooms in slowly to a bowl of cereal and a radio is playing in the background. There is then a man at the sink washing dishes but he puts the dish back into the full sink. Then there is a photo in a lake of water, a wave crashes and helicopter end the film. This film is mostly in black and white and portrays the view of memories he has. The film again ends with water but this time crashing into a picture that disappears.

Bill Viola uses the repetition of images through out his films. He uses the idea of water as an important part of his pieces. They help to portray a strong feeling that Viola has and gives the viewer something that you are able to relate to. He lets you be able to have both an internal and external view of his works. The water seems to drown the idea that he is trying to portray and almost give closer to the viewer. He has an unbelievable creativity which he is able to let the viewer see through his works.

Looking at the technical development of both video and film, we immediately notice a profound difference: as film has evolved basically out of photography (a film is a succession of discrete photographs), video has emerged from audio technology. A video camera is closer to a microphone in operation than it is to a film camera; video images are recorded on magnetic tape in a tape recorder. Thus we find that video is closer in relationship to sound, or music [and I would interject here, to a verbal art like poetry]

than it is to the visual media of film and photography. . . .

One of the most fascinating aspects of video's technical evolution, and the one that makes it most different from film, is that the video image existed for many years before a way was developed to record it. . . . Taping or recording is not an integral part of the system. Film is not film unless it is filming (recording). Video, however, is "videoing" all the time, continually in motion, putting out 30 frames, or images, a second. . . . Video's roots in the live, not recorded, is the underlying characteristic of the medium. Somehow, in a way no one has really been able to explain time becomes more precious when dealing with video. . . . When one makes a videotape, one is interfering with an ongoing process, the scanning of the camera. . . . In film . . . the basic illusion is of movement, produced by the succession of still images flashing on the screen. In video, stillness is the basic illusion: a still image does not exist because the video signal is in constant motion scanning across the screen. (PC 62-63, my emphasis).

I have chosen to use film not video in order to blur the lines between commercial film making and the ontion of continuous video.

although life in itself is a continuous matter, in that time will continue regardless of our existance wihin it,

The piece is about the inddividual life, the individual frames that exists in the continuous life cycle/circle. Each individual moment and day.

This is inspired visually by the mids way of conjuring a memory. Because we are constantly creating the past, every second of our "present" is then done, and solidyfied in our memory. When we visualise our past we see flashes of incidents, not the whole, real time occurance.  Even when only oments have passed between the current and that past. The memories are flashes and stills and moments strung together with a repetitive availability where we choose what and when to remember them.

My way of expressing the way we "think" about ourselves and our day...

In a diary entry of 1980, Viola writes: "I want to look so close at things that their intensity burns through your retina and onto the surface of your mind. The video camera is well suited to looking closely at things, elevating the commonplace to higher levels of awareness. I want each image to be the first image, to shine with the intensity of its own first-born being" (RKW 78). And he cites, as he frequently does, Rilke's lines, "When a question is posed ceremoniously, / the universe responds."

With regard to the above...

Viola's statement "elevating the commonplace to higher levels of awareness"

this closely relates to my work.

My intention is to record, display and consider the daily commonplace self. Routine, the norm.

This is our life. It is precious yet we fill it with incoherant imemorable activities. The older i become, and the more aware of death and time. The more this commonplace becomes frustrating. I am irritated by the speed at which life goes on and the way we are forced to forget. My own Idealism, utopia as it were would be a constant and neveredngin memory bank where by i could naivaget and remember each second so as to feel "more" and a fuller existance. Every smile my child gives me and every smell and sound. 

This is illustrated inb my piece by moments of slowed down film. MEmories that are clear and audible. I can remember the way the wind brushed my hair and recall it in a sensory manner. 

I can remmber the way i felt hurt etc.

But the spaces in between are as important in the presentation because I am illustrating the way in which time escapes us. And it is intended to move a bit too fast to take it in. This is representatve of that imte. It is intended to be frustrating and irritating. But not so much that a viewer cannot see hwat I am showing.

But the "closeness of things" is based on sound as much as it is on light. "We usually think of the camera," says Viola, "as an 'eye' and the microphone as an 'ear,' but all the senses exist simultanenously in our bodies, interwoven into one system that includes sensory data, neural processing, memory, imagination, and all the mental events of the moment. This all adds up to create the larger phenomenon we call experience" (RKW 151-52). In I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, reflection plays a central role: the artist sees his reflection in the chrome of the kitchen faucet, in the eyes of fish, buffalo, and birds, in a glass of water on his desk that turns out to have a miniature tree in it--everywhere there are black pupils that give the artist his self-image even as the sounds of water and wind, intermittent barking and chirping create a disquieting counterpoint to the visual. In Viola's work, sound and image are never fully in sync.

This inspires me to use sound in the slower sections but not the rest as the memory has depleted and become numb in those faster areas.

But such connections are only a first step in assessing Viola's composition. In alternately speeding up the birth cycle (all steps in the cycle are not photographed) and slowing it down (shifting to real time in the case of each shot), the artist asks the viewer/listener to consider what "birth" means

the birth part here is irrelevant really.

The closeness is meant to be permeating on the senses. meant to feel like you are in my personal space. why? to encourage the viewer to feel uncomfortable about the way in which we are looking at life, I feel uncomfortable about the way time passes and the way I am close to myself yet so far. the oscilating view is our own. Looking at our own lives through memory yet we are no longer living it. we can only empathise with our selves and our past and not change or better it. we cannot reshape it.

The sowness is to encourage consideration and conteplation.

 In commercial TV, the detail (say, water bubbles), would function as a signifier: once recognized (look, it's Glacier Lake!) it would be replaced by, say, the bottle of Evian, which represents its real value or by the Chateau Lake Louise which represents its real use as a vacation setting.. But in video, as Viola sees it, the aim is to slow down the viewer's attention and witness what has always already been there but never quite seen. In the words of Viola's favorite poet William Blake, "If the doors of perception were cleansed, every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite."

NOTES extended. In relation to my own work. contextualisation

As a whole Viola’s work inspires and influences my practice through both theme and execution. It has been a valuable discovery for me as I have been able to contextualise my work in terms of contemporary production. Also, Knowing that my concepts are shared with other artists, validates my thoughts that I am surely not alone in the way I feel. My curiosities lie in philosophy, theology and spirituality, and how these things effect the self and the conscious and unconscious self throughout life.

The increasing loss of spiritual and theological thinking both in modern society and in modernist art worries me, as my own interet in it grows with age, and through experiencing the loss of more and more loved ones,a nd gaining a child, whom I never want to leave. Yet someday, I will have to.

Viola gives me a comparible resource in which my ability to gauge the success of my work grows more educated.

Although we explore common curiosities, My own work is more about the way in which I struggle to deal with daily routine, its drain on a persons life, and the short bursts of meaningful moments that we have ability to conjure as memories later on.

The film work is too fast, as is life. It is not filled with beautiful appreciated and nostalgic moments. Sped up footage shows how I personally visualize my past and engage with my memories. Where Violas work is calm, mine is intended to be somewhat frustrating and have a visceral effect on a viewer by confusing the eye and encouraging a sense that time is repetitive and only running out.

The slower areas and moments of calm are intended to allow for moments of deeper engagement and contemplation. The juxtaposition felt between the types of frame work have enabled me to consider more deeply life itself.

The view being singularly on myself is an exploration of how we are viewed by others but also as a means to invade on my personal space. It should be uncomfortable. As I am uncomfortable with the way in which my time and energy is used. Yet I cannot change it.

Sometimes when we see someone we see them in one way. View them In one “light”. This is referenced in the style of film work and the materials used.

 Also, having myself as the central subject challenges what I am comfortable with. I do not like to be the centre of attention, and feel very self conscious a lot of the time. It has been a struggle, seeing myself on camera and expose in such a way. Yet this is valuable to the work.

My work is concerned with the exploration of time and the way in which we waste that time with mundane and repetitive daily activities. The piece I am working on currently, engages with the concept of portraiture through video. It is a personal way of looking, which I hope provokes a sense of familiarity in its audience. Like Violas work this is something I have done intentionally to explore myself, and my inability to deal with the expectations of responsible adult life, and the constant movement towards an unpredictable yet inevitable end.

 I removed the sound altogether from my work as once in the studio space, I found similar and reoccurring problems with sound and the density of darkness created from a white cube space. The sound was tinny, and couldn’t be prevented without the introduction of large equipment.  The imagery and construction of my work could connect with the viewer without sound.

 The mirrored effect of reflecting the image is designed to give multiple perspectives in physical and materilised form.

Circle being the lens, the eye and the representation of a clock or how we measure time. It is in a loop.

The loop then references the repetitive neverending cycle.

The light is cast onto the physical form,m the glass. The events occurng there then bounce onto the ceiling. This is a metaphor for how the events in life have an effect on our spiritual, energy, our soul. The ephemeral part of ourselves. Shown above as we see “higher”

I was not trying to engulf and absorb an audience, more explore myself through my work and my theories that in life we waste time and move forward too promptly 

‘The struggle we are witnessing today is not between conflicting moral beliefs’, Viola observed in 1992. ‘It is between our inner and our outer lives, and our bodies are the area where this belief is being played out.’

His works of the 1990s consistently show the body as the site for physical transformations – often through immersion in light or water – that embody these profound concerns with transformation and mortality. 

While Tiny Deaths opens up broad possibilities around the meaning and transience of existence, Viola’s recent works address spiritual themes more directly. Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), installed in St Paul’s Cathedral, and soon to be accompanied by the related work Mary, epitomises his ability to bring a full command of contemporary technology to engage timeless questions of belief. 

Distance and nearness are attributes of bodies
The journeyings of spirits are after another sort.
You journeyed from the embryo state to rationality
without footsteps or stages or change of place,
The journey of the soul involves not time and place.
And my body learnt from the soul its mode of journeying,
Now my body has renounced the bodily mode of journeying.
It journeys secretly and without form, though under a form. 

Viola's website describes his work as having roots in "both eastern and western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism". Viola also travelled to northern India with his family to visit the Dalai Lama, but his work is not specifically religious, let alone Christian. "I guess I have been interested in the spiritual side of things since I was very young. But the form it took was me, in a very quiet way, simply looking with great focus at the ordinary things around me that I found wondrous. I still do today."

"The early work had been all about me, as, although I didn't realise it at the time, I was probing myself in a medium that is exactly made for that. It takes you, flips you round and shows you yourself. But at a certain point I realised I was constantly hitting some sort of wall and I finally figured out that I should be on the other side of the camera. If I had kept doing just me it would have become more and more knotted and jumbled. I would be tripping over myself, but doing it this way, it became not about one person but about everybody."

The Passion series was me coming to grips with the loss of my parents and being awakened as to what death really means. And therefore what existence really means. It's not a game, it's the deepest thing possible for a human being to conquer and try and understand, and I wanted to deal with that."

[3]: Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart. Dir. Mark Kidal. DVD. Film for the Humanities & Sciences, 2005.

Alone, a self absorbed existence, in alone out alone, spirtual connetion?

Which are felt through the exploration of daily concerns surrounding life and death and the possibilities between.

(where one can become aware of his or her own self, mostly in relation to subjects he finds enthralling.)

Although video projection often requires darkness in order to achieve a materiality, I believe that there is a metaphor here. Witout darkness we cannot see the light. Without the lack of time we cannot appreciate the moments of pause. Without the rush etc… without the bad etc

MY WORK:

The video itself:

The self, the notion of being self absorbed,

Only seeing and experiencing ourselves in life

Although we can empathise with others we cannot be them. We are stuck on this single minded selfish and self absorbed track which s our conscious life.

The closeness of the video seeks to create a sense of claustrophobia, being too cose for comfort, unnerving in some way or unsettling as though encroaching on  the viewers personal space somewhat.

The speed to do the same. Too much info to take in every moment, due to the nature in which the film uses time.

Slower areas are to show moments of contemplation I experience myself or momets when thinking back over my time, my mind chose for some reason or another to remember.

To me the works presentation in terms of its use of time is metaphor or physical representation of the way we visualise the past or remember.

The use of projection rather than film is to explore the notion of light within darkness,  the appreciation of time despite its lack of fulfilling properties?

Light is continuous as is time and life

Light projected: projected as a word =

Light can be interfered with and blocked as can life

The circular form both references a clock and time as a whole, obviously the infinite cycle, the repetitive nature of “going round in circles” 365 degrees versus 365 days a year etc.

It also referes to the eye. The Lens, a way of looking.

Once given a surface on which the projection is created. The cirle. The projection becomes visible and tangble, as does the message.

The reflection of the video onto the ceiling creates a multidimensional piece, which illustrates the idea of “seeing things from mnultiple perspectivea” in this case physically, one above etc.

Also whe a viewer walks infron t=of the light the projection is seen n their body further witching the gaze.

Oscilating gaze etc.

There are several good reasons why video art poses difficulties for viewers. One is that video requires the viewer to occupy real time in order to experience the medium. The minutes pass slowly in a video installation. The average gallery or museum visitor spends only a few seconds before each painting or sculpture. Videos take time. With video, you can't whisk through marble halls and take everything in as a disembodied eye. Video requires you to stand as a body in a public space among other bodies and wonder what to do with yourself, your material self, as you spend anywhere from two minutes to an unbearable ten or twenty watching a stream of images on a monitor or projected onto a wall. There is something about the act of looking in museums that tends to make the viewer unaware of herself. Video installations challenge this by making you visible to yourself—you become a social presence confronting yourself and others, perhaps even becoming part of the art work itself.

The issue of the body—the one seen and the one doing the seeing—is an important part of video art. It's hard to talk about the body and what it knows because the body's language is visceral, its states ephemeral. Whenever we think about our own bodies we know that we feel, but it is hard to find words to represent those stubbornly inexpressible states of being. So we rely on metaphors to convey our feelings and sensations to others. Movie theaters provide soft chairs and a dark room for viewers to forget themselves, including their bodies. But video installations in gallery spaces are altogether different. They are very often about the act of viewing and the time it takes to do so. They prompt a spatial and temporal self-consciousness that makes us uneasy.

The time-based nature of video is closely related to another reason for its difficulty. Video artists like Bill Viola are very good at using this medium to anatomize human perception, dissecting its mechanics and ideologies. Seeing the machinery of vision subverted—whether it is clips of eye surgery, rooms darkened almost beyond the threshold of perception, or the disorientation caused by the sudden jerks of the moving imagery and jarring sounds—produces an awareness of how commonly we rely on fixed conventions and frameworks in "ordinary" perception. Passage, for instance, makes one aware that the solidity and familiarity of the world depends very much on the distance one views it from. Human perception is a bio-mechanical construction of appearances. And memory, the perception of time, is a highly interpretive faculty. If the narrow corridor is the "passage" to the past, which is replayed as the massive image of the party on the wall, the room itself is the inner chamber of memory in which the raw sense data of experience are played and replayed. It's as if Viola has constructed a spatial metaphor of memory in order to show that the "you-are-there" experience we posit as the authoritative basis of memory, the trace of the original moment preserved faithfully in the mind, is itself incapable of resolution.

For Viola, the sublime is more often than not a way of using darkness and monumentality, repulsive imagery, and terrifying bursts of sound and light to jar the viewer into meditation on something the artist finds genuinely enthralling: the human condition. Viola's work suggests that the human condition consists of the fact that we are embodied beings yearning, but ill-prepared, for communion with one another; that we suffer pain and loss; that we struggle to transcend our bodies and our suffering by connecting with a larger or inner aspect of reality; and that we die. Bodies, communion, suffering, transcendence, and death collectively constitute a condition, a worldview that the artist seeks to investigate in his work. Whether one is Buddhist or Christian or atheist (of the Camus variety), coming to terms with suffering and fear and our inability to communicate these states adequately presumes an understanding of the human condition, and Viola finds video a powerful artistic means of exploring these existential facts.

The remarkable retrospective of Viola's work, an exhibition that has traveled through the United States and Europe since 1997, offers the opportunity to consider the artist's treatment of the elements of the human condition. First, he depicts people as being isolated. They rarely appear together in Viola's work, rarely commune with one another. To the contrary, figures appear self-absorbed. For instance, Slowly Turning Narrative (1992) [see front cover] situates the viewer within a darkened room in which a panel revolves in the center, bearing a screen on one side and a mirror on the other. As a voice recites a long list of phrases referring to the self (the one who goes, the one who does, the one who feels, the one who knows...), projections of a man's taciturn face and other imagery are reflected on the rotating panel as well as the viewer's own body, which is also reflected in the mirror on one side of the panel. Viola has written that the "entire space [of the installation] becomes an interior for the revelations of a constantly turning mind absorbed with itself." The room is the ruminating, self-absorbed mind

If video is for him a kind of mirror he holds up to examine himself, it is not for the purpose of narcissism or self-enjoyment, but self-scrutiny and even self-interrogation. Where is the other in this analytical act of self-reflection? Viewers are invited to insert themselves in Slowly Turning Nar rative, where viewers become thoughts reflected in the mind of another1.21