Assignment #8

Bill Viola

  Bill Viola, born January 25, 1951, is a famous video artist. He creates video installations, each with their own message, that you can think of as visual poems. With his exhibitions, he aims to create an internal world where the viewer is submerged. An artist is an artist no matter what tools he uses. What's important about his art is that he brings an awareness and clarity to the human condition in a new and different way.  His work has focused on the ideas of fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness. 

   In one of the videos Bill Viola made in 2008 named Acceptance, he uses powerful imagery. The water creates a beautiful light on the suffering woman. She struggles against the water which most likely represents her struggles in life. At the end, we can finally see her clearly, not suffering anymore and without the painful water. He believes art is something universal and provides inspiration, and a sense of mystery. With this, his art gives a viewer a glimpse into a world of spirtuality. 

"Surrender" is another one of his works of two people who are shown seperated and upside down. This is a work about sorrow, loss, and feeling something very deeply. He is said to believe that in today's world, people don't really experience things very deeply. These two people eventually disappear in a kind of cloud or stream of water, where they will be flipped over to the other side. This repeats over and over again, establishing a connection between tears and water. This work also shows the destruction of the self in order to create a new self and you see the distortion that happens when you think you're fine and understand. But you don't really understand, and it seems like the soul is traveling through these bodies to find a new center and will go on searching until they've become still. This is called Surrender because there are many things in life that you need to surrender to, even if it is painful. 

In the same video, another piece is shown. These people have just gone through something really, really difficult and it was threatening to destroy them. The beauty is that after this destruction, when the dust settles, when everything clears, and you return your mind to emptiness then you will see that they have made it, they didn't die, they didn't get destroyed, and they have broken through. This common theme is one that Bill Viola follows closely, which is the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth that's going on constantly. The experience they had is something that all of us would not like have. In the piece, they begin to realize what happened and that is the most important moment - it's the moment after the big explosion/disturbance, that's the time when you can begin to open your eyes again and to understand what happened so that you can move and continue to experience and to continue understanding the world in both its positive and negative aspects. 

When Bill Viola was in art school, he was always only interested in the future and didn't think about the past or the world's past. He was interested in only moving forward and was exploring a new medium at the same time, where he didn't really acknowledge old masters in art. When he got immersed in something like he did at that time, it gave him a lot back. Even as a young person, there was a lot of information and deep emotion he was absorbing. One day his mother died and his whole world was turned upside down. It was very frightening and disturbing to him and came to him as a shock. He had this experience of something being taken away from him, one of the most important things in a person's life; a mother. That started to teach him something even greater, that life is precious and that you never know when it will stop. We should use our time wisely to help ourselves and others. Getting back to art, there was always a seperation between old masters [of art] and new technology. People have begin bringing contemporary art into a museum with old mediums. One of Bill Viola's goals as an artist is to have that gap between old art and new art be connected because he believes all art is contemporary art.