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
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