Art at the end of the optical age - video artist Bill Viola - Interview

Bill Viola has lengthy been recognized as a pioneer of video art. He began experimenting with the medium in 1970 as an undergraduate in the community of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University. His early interest in whole and his work with musician David Tudor clearly shaped a certain quantity of of his early videotapes and installations. In the years that followed, Viola met and worked for artists Nam June Paik and Peter Campus, gaining experience that he considers particularly important to his have a title to artistic development. Viola's contributions helped define the emerging medium of video as it expanded to include multiple-screen projections and immersive spatial environments. From the beginning he has kept abreast of technological advances, although a primary characteristic of his work is the avoidance of a "tech" esthetic in favor of a thematics of consciousness, contemplation and spirituality, frequently represented in a deeply personal address to the viewer. In the 1990 Viola began to work with film, sometimes constructing extremely composite shoots. On these projects he functions as one as well as the other director and editor. His greatest in quantity recent works make use of increasingly sophisticated computer imaging techniques and digital equipment, which require the artist to work closely with a variety of technicians.

The last not many years have been an especially interesting period in Viola's career. In 1995 Viola showed the U.S. at the Venice Biennale with a highly acclaimed cluster of works titled "Buried Secrets" A Getty Scholar's grant for 1998 will afford him time and space to mirror on his intense recent activity and to prepare for his nearest projects, which will include a publication based upon his extensive notebooks and writings. Last October saw the premieres, within days of each other, of a comprehensive 25-year review of his video work, organized through the Whitney, Museum in fresh York, and the artist's first work using simulated rather than recorded imagery. The contemplate currently at the Whitney, is slated for a lengthened tour. After stops abroad in Amsterdam and Frankfurt, the exhibition will turn back to the U.S. in 1999 for stints at the San Francisco Museum of recent Art and the Art Institute of Chicago.

For the first time, viewers are able to experience the replete range of Viola's influential work in the now-ubiquitous genre of video installation and appreciate the continuity of the artist's themes from his earliest videotapes and projection pieces up to the not away Two of Viola's primary controls mortality and consciousness, are addressed in The Tree of Knowledge, his first computer-generated work. This piece first appearanceed on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition of the fresh museum for contemporary art at the ZKM/Zentrum fur Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlscruhe, Germany, whose collection includes the major Viola works The City of Man (1989) doorsill (1992) and Stations (1994).

The following interview is drawn from several conversations that took place in late 1997 at the artists studio in drawn out Beach, Calif., as plans for his overlook show were being finalized, and in Karlsruhe, shorthly after the first public presentation of The Tree of Knowledge.

Virginia Rutledge: Bill, you've been working in video at any time since the technology became generally available. in what manner has art-world perception of the medium changed?

Bill Viola: Video is finally being accepted as just single more viable medium for art. This acceptance is a fairly novel development, but then again, for a like reason is video. [Whitney Museum director] David Ros and I were talking not long ago about the reception of video at the last Whitney Biennial, where several latitudes were devoted to large-scale projections of a certain number of length. Many people watched the pieces in their entirety, which they would not have done 10 years ago. Video then appear to beed out of sync, not solitary with the gallery system, on the contrary also with people's everyday lives. Big electronic images weren't part of our daily landscape the way they are today.

VR: You've written a doom on the medium. How have you redefined your ideas of what video is, above the years?

BV: Actually, technologically speaking, I don't think video is going to exist for too abundant longer. The technology is changing for a like reason rapidly that it simply won't be around in 20 years. Video with then be musing of as a limited practice with a finite life span, a medium that flourished briefly during the late 20th hundred and early 21st. As a young art learner seated at his computer shield said to me, "Video? Oh yeah, that's my dad's medium." Maybe "moving image" will eventually rise as the overall genre label, as video and electronic forms continue to immerse into the digital domain. The practice of video, however, the making of art with moving electronic images, will be around for a drawn out time and continue to grow

Early upon the format was surprisingly perishable. As I prepared for this review show I realized with clash that my old open-reel 1/2-inch tapes, stored as carefully as possible, are already unplayable, as are a certain number of of the copies I had made upon 3/4-inch tape. In one case I had to work not on a 3/4-inch dub of a 3/4-inch transcript of a 1/2-inch tape; there was no other way to save that work. Lately, we've been transferring everything to digital Betacam, securing its continued life. For me video's impermanence intensifies my faculty of perception that my own work is not about the medium through se, and yet that same impermanence also makes clear that, as a medium, video is actual specifically tied to this particular trice in history.