Bill Viola: Impermanence

Bill Viola's works—exquisitely composed, mesmerizing—could best be described as “cinematic” if one were only concerned with esthetics. Each work seduces us with its hint of a grand narrative at work, a promise to reveal to us something we do not already know about birth, death, fear, desire, or reality. Certainly the works are enigmatic, but with their lush visual clarity, and with the presence of humans and human agency, with some conflict being confronted—we search for the story.

Ancestors depicts a journey on foot across the desert made by a mother and her son in the heat of summer. In the course of traversing this vast and dangerous environment, a profound transformation occurs when the landscape swallows them in a dust storm and they emerge, finding companionship, strength, determination and clarity.

Chott el-Djerid is the name of a vast, dry salt lake in the Tunisian Sahara Desert, where mirages are most likely to form in the midday sun. Here the intense desert heat manipulates, bends, and distorts the light rays to such an extent that you actually see things that are not there. Trees and sand dunes float off the ground, the edges of mountains and buildings ripple and vibrate, color and form blend into one shimmering dance. The desert mirages are set against images of the bleak winter prairies of Illinois and Saskatchewan, Canada, some of them recorded in a snowstorm. The opposite climactic conditions induce a similar aura of uncertainty, disorientation, and unfamiliarity.Through special telephoto lenses adapted for video, the camera confronts the final barrier of the limits of the image, the point when the breakdown of normal conditions, or the lack of visual information, causes us to reevaluate our perceptions of reality and realize that we are looking at something out of the ordinary—a transformation of the physical into the psychological. If one believes that hallucinations are the manifestation of some chemical or biological  imbalance in the brain, then mirages and desert heat distortions can be considered hallucinations of the landscape. It was like physically being inside someone else’s dream.

There are themes that run throughout all ten works: immersion, transformation, a confrontation with basic elements of air, and water. That last one is among Viola’s most powerful motifs. In works such as Ascension and The Raft water is a force the human figures struggle with and are controlled by; while in other works, such as Madison and Sharon, the immersion in water is a peaceful, perhaps edenic experience, a connection to the dream state. Viola’s early childhood event of near drowning is well known, but rather than see autobiography in his art, we can consider his own interpretation of his experience, as one true moment when he saw reality as it is, beautiful but fleeting. Buddhists will remind us, as will the naysayers of our current social media saturation, that this is a problem of attentiveness, of being present in the moment. Chott el-Djerid, a much earlier video from 1979, addresses the question of perception, and serves to underpin the connective strands of the later pieces. Subtitled A Portrait in Light and Heat, it considers the phenomenon of a desert mirage, the dry Saharan lake of the title, and features the near-whiteout of a winter prairie landscape. The images are disorienting. We are perhaps meant to reckon with the disturbing notion that if our senses are unreliable then we have no mechanism for assessing the world or our selves within it. More likely Viola is simply inviting us to engage in the principal activity that he says defines his work: “looking with great focus at the ordinary things around me.”

A young woman and a young man, standing naked from waist up, are depicted in two vertical screens mounted side by side. Even though their worlds are separated, they undergo the same violent transformations that might ultimately unite them.Vulnerable in their exposed state, they are assaulted by streams of liquids that pour from above. First comes the black fluid of despair, which turns to fear as the liquid changes to red. With the flow of white liquid comes relief and nurturing, followed by the purification of cleansing water. Finally, a soft mist brings acceptance, awakening, and birth. The fluids represent the essence of human life: earth, blood, milk, water, and air, and the life cycle from birth to death, a transformation from darkness into light.

Sharon and Madison depict a woman and a young girl under water at the bottom of a stream bed. Their eyes are closed and they appear to be at peace. Water ripples across their body, subtly animating their movements and their long, flowing hair. The sound of running water permeates the space as dreams filter through their watery environment.

The stillness of an underwater landscape is broken when a fully clothed man suddenly plunges into the water from above.  Accompanied by a roar of sound and a luminous explosion of bubbles and turbulence, he slowly sinks with arms outstretched, his body limp and motionless.  Shafts of light undulate as streams of glowing bubbles ascend to the disturbed surface.  Midway down, the man’s descent slows and finally stops, and his body remains suspended in space.  Slowly he begins to rise again, eventually reaching the surface.  There, air bubbles emerge from his mouth and he begins his involuntary descent again.  This time he sinks into the depths and his body soon disappears into the darkness below the edge of the frame, allowing the landscape to return to its undisturbed state.