Francesca Valente Interviews Bill Viola

Bill Vola recently exhibited a video installation entitled The Last Angel at the Italian Cultural Institute in juxtaposition to Leonardo’s The Angel in the Flesh and other drawings, exhibited for the first time on the West Coast. Bill Viola (b.1951) is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach.

For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations - total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound - employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity.

They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers.

Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences - birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness - and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.

In which way your Italian heritage has influenced your artistic vision?

I think unconsciously, because it’s in my blood. I think we have different voices, and one of them is the voice of blood and DNA. My grandfather was born in Pavia and then moved to Lago Maggiore. It was the turn of the century, a really hard time. So he became a waiter at a local hotel and then started to travel to Germany first and then to France, England, Spain, Portugal, and he learned the language in every country.

On his way back to Italy, he met his wife in Germany, they got back to Italy together and then they moved to the States, to New York, where my father was born. My father was a flight attendant and then eventually became the director for the training program for all flight attendants for Pan Am for 35 years. So he was doing what his father was doing at a young age: traveling. I did the same, my generation was made of wanderers, we went in far out places.

How did your interest in video installations originate? Who was your mentor?

I was born when television was just beginning so we were the first generation growing up with that machine, right into our house. I was in high school in 1969, when they brought in a video camera and a monitor. I was absolutely fascinated. I felt in love. It was so extraordinary that you could see yourself. I was glued to that image, for me it was something really profound and deep that I could see myself at the same time I was existing. I will never forget that.

So next year at University I was trying to find a place where I could use that equipment. It was at the Student Center. A guy there had used video the previous year for the first time. I learnt how to use it and got certified. Then I took the machine home and, as I was walking up the stairs, I fell on top of the video recorder and I destroyed it. I was supposed to bring it back on the following Monday, but of course since it was broken I was bani- shed from the Student Center for two months.

I was very sad of course, but later I thought it was a very good lesson. They told me I had to take good care of it, that it was so delicate, and here I am, sitting on it. Also I had very good teachers. One of them was David Tudor, John Cage’s pianist. Another fantastic art teacher goes by the name of Jack Nelson (same teacher as David Ross).

He was an artist working in New York, and the Dean that year decided to get away from those professors teaching the same things for ten years and hired three artists from the street. One of them was him. He got video equipment for us, a department for media, which did not exist. Moreover he created a special department for students who didn’t fit in any other department, outsiders, like me.

It was an amazing experience. There were 15 of us. Of the many incredible things he told me, there’s one I’ll never forget Bill if you get stuck with one piece, turn it upside down. 15 years later when I was here in California I had a real major block. I couldn’t work for 2 months. I would get into my room, drive for hours, but nothing happened. All of a sudden I hear his voice in my mind telling me go to the shopping mall. Here I am at the Cerritos Shopping Mall. Big, big shopping center, California style, everything you want is there, horrible. I bring my camera and turn it upside down and I make this piece of spinning images, one of the best I have ever made.

Which is the genesis of the Last Angel?

The origin of all my works with water dates back to when I was six. I was on vacation with my family in Upstate New York and I fell into the lake. I almost drowned. I saw heaven, I had no fear. It was almost like paradise, it was the most peaceful moment of my life, I will never forget. Since that moment, when my uncle saved me, I’ve always wanted to go back to that paradise. So, all of the water pieces that I produced are connected with that. This one is the last of a series of seven pieces, where the camera is under the water watching figures plunging in, creating a big disturbance of light and color.

This piece is the saddest one, I called it The Last Angel as I Bill Viola think we no longer live in a world populated by angels. We have turned our back on cosmos, on God, the divine and the mystery. Because of technology, finance and technical thinking we don’t have any more space for mystery in our life. So I imagined this figure to be the last angel in heaven, all alone and deciding to fall onto the earth.

This work represents that passage from heaven to earth.

Is the Angel of your installation falling because of the original sin?

No, there is no connection with the original sin. It would be like if Angel Gabriel, after talking to Mary decided to stay instead of going back. I like to think that we live in an evolving world with such an advanced technology that we have never seen before. So we are learning how to cope with it, how to use it positively, how to understand it.

Angels too are evolving. In Buddhism there are the Bohdisattva, sort of saints that after many lifetimes of incarnation become enlightened and reach the highest level. Some of them stay in the spiritual life, but a few decide to go back to earth, to the suffering people, giving up all they have achieved. It is like Saint Francis in the Christian tradition. It is such a beautiful concept, it makes me cry just thinking about it.

Tell me a little more what do you feel in front of Gabriel

He was the messenger and was a very powerful and special being since he had the ability to travel to both heaven and earth at will. He could travel back and forth between the material and the spiritual world. Therefore he could carry with him the special news, for Mary and for others. He could also share knowledge with the gods. He could go up on Mount Olympus and hang out with the gods. We are all becoming Gabriel, we are all peripatetic wanderers, we all get on airplanes and travel. I think it’s our destiny as human beings.

Travel is not a luxury, it’s not even for tourist purposes, it’s the idea of the wonder. We live on a planet that is wondering through the cosmos right now. It’s spinning and moving. We are now at a point where the media, these electronic devices created by human intelligence, are encircling the entire world and bringing us all together in a web of relations which is another extension in the legacy of Gabriel. He is the Saint of communication, as I found out in a little gift shop in Taos, New Mexico where I found a little metal image of him and in the back he was defined as the Saint of communication.

The other person I am very interested in the ancient world is Prometheus. He was another messenger traveling from both heaven and earth who stole fire from the gods for trickery and brought it down to earth and gave it to human beings. So now people could heat their homes and not get cold, have light at night, cook their food, but they could also burn their fingers, burn their hands, burn their house down, burn the forest down. The ancient Greek word for technology is techne and it means trick.

In other words a trick is like a deception, something which has two faces and you never know which one is going to come out. So this technology we all use is good and bad and ultimately it comes down to the person who’s using it and his intention.

When we visited the Dalai Lama in 2005 with our two teen age boys, 50 hours of travel, we had a private audience with him in his private residence, 35 minutes just for my family (it was one of the greatest experiences we’ve ever had) I asked him about technology and I told him I have a real ambiguous feeling about it because I can do my artwork which people around the world like, I have been told, but it is also the cause of much suffering, it is deceptive, a tool for propaganda and useless information, manipulation and greed. I said that to him and he replied that the problem is not technology, but the intention of the user.

If I have a fork in my hand and I want to feed someone next to me is one thing, but with the same fork I can also kill him. Nobody told me that before, and that is the fundamental issue. That was really important for me to hear, to go back again to this idea of the trick, the good and bad, the positive and negative, harmful and helpful. It comes down to what is in the human mind when they act. It is the concept of the crossroad, which is extremely important, and is where the decision is made.

The story I think about is Robert Rauschenberg who as a young man participated in a camp study out in nature and he was supposed to take a class with Josef Albers and he really didn’t like his geometric abstrac- tion, so he was making his own paintings outside class behind his cabin. One day, the wind was blowing, and a big painting was floating around and Albers picked it up, with some grass and stones stuck to it. That was a crossroad as he could have got- ten angry or say that’s pretty interesting, which is what he said.

At that moment he accepted random chance in his work. But there is no right answer, it could be either way. The Last Angel concludes the series Five Angels for the Millennium. How did you get interested in angels, living in the XXI Century? Angels are the embodiment of the space between heaven and earth. The middle space between the material world and the spiritual world that precisely is the space where the poets are.

That is the space where we are half angel and half human, the absolute connecting point where human beings are meant to be. Henry Corbin, Iranian scholar at the Sorbonne for many years, writes about this zone and calls it the imaginal world which is a place both spiritual and material where energy exchange takes place and human imagination comes out. It is a place where our conversation is happening right now. Information technology is actually mimicking, modeling this capacity we had since the very beginning to communicate in distance, either with a sound, or telepathically like Australian Aboriginals.

That is why the Internet is so important; it is just another stage in this process of communicating to someone outside our body.

We live in a polluted world of information. Is there a way to survive?

I think there are people who need facts: dates and numbers. But the amount of information available today is so overwhelming that creates a new form of pollution. The only way to defend ourselves is through inside filters that allow us to focus our attention, not considering all the other things. Our children are so in danger, they need our guidance. (My oldest son watched TV for the first time when he was 5. He is now able to concentrate, be by himself in his room, whereas my youngest one who watched TV much earlier, needs the remote to change channel constantly).

After you have been associated with Leonardo by the Italian Cultural Institute of Los Angeles, you have been associated with Michelangelo by the Accademia in Florence. Which is the work that you chose?

We were asked by the director of the Accademia to show a work called Emergence. Unfortunately we couldn’t go there because of the volcano in Iceland and my wife Kira was very disappointed since she tried so hard to make it happen, but there was no way to fly.

So at the Accademia the tech guy did a Skype connection with us here in my room and he took his camera and walked us through the Accademia and then we had a little glass of Champagne. Emergence is the work commissioned by the Getty Museum. The video was inspired by the fresco La Pietà from the 1400s by Masolino da Panicale, in which the dead Christ is shown at the moment of Resurrection. In 1999 I was the artist invited for the scholar in residence pro- gram at the Getty Research Institute.

Once a week we had a seminar and I had the opportu- nity to sit together with very smart and accomplished people talking about art history. I was very shy and I would just listen. At that time I had the chance to meet with the Director of the Getty Research Institute Salvatore Settis, Italian of course, which proved to be a very important person for me. He brought me to the Sistine Chapel, to Cortona to see the Altarpiece by Fra Angelico, on a tour of the whole Umbria region and to Padova to admire Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel as I was making a piece inspired to that.

I realized that Giotto both in Padova and in Assisi made what we would call today a virtual reality; every single surface was painted by the artist. I was completely shaken by this trip; I can consider that as a turning point in my career. When you see these masterpieces in situ, you have to smell them. It is not only just an intellectual experience, but also a bodily one, your body is so happy you took it with you. My mind, my body, my heart came together; they were all equally involved, and that is what this unique experience was for me.

You have recently received the IIC Lifetime Achievement Award together with Carlo Pedretti. What does it mean for you?

It’s an acknowledgment of my heritage, of the past present and future because our position right now is just an illusion of stability. In reality we are constantly moving forward. I feel my father and my grandfather and my children and their children, when they will have some, are a continuum, which is stable but always moving forward and in this way it contains the past as well as the present and the future. We are here only because someone in our past helped us forward.

And this is the beautiful dance of time. It’s a constant moving river as suggested by Ananda Coomaraswamy in his seminal book A Transformation of Nature in Art, who, speaking of humanity said the incessant river of life suggests a presence of a hidden eternal source. Other deep sources of my inspiration are Titus Burckhardt’s World Wisdom underlining how before the Renaissance East and West were unified, a concept we should go back to, and the seminal books by Seyyed Hossein Nasr entitled Knowledge and the Sacred and Religion and the Order of Nature.

Do you feel that all the traveling that you do and going through different cultures enriches you or it confuses you in a way?

This room is for me the zero point, the starting point. So in a way this is my comfort and also my challenge. But it is also part of my need to go out. I would never stay in this room for years and years. The coming and going is important. Plato and Aristotle in ancient Greek are called the peripatetic philosophers, which means that they move.

They gave lessons not sitting at the desk as we do in school today, you would actually walk in a group behind Plato who was sharing his knowledge in an olive grove out in nature, which is where the word Accademia comes from. In English it means olive grove; indeed that is why they say Plato taught in an academy, meaning in an olive grove. So you need to go out of your environment, of your familiarity, of your comfort zone to understand who you are.

I was lucky my father, as I said, worked for Pan Am Airlines for many years. He was one of the first flight attendants in the late ‘40s and I had free tickets from him so we traveled to many places. And that was really eye opening for me especially in those days, in late 1960s, because it was so expensive to fly, and I was very lucky to have that opportunity.

You led me into your temple, the room where you work and meditate. It seems a place where East and West meet and all the opposites reconcile. Do you think this is your point of departure or arrival?

I think it’s both. It is both coming and going. I think that we are the center of the universe, each and every one of us. Therefore there really is no center, but you, yourself become a center. Things pass through all of us. This room for me is my life blood, it’s my nourishment and all the books you see around - some of which I know quite well and some I looked at only once as sometimes you don’t need to read a book cover to cover to get what you want, but you find something in the text that catches you and enlightens you for the moment - have a place in my life. We are all travelers on this earth.

Francesca Valente
Director, IIC