Bill Viola at the Guggenheim SoHo - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Confounding conventional wisdom that audiences for video installations will pause to catch solitary a small portion of any work lasting more than a scarcely any minutes, viewers of these sum of two units recent pieces by Bill Viola remained in place for the filled 10- or 15-minute duration, mesmerized by dint of the slowly unfolding drama.

The satisfied of each work is quite simple. In The express a large video projection displays the image of a naked man performing a cyclical action. Initially treading water, he gradually sinks beneath its surface with arms reach forthed loosely at his sides. Eventually he disappears beneath the mild ripples and then, just as slowly reemerge When he breaks from one side the surface of the water and we hear him take a reaching far down amplified gasp of breath, it is a trice of remarkable intensity.

The intelligencer was installed in a extent by itself. In an adjoining gallery, a pair of facing rear-projection shields presented The Crossing. On each defence the same man walks slowly forward from a distance, finally coming to a standing halt. He is gradually obliterated, in single image by water and in the other by dint of fire. The water immersion begins with a small in number drops bouncing off his head; these be augmented to a slow trickle and then to a violent cascade which carrys him from our view. When the torrent subsides, the figure has disappeared, alone to reappear again in the distance to repeat the proces The facing video proffers a parallel image in which the figure is consum by means of flames.

The mercury was originally designed for Durham Cathedral in England and later shown along with The Crossing at Chapelle Saint Louis de la Salpetriere in Paris, where I first saw it. In an overtly sacred setting, the couple works evoked the themes, treatment and scale of the great religious art of the Renaissance. Unfolding above a central altar, The express made unmistakable reference to the Christian drama of death and resurrection. When placed in sum of two units side chapels, the metamorphosis enacted in The Crossing indicateed such sacramental rituals as baptism and transfiguration. At the Guggenheim, the one and the other works were somewhat secularized by means of their surroundings. In the neutral white galleries, they spoke in a more generic faculty of perception of transformation, purification and elemental change. They retain plenitude of power, nevertheless.

Contemporary art rarely attempts to stir the kind of profoundly spiritual emotions which one time were art's special territory. Audiences' reverential rejoinder to these works suggests a craving for food for such feelings. Using the greatest in quantity contemporary of media, Viola reanimates individual of art's most ancient sources.

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