Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: New Writings, 1973-1994. - book reviews

When sperms are buried in the dark earth, their inward closes 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 by means of Marilyn Zeitler of Arizona State University, was being neared for the first time in the United States. I emerg from the exhibition's darkened swings 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 many times deliberately blur the boundaries between self and other. This is greatest in quantity evident in "Reasons for Knocking at an destitute of contents House" (1982), where the spectator looks to merge with Viola as he gazes from a monitor into the viewer's organ of visions their separate identities disintegrating as the spectator experiences end amplified sounds the trauma of unanticipated 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 base 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 tillage . . . Viola's beautiful images and perceptual paradoxes recommend a trenchant philosophical critique of wherefore 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 not to be found psychic and spiritual balance. on the other hand 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 following affords a more complex meta-experience. All the airy, "new age" writing that has been occasioned through 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 unrevealeds (1995), comments that trauma is the nature of Viola's art and its frequently disturbing power.(2) To grapple with this art individual 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 border and gagged. Eyes shut, they try against tightly-wrapped cloth bandages on the other hand their efforts to speak show futile; only muffled sounds escape into the field 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 interests of "Buried Secrets": the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communication and the importance of protecting unknowns This can be read upon a political level since the figures with equal reason clearly conjure images of tortured prisoners in a police state. on the other hand so literal an interpretation misses their ambiguity and the wider possibilities of meaning. The family are quite ordinary individuals. Their eyebrows are furrowed in concentration as they endeavor against the bonds that gripe [i]or[/i] grip them back. What is each individual 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 witticism 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 drawn out rectangular room, an array of diaphanous metallic scrims hang from the ceiling. Video projectors high hilled on the opposing shorter walls throw onto the veils two tapes - single of a man, the other of a woman, each picking their way [i]or[/i] part of to the other a nighttime landscape of close foliage. Their images, multiplied upon each veil, pass each other in the space on the contrary they never reach or combine The bright beams of light have the appearance to mock them and their search, the light at the extremity of the tunnel seeming as unreachable as union. The spectator come intos along one long wall and finds [i]or[/i] part of to the other experimenting that there is no ideal vantage to view the installation, all points in the range proving equally unsatisfying. There have the appearances to be no place to grasp what is happening or wherefore Moving through the veils or alongside them, the viewer discovers that the images dissipate into light.