First the Soundtrack, Now the Film

As a student at Syracuse University in the early ‘70s, artist Bill Viola pursued two passions: music and video. He studied with avant-garde pianist and composer David Tudor, even playing in some of Tudor’s electronic music concerts, and he encountered pioneers in the genre like composer Edgard Varese. Simultaneously, he immersed himself in the emerging field of video art, ultimately becoming one of its premier practitioners. But he refused to bring the two art forms together.

“I decided early on in my work never to combine music and video,” he says, over lunch at a hotel in Marina del Rey. “When people put popular music to video, I saw the music winning hands down, it had so much cultural power.”

Cut to 30 years later, and Viola has broken his vow. He will present a work based on Varese’s “Deserts,” as part of an evening devoted to avant-garde music and imagery organized by Peter Sellars at the Hollywood Bowl on Tuesday. With Esa-Pekka Salonen conducting members of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, this will be the American premiere of Viola’s “Deserts” with live accompaniment (it was presented, with taped music, on KCET-TV in 1997).

Viola, 49, is a man in motion. Although he lives in Long Beach with his wife and studio manager, Kira Perov, and their two sons, Blake and Andrei, he spends many months of each year traveling to fine-tune his video installations at museums and galleries around the world. Recently returned from a rare holiday in Hawaii, he is briefly in town before heading to Frankfurt, Germany, to oversee the installation of a 17-foot-high video projection on the side of the new Helaba Bank building. Then he is off to the Chicago Art Institute, where a major survey of his work arrives Oct. 16 (curated by Sellars and first shown at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997, it is currently on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art).

With such a demanding schedule, it is small surprise that he is punctual and organized, arriving for lunch with a file folder of notes. Dressed casually in an untucked linen shirt and cargo pants, he lays out his materials on the table and explains his decision to break from his rule against music-video projects.

In 1993, Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern approached Viola about creating a visual complement to Varese’s “Deserts,” a half-hour work that combines wind instruments, percussion and two-channel tape that premiered in Paris in 1954. “In the course of researching Varese, they found notes of his that mentioned ‘Deserts’ as a visual music project,” Viola explains.

In fact, Varese was one of the 20th century’s most diligent experimenters. More than one of his atonal soundscapes caused audience uproars, and he was among the earliest proponents of applying technology to composition. Born in France in 1883, he came to the U.S. in 1915, fleeing war and the conservative European musical establishment. Significantly, Varese found his unconventional ideas well received by visual artists and had close relationships with Futurists and Dadaists including Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia who both lived in New York when he arrived.

His notion of mixing moving pictures and music came around the same time as Disney’s “Fantasia,” which Varese dismissed as simplistic, a missed opportunity.

“He had a great line about it,” Viola says, with a knowing laugh: “ ‘Why do people insist on turning new vehicles into hearses?’ ”

During the late ‘40s, the composer talked to various filmmakers in Hollywood, at one point involving Burgess Meredith, but he failed to find someone who matched his vision. Frustrated, Varese completed “Deserts” without its visual accompaniment.

Making Varese’s ideas become a reality appealed to Viola, especially because he considers the composer an inspiration for his own art.

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As a rule, Viola’s video installations don’t use what he call’s “pre-composed” music, but they do employ sound. It is sound as much as image, in fact, that articulates space and manipulates the viewer. In his 1991 “Stopping Mind,” for instance, a viewer is surrounded by wall-size projections of calming nature scenes that are disrupted at random by chaotic static and sound.

And his non-narrative videotapes rely on the pacing of musical composition, the kind of thing he experienced even when playing in a rock band in a Queens high school.

“Varese was very influential for me because of his ideas about spatial sound,” Viola says. “He spread different instruments of the orchestra around the concert hall. He worked with magnetic tape collages and mixed them with live instruments. He talked about making structures with beams of sound, almost in a sculptural sense. It was totally physical. Varese said, ‘My music is based on the motion of unrelated sound masses.’ ”

Viola smiles at the audacity of the remark.

Although the Ensemble Modern did not know of Viola’s earlier interest in Varese, its members certainly knew of his long fascination with the composer’s subject in this case: deserts. In 1979, Viola made a videotape of the Sahara, “Chott el-Djerid.”

“I was [finally] convinced to do the project when I read Varese’s notes,” Viola says, “and he talked about the vastness of space in the desert, a place of essential loneliness. The desert has always been very important to me.”

Taking out a paper of Varese’s writings about “Deserts,” Viola quotes, “It suggests space, solitude, detachment . . . deserts of sand, sea, mountains and snow, of outer space, of deserted city streets. . . .’

“Yet, there was no storyboard,” Viola adds. “[Varese’s vision] was [just] really poetic and open.”

Viola admires Varese because he “spans Modernism.”

“Although he only left us about 2 1/2 hours of work, it was amazing. In the mid-’30s, he had a dark period of about 10 years. Then he reappeared with ‘Deserts,’ which he wrote between 1946 and 1949, and is one of his longest pieces.”

The 26-minute work features live music interspersed with three of what Varese termed “interpolations”: prerecorded sound collages on magnetic tape. At three points in the score, the players stop and sound comes out of speakers in the hall. “So you have this striking visual scene of these musicians not playing and these aggressive, wild, electronic sounds coming out of the speakers,” Viola says.

“Deserts” is often performed without these difficult interpolations--which were revolutionary enough in Paris to cause a near-riot--or with the toned-down versions Varese composed in the early ‘60s. “The Ensemble Modern went back and got Varese’s original tapes, which are a lot more raw and interesting than what is usually used,” Viola says.

He found the experience of creating visuals to a preexisting score to be challenging.

“It was difficult because sound is the basis of all my images,” he says. “I ‘hear’ images before I see them, and that gives me a clue as to what to look for and tells me how to edit since I work a lot with non-narrative images. Here, I had to work backward, making a silent movie with an existing soundtrack.”

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In 1994, Viola came up with a structure whereby the live music portions would accompany frames of landscape, mostly of the desert, shot on hand-held, high-resolution video. He went to Death Valley in August of that year to record mirages, which he echoed in rippling underwater effects. Other images are nocturnal, sometimes shot around the corporate office towers and empty parking lots of Irvine at 2 in the morning.

The interpolations, on the other hand, are accompanied by interior scenes of a man in a windowless room and were shot on 35-mm film with a full crew and a set, using producer Peter Kirby, cinematographer Harry Dawson and actor Philip Esposito. This was Viola’s first experience with all the accouterments of film as opposed to video, and he loved it.

“Working with a crew, building a set from scratch, it was like painting; I saw the connection so clearly. Light is your medium, so you make things advance and recede with light. It was a controlled situation compared to the video portions, where I would go out in the morning and let the camera eye move through the landscape with no subject.”

Viola, who has received grants from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations, feels the experience with traditional filmmaking techniques led to breakthroughs in his work of the next few years. After completing “Deserts” in 1994, he had a set constructed and used a crew to film “The Greeting,” based on “The Visitation” by Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo, which served as one section of his “Buried Secrets” installation at the U.S. Pavilion of the 1995 Venice Biennale. In 1996, he used a similar process in “The Crossing”--projections of a man being consumed by water and fire.

“It got me into a whole other mode of creating moving images with light, which I hadn’t done before,” he says. Because of the film projects and the unusually ambitious two-year tour of his survey, which continues at the Art Institute of Chicago to Jan. 9, Viola has not returned to video since completing “Deserts.”

“People have said that ‘Deserts’ is a culmination, containing elements that were floating around in other pieces but brought into a unified whole. I think it’s the most complex thing I’ve done,” Viola says. “Over the years, I developed temporal complexity with single-channel videos. In the ‘90s, I transmuted that into architectural, spatial complexity.”

“Taking sound and configuring it in space so that you are inside a sound field is something that, 15 years ago, only artists were doing,” Viola adds. “Now they are selling surround-sound systems at Good Guys. With the addition of virtual reality, we are clearly moving into a form of art that is occupying the whole space, and not just time. Paintings can inhabit the room with you. That’s where the performing and visual arts are coming together at the end of the 20th century. People like Varese were the pioneers of this stuff.”

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“DESERTS,” Hollywood Bowl, 2301 N. Highland Ave.

Date: Tuesday, 8:30 p.m. Prices: $1 to $83. Phone: (323) 850-2000.