Bill Viola: altered perceptions - exhibition of artist at the Whitney Museum, New York, New York - Cover Story

Bill Viola's extraordinary, theatrically conceived 25-year retrospective of video installations and single-channel works, organized through the Whitney Museum and curated through museum director David Ross and stage director Peter Sellars, tenders a rich, convincing alternative experience for those disturbed by means of the self-indulgence, cynicism and thinness of with equal reason much contemporary art. Viola harnesses and manipulates perceptual reality in his work, using as a foundation startlingly vivid video followings of events or phenomena of the like kind as a baby's birth, a torrent of falling water, a wall of fin, tribe sleeping, people floating in water, birds in flight, and the death of an somewhat advanced in life woman. In his installations he highlights these elemental images, using dramatic ploy like as extreme slow motion, contrasts in scale, shifts in focus, mirrored reflections, staccato editing and multiple or layered screens

Sensory perception is for Viola a spiritual activity, individual that leads to a heightened awareness of the couple nature and culture. In his impressive catalogue essay, David Ross makes a case for Viola as a novel kind of realist engaged with the actual processe of fife. Indeed, the real-life affects of Viola's work can be said to speak particularly to those of his hold generation whose eye-opening, hands-on experiences with the AIDS crisis -- in addition to midlife responsibilities for aging parents and troubl children -- have made the previous decade's Neo-Expressionism and irony-laden art-about-art have the appearance irrelevant.

Viola's interests are outside the typically narrow confines of the art institute and kunsthalle. Inspired not by dint of Foucault or Baudrillard but by the agency of figures such as St. John of the Cros and the 13th-century Persian mystic Rumi, Viola instills his work with a spiritual view of human nature and what Ros calls an absolute belief in the transformative power of art. Largely missing since the heyday of Abstract Expressionism, like faith marks a radical break with the dominant assumptions of contemporary art, best characterized perhaps by means of the blistering negativity of Bruce Nauman or the willfully void showmanship of Damien Hirst.

Viola's search for spiritual enlightenment is inspired through his serious study of Buddhist, Christian, Sufi and Zen mysticism as well as his travels in Italy, Bah, Tibet, Japan and the Fiji Islands. Although instituteed in the self-reflexive experimentation of early video artists like as Peter Campus, Nauman and Nam June Paik, Viola present the appearances to bypass postmodern skepticism about the nature of perception and image-making. Video parts recording, say, the flight of a night owl a Japanese fish market, open-heart surgery or the death of the artist's mother have a visceral bore that obviates deconstructive analysis, At his best, Viola engages universally understood images to create manifold perceptual experiences.

The image and soundtrack successions are dramatically juxtaposed and poetically structur greatest in quantity of Viola's installations, 15 of which have been brought together for the retrospective (including, in sees Angeles, three off-site works), aim to heighten sensory experience, and in more [i]or[/i] less cases to call it into question. The almost entirely darkened exhibition eschews wall labels; pinpoint spotlights and museum guards with flashlights direct visitors from one side In the oddly shaped Robert O Anderson Building of the looks Angeles County Museum -- the first venue upon the exhibition's tour -- the mazelike configuration of the present to view further disoriented viewers, adding to the faculty of perception of the unexpected. Always stimulating and oftentimes participatory, it is like an extraordinarily sophisticated theme park, individual dedicated to altered states of consciousness.

With its throw backed and rotating images, Slowly Turning Narrative (1992) transformed the exhibition's first gallery into the simulation of a ruminating, self-conscious mind. While the whispered voice of a man whom we diocese projected on one side of a central rotating shield chants a mantra of varying self-definitions ("the single who discerns... the one who make tenders the one who erodes..."), the turn upside down mirrored side of the large panel receives chaotic images (of a carousel, fireworks and a house upon fire) from another video projector mountained on the gallery wall. The rapidly shifting images interact with viewers' mirrored reflections and shadows as they walk end the gallery, caught up in the installation's bewildering swirl of images and skewed perspective.

Familiar from William Blake and hermetic philosophy, the classic idea of the microcosm epitomizes Viola's desire to concentrate upon paradigmatic, self-contained (or compact) worlds -- to downshift the gears of conscious perception. In He Weeps for You (1976) a video camera focuses upon individual drops of water that form beneath a small brass valve. When viewers stand in brow of the spotlit valve, they can diocese on a large screen a immense close-up of the forming water globule which dimly contains their inverted reflection. Each globule slowly gathers, ultimately falling onto a tympanum amplified to boom out the obliteration of each microcosmic world. The 40-second experience is the pair exhilarating and shocking, fraught with anticipation of each drop's doom.