Bill Viola essentially pioneered video art as a legitimate and vital part of contemporary art.
Moving images are extremely important. Moving images exist on the walls of the caves of Palaeolithic times, made by a guy with a torch and a brush who was painting bison running, because that’s what they were doing, they were hunting animals – they needed someone to stay inside, in the deepest place underground, where the spirits are, to make contact with those animals and we still need that today with our artists and philosophers and all these people that do this stuff. It’s kind of an endless thing – the technology changes but the intention and the means and the goals of what people do with it is actually very consistent since we first set foot on this beautiful earth.”
American artist Bill Viola essentially pioneered video art as a legitimate and vital part of contemporary art. His works draw on the elements, reflect on the nature of film and generally move and stun his audiences. Immersive installation works form the core of his oeuvre and he regularly employs state of the art technologies to submerge the audience within his spiritual, intense filmic worlds. Working since the ‘70s, his work is world-renowned and as part of The Melbourne International Arts Festival, we will be lucky to see two of his works – Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension and The Raft right here in our windy city.
Viola’s wife is a Melbournian, so coming back to Australia is a pleasure for him. “I first came to Melbourne in 1977 and I’ve been many times since to visit family,” he explains. “In the context of The Melbourne Festival it’s even more special. I’m really very flattered and humbled that they’ve asked me to have such a prominent place in this incredible world festival and that’s really pretty thrilling so that’s going to be a joy. We’re going to set up this piece in St Carthage’s Church – Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension – that’s going to be really wonderful, particularly because it’s not in an art gallery, it’s in a church and that’s a connection that for me is very important… and then the other piece that we’re doing at ACMI, The Raft, is also a great thing – it’s in the context of the moving image. The fact that there’s a national centre for the moving image in Australia,” he gushes, “that is the medium of our time and will be for the foreseeable future.”
Viola speaks with measure and control – his sentences are long and thoughtful and my questions seem to provoke extended responses. Much like his art, his words are quite mesmerising.
“When I was young I was very visually oriented and I would go to the movies and after the first half hour I’d be completely lost,” says Viola. “I’d have to lean over to [my wife] in the middle of these thrillers saying, ‘What’s happening? What’s going on?’ because I was just carried away by these images and of course we live in a society right now where people are essentially illiterate and the dominant communication on the planet right now is television and cinema.”
The medium of film worries Viola sometimes. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say the way people use and respond to film worries him. The importance of what he does is certainly not lost on him. “We’re not taught in school how to read images anymore – I mean we’ve never been taught that but I think that’s one of the most essential skills that we really need today because we are getting manipulated on the deepest level by these corporate institutions. The other thing that has been neglected too is the human heart. The depth that’s in our souls – that’s what we open up to when we go to see films, when we go to the theatre, when we look at art. It’s a very profound and precious thing and in the wrong hands that can be very dangerous.
“We’re in a very delicate time right now and the image, the media that I use to make my images is right at the centre of the difference between right and wrong and good and bad.”
Being obsessed with film, his words are almost like a narrator’s. But Viola’s focus is more on the technology than narrative cinema and its conventions. “I’m a techie from way back. I got involved in this medium the first time I touched a video camera in 1969. By 1970 I was prolific in it. It was black and white, open reel – so we had to thread the tape by hand – it was very primitive by today’s standards but I just pursued it because I had these images in my mind – I wanted to get them out of me.
“Any time there’s a new development in the medium there are new creative possibilities. But the bottom line is something that the Dalai Lama told to me [in 2005] – one of the things I wanted to talk to him about was the loss or the existence and or loss of solitude in the medium [of film] today because we have a lot of voices jabbering away at us 24/7, so I asked him, I said, ‘Your holiness, I’m really concerned about the medium that I use because it’s responsible for a lot of suffering in the world through misinformation and propaganda’… I told him about my father who would come into the motel room when we were on vacation and the first thing he’d do would be to turn the TV on and walk away. I said, ‘I’m really afraid we’re losing our solitude in this world,’ and the Dalai Lama looked me right in eye and said, ‘I do that too.’ That wasn’t the answer I wanted to here but it was really profound – here was… one of the most important spiritual individuals on the face of the earth right now and he told me he had three televisions going in his room. You can’t escape it. It has to be put to positive use.
“The way I make my work is different than the way most commercial cinema is made,” Viola clarifies. “I’m not really interested in pre-determining things. I don’t use storyboards and I don’t use scripts. I love to feel this energy when you’re with people in a room or you’re out alone in the mountains and you’re engaged in what you’re experiencing but you have no control over it. The way that I make [films], I make them all from a position of falling. A position of falling means literally letting go… You can feel that in great filmmakers work, in great visual artists’ work, in amazing composers’ work – all the ones that I think really catch you have this centre of emptiness in it and that emptiness comes from the fall, of letting go.”
As for his works in MIAF, I’m interested as to whether The Raft in particular has a political undercurrent. “Yes, very much so,” Viola replies. “I don’t do overtly political statements, recognisable images from the political domain, but I’m very interested in politics from this point of view of the individual person, very often who is innocent in those situations and who is subject to something very difficult if not horrifying.
“When I received the commission to do The Raft from a museum in Athens it was for The 2004 Olympics and I thought, ‘What can I do in the context of a world event such as The Olympics were all people from all these different cultures are coming together?’ And I just got this image in my mind of a group of people waiting at a bus stop, just standing there, a really across-the-board configuration of people of various ages, genders, race, class and they’re just waiting for something. And then without warning, they get assaulted by these massive blasts of water – it knocks people down, they go flying and then after that it stops, they’re in shock and then they begin to recover and to help each other. For me that was a metaphor for today’s world and the sense that I don’t think that we all know what is the true nature of these forces that are affecting us so profoundly in this world.”
Profound is certainly the right word for Viola. His works are not only beautiful but full, bursting with ideas, beliefs and lessons. If you believe in film – if you believe that we live in a visual society and that images are our global language, then you need to see Bill Viola’s work.
Bill Viola’s Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension will be installed in St Carthages Church from Friday October 8 until Saturday October 23. His work, The Raft shows in ACMI’s Gallery 2 between Thursday October 7 and Sunday February 20 (free). Bill Viola also speaks in Bill Viola In Conversation in ACMI’s Cinema 2 on Friday October 8 at 6.30pm, tickets $14/$11.
