His Camera Never Blinks

A pioneer of video art, Bill Viola, 46, found his way to the medium by playing in a rock band in the late 1960s. Although he was proficient in painting and drawing, his search for an alternative art form led him to courses in electronic music and video at Syracuse University. And the rest is history. Viola, a 15-year resident of Long Beach, was awarded a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant in 1989, and in 1995 he became the first video artist to represent the U.S. at the prestigious Venice Biennale. Next year he will be a Getty scholar.

His installations are frankly spiritual in intent, incorporating large-screen video projections that have greatly influenced the form internationally. Next Sunday will be the premiere, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, of a major retrospective of Viola’s work organized by David Ross, director of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. The show was co-curated by theater and opera director Peter Sellars.

Viola spoke in the midst of the installation of the exhibition, which he designed in all its detail.

Question: This is the largest retrospective ever organized for a video artist. What do you think that says about the place of video as a medium in the art world today?

Answer: When I was giving a workshop in an art school, a student said, “Oh, yeah, video, that’s my dad’s medium.” When I started doing this stuff in 1972, the medium was largely unknown. Today, a large projected image on a wall in a room is commonplace. The technology is so much a part of our world, it has become what artist John Baldessari said 25 years ago, “Video is like a pencil.” We’ve reached a healthy point where we can discuss the art and not the machines that make it possible. It is an established art form.

Q: What special challenge does that leave for you as a video artist?

A: When I started, video was very much part of the counterculture as a way to circumvent the dominance of television in terms of corporate and political structures and the control of information. The new portable video machines meant that an individual could have access to the same technology as professional broadcasters, and they could make their own programs. That was the fuel in the fire surrounding new media and alternative culture when I was starting out.

My own path has been not to go into the political dimension in terms of activist work but to go within, to the direction of the individual and to the inner self. Any liberation that happens, whether it’s political, personal or cultural, has to begin with the tiny spark that happens in each and every one of us. That’s the key. The content of the news does not interest me in terms of my own work. But the relationship between the individual and society interests me a lot. Which is the ultimate political aspect of human life.

Q: It seems that video would be a medium that would lend itself to looking at the external world. But you have spent most of your career revealing your internal world.

A: These tools give us really potent metaphors for the inner life. Images in the electronic domain have a life. They are moving, changing, transforming. The painter’s dream of bringing the images to life goes back in history to the origin of painting itself.

The Sufis placed imagery as the intermediate zone between God and man. You reach the divine through images; the divine reaches you through images. And it all plays out through the individual. So television for me has one foot in the material world and another foot in the metaphysical world, and that is its power.

In the Middle Ages, they painted the sky gold in their paintings. Today we paint it blue and we think that’s real. But if you went back to the Middle Ages and showed someone a picture of a blue sky and a gold sky, they would say the gold sky is real. They believed that the divine effused through every aspect of the world so the gold sky was a closer representation of the reality of the world. Today, cameras show us the blue sky because they are based on optics. Human beings are not based on optics. We are much more than light falling on the retina. To say that video is about the outside world is like saying that human life is about the light falling on your retina.

Q: This seems to be a good place to ask you about conveying a not-so-covert spiritual message in your work. What was the incident that made you feel confident this was a direction you thought you could take in making your art?

A: The key word you used was “confidence.” I believe the aspiration to transcend oneself is a basic human need. The possibility of union with God is a driving force we all have, whether we subscribe to any religion or not. I grew up in a time when it was not cool to do that stuff in art. The issues in art were theoretically based, influenced by people like Marcel Duchamp. I didn’t feel I could talk about things that really mattered to me until the mid-’80s.

When you are an artist, you have to have the ability to let go and jump in when it is not clear whether there are rocks under the surface. If you don’t do that, you never get anywhere. I just started practicing what I really believed in. I became more interested in the ideas themselves and less interested in my status in the art world. It’s about the work, not the reception of the work. Then everything changed.

Q: Was the first piece to reflect that change “Room for St. John of the Cross,” in which the ecstatic poetry of a saint is recited in a small room?

A: I think so. I remember thinking about that title because it seemed politically incorrect to mention a saint. But St. John as a human being went through this incredible experience of being confined to a cell and writing ecstatic poetry. It’s a parallel with what any great artist goes through. I remember thinking, “This work was inspired by this man’s poetry, and I am going to devote this room to him.” That was an important step.

Q: What was the next important step?

A: My wife, Kira [Perov, a photographer], had our first child in 1988. That was a major transformative experience. The advent of family, which preceded the death of my mother in ’91 and the birth of our second child the same year, all of a sudden these things I’d been thinking about and reading about became evidenced in an amazing way. The ultimate act of creativity is the creation of life. Experiencing that directly was very profound. There is a whole grouping of pieces from the late ‘80s that have to do with children, family and mortality in a direct way.

Q: You have expressed frustration that the so-called big themes of love, death, mortality or faith are rarely addressed in contemporary art today. Why do you think that is so?

A: One of the great functions of art throughout history has not been to deconstruct culture but to show an individual a way to be in the world, to articulate things that are not being articulated by other structures in the culture. Now we reach the 20th century, where the content of works being created has been influenced by this thing called critical discourse which has to do with the accumulation of decades of analysis of artworks by people who don’t make art themselves. There’s a whole institution created around the nature and practice of making art. But that is a mode of analyzing art, not practicing art.

In nontraditional times, such as these, you have art that has to do with form and structure, but not content, because you are questioning the whole thing, whether it is the structure of language or how cultural codes are created. The only traditional art form we have today is cinema. You don’t need a wall label to go to the movies. Everybody knows, going back to Aristotle, what the dramatic structure is. We are not at that point in the visual arts today. Video is now the vernacular, and over the years I became aware that I could focus on content, the great themes of birth, death, mortality. And the structure, or form, is familiar. This work is more familiar to most people than a gallery filled with paintings. It’s a dark room with images and sounds. That is the common language of today. We are broadcasting two programs on KCET during the course of the show. So there is a real potential to make work that goes out to the public in the common language of today. Painting gets its power by not being in the common language of today.

Q: At the same time, you have been very careful to avoid structures that people can relate to as narrative.

A: The Village Voice film critic Jim Hoberman said that my work is neither avant-garde nor mainstream. [Laughs] I have been interested in those aspects of life which can’t be codified into a nice, neat narrative movie. So I guess I’m straddling both fences.

Q: When you started, you were a pioneer. Now every graduate student seems to make video art. What is the future of video art?

A: It’s wonderful to see the proliferation of video in the museums. But technologically, video art’s days are numbered. Everything is moving to pure digital form. By the time I get to be an old man, I’m sure I’ll be using some all-digital format. Young people today are crazy if they don’t get involved with computers in terms of image making. That’s the Portapak of the ‘90s.