12/25/2023 0 Comments 20 minute timer with music believerIndeed, the desert landscapes, cascades of water, towering walls of flames that have become identifiable features of Viola's art make it almost impossible not to feel the potency of an art meant to operate at the highest level. (His younger son Andrei was named for filmmaker Tarkofsky.) By embracing this forbidden territory in video, as opposed to traditional media like painting or sculptures, Viola can evade the charges of critics who consider spiritual art to be somehow atavistic, even reactionary. But he declares that all art, throughout history, was at some point contemporary and he finds allies in pre-modern artists: Fra Angelico, Mantegna, William Blake, for whom he named his elder son. In this, he has found himself isolated from the mainstream of contemporary art, which is decidedly secular these days. No music, just the intensity of the image and a sense of anticipation, heightening our own awareness, our own consciousness.Ĭolor High-Definition video projection four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1) 11:12 minutesĭevoted for decades to the lessons of Zen masters, Sufi poets and Gnostic Christians, Viola has never wavered from his faith in an art with spiritual roots and transcendent implications. Viola's early interest in music, playing with David Tudor after college, contributes to his great gift for timing, holding a viewer’s attention during prolonged moments of inactivity, such as the man lying on a slab in the pouring rain for minutes until he is pulled suddenly upward in Tristan's Ascension. A piece can be 15 feet to 20 feet tall or small as an iPad with equal impact.īill Viola, "Tristan's Ascension" (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005Ĭolor High-Definition video projection four channels of sound with subwoofer (4.1) 10:16 minutes The 20 works, ranging from 1977 to 2013, are arrayed over two floors with Viola's sound installation in the circular stairwell that links them. The Grand Palais is a beaux arts behemoth but individual enclosed galleries were built within it to contain each work for maximum impact. Unlike many video exhibitions, each piece is contained in a darkened room making the visual impact crystalline and allowing the sound to remain subtle, without bleeding into other galleries. The show at the Grand Palais makes this abundantly clear. As Viola says, he was born the same year as television and he has been a true believer ever since the getting his hands on a portapak while a student at Syracuse University.īill Viola, "Catherine's Room" (detail), 2001Ĭolor video polyptych on five LCD flat panels, 18 minutes With decades of extraordinary output, it couldn’t have been easy for curators Jerome Neutres and Kira Perov, who is Viola's wife and collaborator, to choose pieces that best reflect what Viola has done, which was to change the appearance, the scale, the very significance of what was originally considered to be a marginal medium in contemporary art. But Bill Viola, the survey now on view at the Grand Palais, is unparalleled in every way. I’ve seen individual pieces in LA such as The Passions at the Getty or his video sets for Tristan and Isolde as well as his big 25 year Whitney Museum survey that came to LACMA in 1997. My first review was in 1978 and, in some way, it launched the career that I've had ever since. I've been looking at and writing about the videos of Bill Viola for much of my professional life.
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