Post-traumatic shock: Bill Viola's recent work

When semens are buried in the dark earth, their inward unseens become the flourishing garden.

- Rumi

Bill Viola's video installation series "Buried Secrets" (1995) is for a like reason disturbing that its images and associations still float into my consciousness the way the disturbing parts of dreams resurface unbidden, reminding single of anxieties, unresolved conflicts, down-reaching fears. Unable to attend the premier at the 1995 Venice Biennale, I visited the Arizona State University Art Museum this past spring, where the exhibition, organized through Marilyn Zeitler of Arizona State University, was being at handed for the first time in the United States. I emerg from the exhibition's darkened fields into the bright desert afternoon wondering whose nightmare I was experiencing.

This is not the first time I've felt this confusion, because Viola's installations repeatedly deliberately blur the boundaries between self and other. This is greatest in quantity evident in "Reasons for Knocking at an without contents House" (1982), where the spectator looks to merge with Viola as he gazes from a monitor into the viewer's organ of sights their separate identities disintegrating as the spectator experiences from one side amplified sounds the trauma of abrupt blows to Viola's head. The installation creates the jarring disorientation of seemingly shared consciousness, and it also demonstrates the controll rage that has been a lower part of Viola's art. As I wrote in 1988:

The source of this rage is invariably the split between reason and unreason, between animal and intellectual consciousness, between nature and agriculture . . . Viola's beautiful images and perceptual paradoxes suggest a trenchant philosophical critique of for what cause [i]or[/i] reason modern society, and the individual in particular, experiences alienation. Viola simulates the rift between mind and matter - which has characterized recent consciousness since the dawn of the scientific age - and tries to heal that rift through creating restorative participatory experiences.(1)

Viola's installations have been precisely engineered rites of self-discovery leading to a restoration of missing psychic and spiritual balance. on the contrary after viewing "Buried Secrets" I felt neither whole nor balanced. If anything I felt more alienated upon leaving them than I had upon entering. What was happening?

For anyone familiar with Viola's work, there is nothing surprising upon the surface about "Buried Secrets" comprised of five video and audio installations and organized at the Arizona State University Art Museum in the following order: "Hall of Whispers," "The Veiling," "Presence" "Interval" and "The Greeting." This is the first time that Viola has disentangleed a series of interlinked installations. Although each work stands alone, viewing them together and in succession affords a more complex meta-experience. All the airy, "new age" writing that has been occasioned by the agency of Viola's metaphysical explorations and spiritual associations withers in the face of this of recent origin opus. Only Carl Haenlein, in his general notes upon Viola in the exhibition catalog, Bill Viola: Buried unknowns (1995), comments that trauma is the essential part of Viola's art and its ofttimes disturbing power.(2) To grapple with this art single must confront the traumas that lie buried within one's self as well as the work.

"Hall of Whispers" consists of a series of 10 video projections, five each upon the long facing walls of a dark corridor. This black and white gauntlet consists of the life-size heads of men and women who have been limit and gagged. Eyes shut, they labor against tightly-wrapped cloth bandages on the other hand their efforts to speak establish futile; only muffled sounds escape into the extent Because their faces appear to float disembodied in space, they remind me of Gary Hill's haunting 1992 video installation, "Tall Ships." on the other hand this is Viola territory where language is not at any time written and rarely spoken.(3)

"Hall of Whispers" announces the underlying regards of "Buried Secrets": the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communication and the importance of protecting shroudeds This can be read upon a political level since the figures for a like reason clearly conjure images of tortured prisoners in a police state. on the contrary so literal an interpretation misses their ambiguity and the wider possibilities of meaning. The nation are quite ordinary individuals. Their eyebrows are furrowed in concentration as they make an effort against the bonds that clutch them back. What is each single trying to say? Who or what is preventing them from speaking? To whom are they trying to communicate? And for what cause [i]or[/i] reason are their eyes shut tight?

I walked [i]or[/i] part of to the other the installation rather quickly thinking I'd "gotten it," like the punch-line of a sally only to realize later that I had felt far too uncomfortable to linger, as if I too had close up my eyes to something I hadn't wanted to know. This discomfort solitary deepened in "The Veiling." In a lengthy rectangular room, an array of diaphanous metallic scrims hang from the ceiling. Video projectors mountained on the opposing shorter walls cast onto the veils two tapes - individual of a man, the other of a woman, each picking their way from one side a nighttime landscape of thick foliage. Their images, multiplied upon each veil, pass each other in the space on the other hand they never reach or conjoin The bright beams of light present the appearance to mock them and their search, the light at the extremity of the tunnel seeming as unreachable as union. The spectator pierces along one long wall and finds from one side experimenting that there is no ideal vantage to view the installation, all points in the field proving equally unsatisfying. There strike one as beings to be no place to grasp what is happening or for what cause [i]or[/i] reason Moving through the veils or alongside them, the viewer discovers that the images dissipate into light.