{"id":5563,"title":"Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes The Poetics of Light and Time","kind":"biblio","url":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/bill-viola-installations-and-videotapes-poetics-light-and-time","version":"2ac96f7ea9124b87d3a1950afe28bfa47ed1accf9f6af2e340a9cd086c1e3859","modified":"2026-09-13T21:52:04.4386316+00:00","credits":[{"role":"Curator","name":"London Barbara"},{"role":"Editor","name":"Barbara London"}],"authorKeys":["London, Barbara"],"subjects":["Texts by Author"],"metadata":[{"label":"Publisher","value":"The Museum of Modern Art","url":null},{"label":"Date","value":"10/16/87-1/3/88","url":null},{"label":"Place","value":"New York, NY","url":null},{"label":"Organizer","value":"Museum of Modern Art","url":null},{"label":"Site","value":"Museum of Modern Art","url":null},{"label":"ETC archive","value":"ETC0583","url":null},{"label":"Curator(s)","value":"London Barbara","url":null},{"label":"Exhibition Dates","value":"10/16/87-1/3/88","url":null}],"citations":{"page":"\u0022Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes The Poetics of Light and Time.\u0022 Video History Project, Experimental Television Center, 2026. https://www.videohistoryproject.org/bill-viola-installations-and-videotapes-poetics-light-and-time.","publication":"Bill Viola: Installations and Videotapes The Poetics of Light and Time. The Museum of Modern Art. 10/16/87-1/3/88.","risUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/citation/5563.ris"},"links":[{"label":"Scanned document","url":"https://archive.org/details/ETC0583","relationship":"linked document; contents not retrieved","contentType":"application/pdf"}],"sections":[{"name":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"characters":38194},{"name":"abstract","source":"recorded publication abstract","generated":false,"characters":218},{"name":"summary","source":"existing VHP generated summary","generated":true,"characters":802},{"name":"archive_summary","source":"existing ETC archive summaries: ETC0583","generated":false,"characters":86}],"content":{"section":"body","source":"VHP record body","generated":false,"text":"For more than sixteen years Bill Viola has consistently used the most contemporary electronic technologies to create deceptively spare, provocative videotapes and video-and-sound installations that pursue an ancient theme: the revelation of the layers of human consciousness. Although based on realistic images, his projects go beyond representation to challenge the viewer\u0027s preconditioned expectations and viewing patterns. His work, which derives from a combination of the highly rational and the deeply intuitive, probes many levels of experience. \u0022The real investigation is of life and being itself,\u0022 Viola has said. \u0022The medium is just the tool in this investigation.\u0022 (1) Viola gives painstaking attention to his subjects, both natural and man-made, so that the results invariably have a resplendence, depth of spirit, and intensity that make them indisputably his. He handles his recorded images in a straightforward manner; the primary special effects he employs involve slowing down, reversing, or speeding up time. This directness extends to his editing, which is as concise as it is precise: nothing is extraneous and very little is left to chance. Although his works reflect his extraordinary control, during recording he will accept the serendipitous action occurring in front of the camera, which heightens the energy of the completed piece. Because Viola is exceptionally skillful with and knowledgeable about broadcast-quality video equipment-to the extent that he operates the hardware with what appear to be reflex actions-he is free to be creative during production. He works alone, without needing the assistance of a technical middleman, so each project remains an expression of his personal vision. Viola\u0027s primary subject is the physical and mental landscape, and the connections and interplay between the outer world and the inner realm. He is concerned with exploring the interaction of his images with the viewer\u0027s memory, as well as with the subconscious and its dreams and imagination. He is particularly interested in that moment of exchange between the viewer and the art work when energy is released and the viewer achieves a new awareness. \u0022In a way my work is very literal, but it has more to do with the after-experience than the actual experience in itself,\u0022 he told an interviewer. \u0022As if memory were a sort of filter, another editing process. In fact the editing is going on all the time. Images are always being created and transformed . . . I think memory is as much about the future as it is about the past . . . I\u0027m interested in how thought is a function of time, There is a moment when the act of perception becomes conception, and that is thought. (2) For Viola the image is merely a schematic representation of a much larger system, and the process of seeing is a complex process that involves far more than surface recognition. For many years Viola has been drawn to the numinous aspects of nature. He travels great distances to experience particular sacred locations, which become sources of personal inspiration as well as provide subject matter. He has made an effort to explore the myths of other cultures, and over the years has sought out remote locations revered by native American, Near Eastern, Asian, and Pacific island peoples. Thematically he draws from the rituals of his own Christianity, as well as from Buddhism and shamanism. His studies have included the literature of primitive mythology and of Greek philosophy, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, Judeo-Christian mysticism, and Sufism. He subscribes to the Eastern philosophies that place man in the context of nature\u0027s ongoing cycle; that see an infinite, eternal entity as being embodied in all animate and inanimate things; and that recognize the whole as being represented in its parts. Viola\u0027s approach to his life and work has been greatly influenced by the East, which is key to understanding his art. Having as much esteem for the circulatory system as the circuit board, he is constantly exploring the larger system as it is expressed by the smallest part. Respecting nature\u0027s power, he sees the world as composed of interacting opposites-light and dark, spiritual and physical, life and death-as reflected in the Chinese concept of yin and yang. Although he does not adhere to any formal religion, he respects the significance of tradition and ritual in all systems of belief. Born in 1951, Bill Viola grew up in Flushing, New York. While in public school he discovered he could escape into his own creative world through drawing. Playing drums with a local rock band, he became committed to music, later recognizing how important it had been to learn the discipline required to develop a skill. Like other teenagers at the time, he was indirectly affected by the social upheaval of the 1960s, and the questioning of many traditional, middle-class values. Viola studied art at Syracuse University, graduating from the College of Visual and Performing Arts in 1973. Not interested in pursuing more traditional art mediums, he spent time in the \u0022experimental studio\u0022 of the art department. He explored performance after responding to the intensity of working with the manipulation of the self in a live situation-before looking into experimental film. With friends he would analyze the image, camera, and structure of films by such artists as Michael Snow, Ken Jacobs, Hollis Frampton, and Stan Brakhage. Around the same time, during his sophomore year, his professor purchased an early Sony portable, black-and-white camera and simple reel-to-reel recorder for the \u0022experimental studio.\u0022 At the same time Viola was studying electronic music. In an interview he described the connection between the two mediums: The crucial thing for me was the process of going through an electronic system, working with these standard kinds of circuits which became a perfect introduction to a general electronic theory. It gave me a sense that the electronic signal was a material that could be worked with. This was another really important realization. Physical manipulation is fundamental to our thought processes-just watch the way a baby learns. It\u0027s why most people have so much trouble approaching electronic media. When electronic energies finally became concrete for me, like sounds are to a composer, I really began to learn. Soon I made what was for me an easy switch over to video. I never thought about [video] in terms of images so much as electronic process, a signal (3) Viola began working full-time with video, which unlike Super-8 film, allowed him to view the image both before and during recording. He began by creating exercises that deliberately explored structure and form. \u0022When Marshall McLuhan wrote his famous manifesto \u00B4the medium is the message,\u0027 he was saying that communication is transmitted by the very form of the medium itself.\u0022(4) He was influenced by Gene Youngblood\u0027s book Expanded Cinema (1974), in which he described the technical processes of video as being key formal elements of the aesthetics of the medium. At first Viola saw his raw material as being only the technology, but then came to understand how important the other half of the art process is: the viewing experience, those moments of dynamic interaction called perception. Inspired also by the video and performance pieces of artists Bruce Nauman and Vito Acconci, Viola set up problem-solving situations, working with the physical aspects of both electronics and architectural space. He was dealing conceptually with video\u0027s properties, and emotionally with the representation of personal experience. In the United States this was a period of broad experimentation with alternative forms of expression: standard art materials and venues were being challenged, and for many artists the act of experiencing art took precedence over the production of tangible, salable art objects. Considerable artistic activity explored the environment in the Southwest, with its vast, open desert spaces and provocative traces of Indian culture. In this setting such artists as Nauman, Robert Irwin, and James Turrell broke away from the restrained concerns of the then popular Minimalism to develop their subjective, process-oriented, spatial pieces that explored individual perception. At the same time Peter Campus was carefully investigating the characteristics of \u0022live\u0022 video. Campus wrote that \u0022the video camera makes possible an exterior point of view simultaneous with one\u0027s own. This advance over the film camera is due to the vidicon tube, similar to the retina of the eye, continuously transposing light (photon) energy to electrical energy . . . . It is easy to utilize video to clarify perceptual situations because it separates the eye surrogate from the eyebrain experience we are all too familiar with.\u0022 (5) After graduation Viola attended a workshop given by Campus. Viola respected Campus\u0027s intensity of vision and the aggressive way he dealt with issues of self-confrontation, and he responded to the overtly emotional tenor of his carefully controlled, ominously lit installations. Today Viola believes Campus to be \u0022one of the most important artists.\u0022(6) At that time Viola quickly advanced when, with other students, he helped set up Synapse, a two-way cable system and a one-inch color-video studio, at the University. This was one of the first \u0022alternative\u0022 media centers in New York state. Training as a studio engineer, he worked intently at Synapse on projects by other students and invited artists, gaining firsthand experience with a three-camera, broadcast-quality studio situation. He learned how live television works, and how to use a video switcher to do live editing independent of, but simultaneous to, recording in the manner of low-budget, television soap-opera productions. Viola met \u0022new music\u0022 composers Alvin Lucier and Robert Ashley at Syracuse in 1972, and during the summer of 1973 he came into contact with composers David Tudor, Gordon Mumma, and David Behrman at an experimental music workshop in Chocorua, New Hampshire. These three weeks heightened his awareness not only of electronic theory and circuit design, but also of sound as a malleable, sculptural material. For the first time he became aware of how integral sound is to the perception of space. After this experience his projects developed from discrete exercises to focused works. That summer at Chocorua he and the musicians John Driscoll, Linda Fisher, and Phil Edelstein formed the Composers Inside Electronics Group; over the next few years they performed their own compositions as well as Tudor\u0027s sound sculpture Rain Forest (conceived initially in 1968 for a dance by Merce Cunningham). In this environmental installation transducers were attached to such \u0022found\u0022 objects as metal box springs, lawn sprinklers, and oil drums, which were suspended from the ceiling of the performance/exhibition space. The transducers drove prerecorded sounds through each object, which acted as resonators and filters to enhance or subdue frequencies in the acoustic source. The musicians chose sounds that worked with each particular object. Viewers experienced the installation by moving randomly through the space, a tactile composition of resonating materials and sounds. This structured situation, which also allowed for spontaneous interaction, appealed to Viola and influenced his work. Two years later, in 1975, while he was technical director of Art/Tapes/22, an informal consumer-format production studio for artists in Florence, Viola became interested in cathedrals as rich, acoustic spaces, and spent his limited free time audiotaping local masses. He saw the cathedral as a functioning, living system, as well as a three-dimensional model of historic ideologies, a concept that later enriched his installations. The following year he moved back to New York. When David Loxton and Carol Brandenburg invited Viola to be an artist-in-residence at WNET/Thirteen\u0027s Artists\u0027 Television Laboratory, ","offset":0,"nextOffset":12000,"totalCharacters":38194,"complete":false},"rightsUrl":"https://www.videohistoryproject.org/terms-service"}