Right now you have the widest range of media styles, techniques and languages to express your inner vision that has ever existed in the history of art-making on this planet. And right now for artists out there, we are living in an extraordinary time unprecedented in the history of art. All art is contemporary art and is born in radical new ideas. It is kept alive by the human presence within all material creations, including video and computers. I firmly believe that it is especially needed in this day and age of conflict, strife and misunderstanding. Art is the universal language of mankind. Creativity exists in all human beings it transcends time and place and it arises from the practice of making something new from something old. People who came before have left behind something that gives us knowledge. The most important thing human beings can do in their lives is to leave something behind. “The human condition is so powerful and so necessary. “Humanity consists of three things: the unborn, the dead and the living,” Viola remarks. 23 minutes, performers: Blake Viola, Kira Perov, Bill Viola, Lois Stark (Photo Kira Perov) His mind is chaotic and jumps from subject to subject, but this reflects an extreme openness of spirit, influenced by wide-ranging references, whether mystical (fromSaint Jean de la Croix to Jalal al-Din Rumi), philosophical (from the Greeks to the American Indian Seneca Chief), poetic (from Japanese Zen monks to William Blake) or artistic (from the Buddhist frescoes of Alchi to the Italian Renaissance painters).įour Hands (detail), 2001, black-and-white video polyptych on four LCD flat panels mounted on shelf. And new tools, especially projectors and flat screens, gave me new inspiration, and constantly expanded my palette.”įor the past four decades, Viola has kept a personal journal that he writes in every morning, which now comprises 40 volumes filled with his thoughts, projects and drawings. “As the equipment improved over the years, I was able to see some of my pieces finally shown the way that I had envisioned them. His work has proven that video could be a creative tool, contributing to opening new perspectives in art, and he is one of the rare artists to have worked principally with the moving image since 1972, testing a vast range of equipment: the “portapak” portable black-and-white video recorder commercialized in the 1960s, the first audio and video synthesizers, infrared cameras, military surveillance cameras for filming under moonlight in the desert, miniature telescopic cameras for exploring inaccessible zones, devices for filming underwater, digital cameras, high definition, new types of plasma and LCD screens. Painting with technological and digital color of his own invention, he creates moving pictures forming a body of work that takes its rightful place in art history.īorn at the same time as video, Viola’s career is also the story of the development of a new medium – video art – which is now omnipresent in contemporary art. He forces us to see directly what we couldn’t or didn’t want to see, to look below the surface, to penetrate the image and risk entering unknown territory. The camera becomes a kind of second eye that zooms in on a subject to perceive it more precisely, re-teaches us how to see and addresses the world beyond appearances. In his hands, time may be stretched, condensed, repeated, interlinked, layered, reversed, accelerated or decelerated to reveal to us all its facets, his signature being the slow motion technique that obliges us to look attentively at the image to fully grasp its evolution. He defines his art as “sculpting time”, where time is the basic material of film and video as the artist goes about creating events or experiences that will unfold, captured on a strip of tape or celluloid. “Time makes my art possible,” insists Bill Viola.
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