The Bill Viola video retrospective at the Art Institute of Chicago is the real thing.
At a time when contemporary art is dominated by pop-culture banality and politics, Viola uses up-to-date technology to reorient viewers toward eternal issues of life and death.
His favorite art historian, Ananda Coomaraswamy, used to say that to learn Buddhist art you had to study all its forms and categories and then remodel your personality. The aspiration behind Viola’s work is scarcely less; it seeks to activate the human unconscious with sights and sounds that prompt self-transcendence.
This is a big order, the biggest that artists throughout history have imagined. And because the effect of such work is ultimately inward and personal, its success can only be measured one viewer at a time. Some have found the show’s 19 room-size installations “vacant, predictable and wholesome.” I find several of them so harrowingly direct that I am moved to the core.
An example: Three projections flicker on the walls of a room in darkness. The images themselves are black, but from time to time silhouettes of isolated figures become discernible. Each of the silhouettes eventually lightens, erupting like a firework. And each is immediately extinguished before another emerges and the cycle begins again.
The title of the piece is “Tiny Deaths,” but as there is no wall text or label, few viewers will know it. They do not have to. The light-burst of each image might well be an illustration of Macbeth’s “Out, out, brief candle!/Life’s but a walking shadow.” Even some of the teenagers who, unexpectedly, have colonized the exhibition in large number seem to grasp it is “about” mortality.
Although Viola’s work uses the medium of the young, television, there is none of its cool contemporary attitude, irony. What you see is what you get. And Viola’s poetic language — a language of images and sounds, only rarely words — affects not just the mind but the viewer’s entire body.
Contemporary artists from David Salle to Matthew Barney seek that sort of all-enveloping immediacy. But their efforts at creating time-based art usually have had the lightheadedness of comic-book or B-movie content. Viola’s pieces not only are more technically proficient but also their themes are less for fans of Bruce Willis than Ingmar Bergman or Andrei Tarkowsky.
Consider: Two picture tubes are mounted vertically facing each other. The one on the bottom shows a newborn baby in closeup. The one on top has the face of a dying woman. Viewers see the woman only as a reflection on the glass of the first tube, hovering ghostlike over the face of the infant.
The woman is Viola’s mother; the child, his son. She went into a coma before he was born. Hence, they meet only here, in an artwork titled “Heaven and Earth.” But viewers do not need to know anything beyond the piece itself. The deployment and particular conjunction of images clearly, wordlessly, communicates the reach of one generation toward another.
Several works present what we might call video koans or parables. Viola is deeply involved with Eastern and Western mysticism. So recurring images of, say, fire and water have behind them symbolic associations that stretch back for millennia. Each video piece is aesthetically complete in itself — a work of art, not a didactic exercise — yet its ultimate aim is to give opportunity for further, interior, exploration.
Nowadays many people resist visual art that really is visual and does not rely on fancy theoretical exegesis; the New York critical establishment already has expressed its resentment that such an art has flourished without benefit of its input. Others of a more genuine intellectual bent are dismissive of content that in recent years has become the focus of self-help books and talk shows. Yet authenticity and depth of vision make a tremendous difference, and in the work of Viola both are completely manifest.
This is not to say, however, that the art is without flaw. Viola’s persistent slowing down of time can effect a feeling of monotony despite the richness of its symbolic intent. And his treatment of sound tends to compress the variety of audible experience into too-predictable bands of whisper, scream, rumble and roar.
The exhibition, which extends from the Institute’s Regenstein Hall and Gallery 211 to the Water Tower Pumping Station and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel, has solved the chief problem of all video displays, ensuring that the pieces not only are operable but also adjusted for optimum visual impact. Even so, despite the museum’s best effort, spillover of sound from one piece to the next continues to be damaging, and the all-important correspondence of Viola’s “Nantes Triptych” to a traditional altarpiece is blunted every time viewers have to engage in a lengthy hunt for a janitor at the chapel to turn it on.
I first saw a tape by Viola nearly 25 years ago in an extensive and, sorry to say, deadly exhibition from the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. Numbed by the experience, I asked a curator with interests far and wide if he had yet come across a video piece that could stand with the best of the century’s art in other disciplines. Referring to poems by Rainer Maria Rilke that get to the very heart of existence, the curator replied, “If you mean anything like the Duino Elegies, no.”
It is the achievement of Viola that now, a quarter of a century later, he is the only video artist we know who is coming close.
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Organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, “Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey” will continue at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., and at the Water Tower Pumping Station and Rockefeller Memorial Chapel through Jan. 9.
