An interview with Bill Viola

While Bill Viola was in Los Angeles preparing for the transfer of his Passion exhibition to the National Gallery in London, Mel Cooper spoke with him. Here is a transcript of Bill Viola's thoughts about his work.

M.C. When and how did you decide to dedicate yourself to video art?

B.V. Making art was never a conscious choice for me. I was already the class artist in kindergarten, and when I reached university in 1969 the technological (and social) revolution was already in high gear. As a musician (I was playing drums in a rock band), I was immediately drawn to the new field of electronic music. And when, as a visual artist, I discovered the new portable video technology, it seemed natural to want to use it. Making art with it was never a question.

I don't think that we choose to do something as our life's work - I think that the thing chooses you. We contain the spark or seed of our future work - something inside of us already knows.

M.C. Do you think that the art world, in general, pays enough attention to the new technologies and what they can achieve as tools for expressiveness?

B.V. Yes - and perhaps even too much. There was an explosion of video art in the late 1990's, particularly in the area of projection installation. Advances in technology (computer-based editing, high quality camcorders, inexpensive super-bright projectors) fueled this burst of activity, along with the simple fact that for a new generation the media world had become THE world. Digital technology, at the centre of all this, was becoming a fact of life, and therefore a subject and object for the practice of art. The down side was that a lot of hastily-put-together, simply-conceived or derivative work was made, and the art world, loving new fads in a culture that itself loves technological gizmos, gobbled it right up.

On the other hand, this process of technical innovation sparking cultural change, which even existed back in the Renaissance, allowed for a new crop of young artists to enter the mainstream, which is always a good thing.

What happened in the 1990s dispelled any doubts that video art was a temporary or secondary phenomenon. By 2001, video had been shown in most mainstream museums, including the National Gallery in London (the Encounters exhibition), and one of my pieces, The Quintet of Remembrance, entered the collection of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, their first work of video art. Time to die, I guess!

M.C. Does the work on PASSIONS have a special place in your output and your affections?

B.V. Yes, The Passions series came directly out of my father's death in 1999. All through 1998, while I was a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, studying the depiction of emotion and human suffering in Old Master paintings, my father was slowly dying. Professionally, I was having this intense intellectual experience and series of revelations about art at the Getty, while personally I was on an emotional roller coaster of uncontrollable waves of extreme emotions that dominated my life and at times overwhelmed it.

His passing in January of 1999 was both a release and a sudden blow, as death often can be. It knocked me off my feet, and this loss of equilibrium is exactly what The Passions pieces are about.

M.C. Is a show like PASSIONS really more of a collaborative venture rather like making a film than earlier work you have done?
- Would you agree?
- And to what degree does the element of collaboration also lead to surprises?
- To what degree could you be considered to have a role parallel to a film director as the auteur of your works?

B.V. Over the past decade I've become increasingly drawn into the world of film production. This has come about due to the mounting technical demands of the ideas (for example, requiring extremely smooth slow motion at high resolution), and the complexities of the projects (like flooding a building out from the inside in a crowded street scene). After years of doing everything myself - camera, sound, editing, audio mixing - I've come to appreciate the level of focus on the image and the action that having a team of technicians has afforded me. In particular, my creative collaborations with cinematographer Harry Dawson and performers like Weba Garretson have greatly expanded and enriched my work.

What happens when you are on a set is that you are participating in a traditional art form whereby a hierarchical, structured situation, a kind of instrument really, is assembled to give the director absolute control over creating the images he or she sees in their mind's eye without becoming distracted by technical or physical problems. After my first experience of working with a full crew, I immediately recognized and appreciated the talents and artistry of the people involved and realized that this situation was much closer to music than it was to painting. People participate in the idea and make contributions, sometimes in ways you would never do or could anticipate. As with music, the whole becomes more than the sum of the parts, and for a visual artist this can take some getting used to. Now I rely on it.

M.C. Was getting recognition among the art community and critics for the kind of work that you do any kind of a struggle?

B.V. It is always a struggle at the beginning. Luckily I came of age in one of the more enlightened periods of recent Western cultural history - the late 60s/early 70s. In the 19th century, artists traded material success and cultural recognition for creative freedom. This is the period of the avant-garde that we have only just been emerging from in these past few decades.

What this meant was that artists regained control over content and technique, you could now paint or sculpt whatever you wanted to, how you wanted to but the ability to make a living from what you did became much more difficult. A distance emerged between the artists and the members of the community. As art got more theoretical and research-oriented, understanding what artists were doing required access to a specialized body of knowledge with its own language, and the larger public became more and more distanced from the art of their time.

In the art world, photography and video were the transition media in the shift from the avant-garde to the current "post-modern" (a poor term) or "contemporary culture" situation. Already the vernacular, these forms provided the bridge between what the larger public was experiencing and what the cultural researchers and theoreticians were doing.

Ironically, video began as another radical style in the avant-garde tradition, but ended up being the gateway, including its digital cousins the PC and the Web, to the largest cultural network ever created in the history of humankind.

It is hard to believe, but back in the late 60's and early 70's there were serious discussions as to whether video and video images were really art or not. Large established institutions eschewed it, and the critical establishment was extremely slow to catch on, if not downright hostile. Artists took it upon themselves to set up alternative spaces and underground publications to exhibit and discuss the new video art (the contemporary versions of the famous "Salon des Refusés" of the Impressionists).

By the turn of the century, the first phase of video was complete, and, as I've mentioned, it could be found in most of the major museum collections in the world, as well as on television, which was always video's unique, built-in connection to the world at large. By the time I was 25 years old, my first video works had been seen by millions of people on public television stations in the U.S., Europe, Japan, and other countries around the globe, an impossibility for a young painter my age.

M.C. What would be your advice to a young person setting out today to be an artist in terms of:
- The kind of training they should seek?
- The variety of possibilities open to them because of new technologies?

B.V. If they do not limit themselves to defining art only in terms of commercial galleries and museums, artists today have one of the widest ranges of avenues for their talents open to them - wider by far than at almost any other point in history. Electronic and digital media have played a crucial role in empowering individuals by providing flexible, high quality, low cost tools for self-expression and communication.

One of the crucial decisions for a young artist to make today concerns the nature of training and educational experience. It is becoming more and more essential for a creative person to look outside their traditional areas for sources of inspiration and skills.

There are two aspects to this. The first concerns technical skills, which in the age of auto-focus, auto-colour balance, auto-level adjustment and grammar/spell checking machinery is getting glossed over and neglected. These devices and other educational traps like "the proper way to light a scene" or "successful editing techniques" are creativity limiters and are becoming built-in to the hardware and software. They should be constantly questioned and overridden.

Second is the idea of studying something not obviously in your field or currently a "hot topic". As the Sufi masters have reminded their students over the past millennium, "The Sufi studies darkness in order to understand light."

In 1980, I went to Japan as a video artist to study Zen painting and the 600 year old traditional Noh Theatre. It seemed off the wall or arcane at the time, but I never could have developed the concepts and techniques I now have about time and slow motion without knowledge of Zen and the Noh drama. The formal education system in schools offers very little help in this area.

M.C. You have worked in the past with music and musicians:
- Do you find that this adds an important dimension?
- How important is music in your life?

B.V. Video is a time-based art. A traditional education in the visual arts is not very well-suited to the medium's primary aspect: time. I was fortunate to have had musical ability that connected me to music and sound early on, in a practical as well as theoretical way. Nam June Paik, the founder of video art, also came out of a music background, participating with the Fluxus group and studying Electronic Music composition in Germany. Just out of university, I performed for seven years with David Tudor, the pianist, electronic music pioneer, and collaborator with John Cage.

Video shares with music the creative practice of ordering events in time, and I don't think I could have made as much progress in video without a deep involvement with music.

Music has always been a vital part of my life. I always have music on while I'm working. I primarily listen to traditional spiritual music: Indian ragas, Javanese gamelan, medieval and early Renaissance vocal and instrumental music, with some African thrown in. In 1994 I created a video piece based on Déserts by the 20th century composer Edgar Varése for a concert tour of the German contemporary music group Ensemble Modern. In 2000 I created three new video sequences for Trent Reznor and Nine Inch Nails' "Fragility" world tour. I am currently involved in a project with the L.A. Philharmonic conductor Essa-Pekka Salonen and theatre director Peter Sellars to create a projected image cycle for Richard Wagner's opera Tristan and Isolde at the Paris Opera in 2005.

M.C. A tribute to your work especially linked to the PASSIONS exhibition has been commissioned from Isidora Zebljan, a young Serbian composer. She has been watching and absorbing samples of your video work. Do you have anything you would like to say about this or any advice for her in responding musically to what you do?

B.V. No, I think this would be a mistake. As a fellow artist, I think it is up to her and her inner artistic sense to develop and explore her own relationship to the work I have done. In this way, she might uncover things latent in the work that even I don't know are there. I firmly believe that we all exist on this planet to inspire each other through our actions, and it is precisely these things, not our personalities, that will outlive us and continue to grow and transform.

M.C. Are you a fan of films? Do you study films for the imagery and iconographies? Do you believe that films have made a difference in the past 100 years to the way that we look at the world and its realities?

B.V. No, I do not spend a lot of time with film. The main inspiration in my work is literature, poetry and painting. I become impatient with the conventional ways of cutting pictures and sequences together that I see in most filmmaking. Even so-called innovative films rely heavily on conventional storytelling techniques, plot and character development. There is nothing in the design of the technology itself that demands it be used to make the kinds of conventional dramatic narrative films and videos that saturate the commercial cinemas and airwaves.

There is still a vast unknown territory out there waiting to be explored, and it's growing not shrinking. It's a very exciting time for artists right now.