Bill Viola is obsessed with the traces people leave upon the objects which eventually end either in dust-bins, or in museums.

A painting or a sculpture is the immediate result of the movements of the artist, preserving the print of his body more reliably than the Holy Shroud. The fact that art dealers ultimately commercialize the artists’ bodies is perhaps the reason why their profession seems somewhat akin to white slave trade. However, Bill Viola’s artwork, which consists of multimedia installations, interposes a lot more layers of technology between the artist’s body and the connoisseur’s avidity. Their physical entities may well derive from Earth, which is the ultimate raw material of any techné, but the utterly sensuous expression of the matter is considerably mellowed by the soft pedal of high tech. The ingenious assembly of sounds, images and ideas may make an ingenuous observer overlook that the essence of this art is primarily temporal, not multimedial. A drop of liquid is filmed while it grows as a sphere, distorts into an elipsoid and eventually falls on a drum surface, making a solemn sound. We follow the process on a screen, where the giant image of the drop combines by reflection with the viewer’s. We experience the expectation of the event, we delight in the anticipation and, while exposed to the audio-visual stimuli, we capture the sheer sense of duration. Reading or watching a movie also absorb our attention and act upon our perception of time, but they manage it by using a narrative. In the case of Viola’s art, the suspense floats in the air, unhinged to any story and mesmerizes us exactly as long as the artist considers fit. On an old-fashioned chest-of-drawers, placed in the middle of a dim room, there is a TV monitor, between a bowl with artificial flowers and a lit reading lamp. On the screen, a sleeping person is obviously dreaming. All of a sudden, terrific images are projected on all the three surrounding walls, accompanied by explosive sounds. In this case, the content of the images is less important than the timing, the surprise, the unexpected occurrence of the nightmare. Traditional art does not encroach upon our freedom to such an extent. One can look at a Leonardo masterpiece as long as one wishes, according to one’s focusing power or to one’s daily schedule. We can contemplate Gioconda all day long, or we can give it only a perfunctory glance. In the case of this kind of technologic art, the only freedom that is left to us is to ignore it. Otherwise, the technical protocol of the exposal requires a complete temporary surrender to the artist’s will as long as it pleases him to please us. The visitor’s body is integrated in the installation and his attention is coupled to the mechanically controlled temporal gradation of the environment. The unexpected, surprising events are inserted in the prescribed duration of the artistic experience, either according to the theory of the Golden Section, or by a systematic harnessing of randomness. The dialogue with classical art is frequently actuated. On a large screen, we can see a video rendering of Pontormo’s Visitation. Three women atemporally dressed, filmed from below in order to look monumental, seem to perform the sacred conversation between Virgin Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, in the presence of a silent witness. The camera recreates the Renaissence veduta, including the diminished characters in the background, the scenographic environment and the still unsure perspectival effects. But a more important technique is the well-tempered temporal manipulation, obtained by modifying the number of images per second. The duration of the filmed action differs dramatically from the duration of its visualisation, the movements of the persons are incongruous to those of their fluttering veils, the artful de-synchronisation enhances the emotion, in order for the whisper of the sacred to be heard.

Viola contradicts the cliché about the ultimate rapidity of thought. He believes that, in reality, things move faster than our mind, so that we are hardly apt to follow them. The artificial slow-down is meant to adjust the speed of life to the speed of thought. In the multiplicity of asynchronous processes which compose the global stream, time as an ultimate, irreducible and unitary entity fades away, sharing thus the destiny of other universalia, stamped by the sentence that they non sunt realia. Viola secretely attempts to complete all the possible experiments of temporal manipulation and thus to either rediscover by chance, or recreate by art, or reinvent by will the shredded concept of the real time. For the time being, he cannot think of anything else more appropriate than to lock a plugged-in VCR in an empty room and to wait patiently until the recovered image of the past will eventually emerge on the screen. Following the example of literature, which managed to bring back the time irremediably spent, technology as art sets itself as a goal the recovering of the time, the real one.

Are Video and Film installations really art? Discuss Here

Copyright 1999 © Adrian Mihalache All Rights Reserved

Adrian N. Mihalache is a professor at the "Politehnica" University of Bucharest, Romania. Presently, he is a Fulbright Scholar at Western Michigan University, Department of Anthropology where, together with prof. Arthur Helweg, he is working on the book "Ethnology of Cyberspace".