Bill Viola
The man known as the 'Rembrandt of video art' returns to Australia
By Richard Cooke
Trial by fire... Viola's work invites viewers to go further with their interpretation
Bill Viola has done more than almost anyone to define the terms of new media art forms. The Tristan Project, currently showing at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and St Saviour’s Church, Redfern, is a trio of pieces originally produced as a backdrop to a Paris Opera production of Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. Viola talked to Time Out’s Richard Cooke about this incredible work, easy answers on the internet, and the prickly business of dealing with Wagner.
I was watching one of your works on YouTube, and the first comment is from someone saying ‘I’ve got to study Bill Viola for my art exam but I have no idea what this artwork is about. Does anyone have any advice on how to understand Viola’s work’, and I thought we could help him out. What would you say to him?
Look a little deeper. I think the internet is becoming a kind of prosthetic device for people to have someone else to do their thinking for them. And there’s a whole generation that’s been raised to think that the information exists somewhere in some reservoir out there, and that they could have access to if they have one of these devices, one of these machines, and they could just cut and paste it, put it in their paper, and hand it in, and satisfy their requirements for their education. And it’s a very, very sad state of affairs.
Reading between the lines in some of your interviews, it seems you’re uninterested in putting your works online, even actively hostile towards to the idea.
In the beginning certainly, I was not happy about getting my works out online, and that had to do primarily with quality. I mean, not to say that my works all have to be pristine and so called ‘high quality’; as you know I’ve worked with old cameras from 30 years ago, and I’ve got grainy images you can hardly decipher. But I wanted people to see the work as I kind of intended it to be. And there were certain aspects of… particularly the internet, eight years ago or so, that really were kind of missing, the point of the work in terms of the visual quality. But today, it’s changing a lot. I think YouTube is ironically, absolutely beautiful, the actual destination of where video was going starting in the late 60s and 70s, when we were trying to get our work out to the public, bypassing museums and galleries and going to cable TV.
One of the things that’s striking about the video art of that period is that in some ways it was the product of TV, but a very low percentage of it was actually televised. That wasn’t just the networks not wanting to put it on, but artists not wanting to have their work displayed in that way, and it seems like with YouTube, that’s changed.
The advantage of YouTube is low resolution. That is its strength, and that means everybody can do it; you don’t have to be George Lucas to get a $200,000 camera to make your videos, you can do it on your dad’s camcorder and get it out not just to your friends, but to people across the globe, and that’s pretty extraordinary. What’s happened now through the internet, is that the dream of all of us, going back to the late 60s early 70s where you can have a truly democratic open art practice that wasn’t about these expensive rarefied kind of galleries and things, is actually being realised, and it’s actually become more than merely making art. I know artists who devote work primarily to that, but it’s also about people communicating with each other, I think it’s become like what those snap shot photos were to another generation but moving images.
Making a work in response to Wagner is always going to be complicated by the composer’s political beliefs and anti-semitism. How did you negotiate that?
Wagner is a very complex man as we know. [Opera director] Peter Sellers had one of the best comments about him, he said “You can’t roll tanks into Prague with Mozart but you can with Wagner”. He’s the Nazi’s favourite composer. On the other hand, I think with Tristan itself, he almost exceeded himself – it’s on that level of achievement that transcends its maker, and all of the complexities, and it becomes something major that’s part of culture.
Do you meditate, and do you find that ideas for your artwork come to you when you do?
Yes I do meditate, but, no, I don’t get ideas. We had a teacher in Japan, he taught us how to meditate, and you have to empty yourself. The whole notion of art-making in western practices which since Michaelangelo is extremely personality based, the creative genius kind of figure… in Buddhism, the idea is kind of getting the whole self out of the way. Just that that’s the problem, the ego self is the problem… there is a point where you enter the picture. Because we all have limitations: the history of art is littered with bodies, with artists that have died, artists who could not close the gap between what they can see in the deepest part of themselves, and what they can feel, and what they can physically do, their abilities.
Whatever they produce is a disappointment, because they can’t create something that matches the inspiration.
Van Gogh said “although one may have a blazing hearth in one’s soul, the passer-by just sees a mere wisp of smoke coming out the chimney, and goes on their way.” They have no idea what’s going on in there.