A moving stillness

Something very strange is going on in Bill Viola’s new video, “Emergence.” It isn’t just that the 6 1/2-foot-square, rear-projection piece -- which went on view this weekend in “Bill Viola: The Passions” at the J. Paul Getty Museum -- resembles a luminous Old Master painting. Viola has been poking around in art history for several years. And it isn’t just that the high-definition image of three actors comes to life in slow motion, elevating every gesture and facial expression to a state of high drama. Human emotion -- in sharp focus and excruciating detail -- is the theme of his entire series, “The Passions.”

“Emergence,” among the dozen “Passions” on view in the new exhibition, is a special case. Commissioned by the Getty and making its debut in Los Angeles, the 11-minute, 49-second piece is a narrative, not just an outpouring of feeling.

It’s also a mystery.

The piece begins with two women, lost in thought, clothed in robes that seem almost biblical. They sit on the ground, on either side of a square marble cistern, but the younger woman suddenly turns and stares in shock as the head of a young man emerges from the reservoir. As he continues to rise, water spills over the sides and into the courtyard. When the older woman sees what’s happening, she rises to her feet in astonishment.

The nude male figure is so white and rigid, he appears to be a statue. But his arms bend in response to the women’s touch, and when his whole body emerges from the cistern, he crumples and falls. The women catch him and struggle to lay him out on the ground. The older woman cradles his head and weeps, while the younger one covers his body with a cloth and embraces him.

Does this work portray a birth or a death, or both? Is it the scene of a resurrection or a burial, or something quite different?

Whatever it is, “Emergence” is part of a landmark event for the Getty, which rarely includes contemporary art in its exhibition program and restricts its collection to pre-20th century art, except for photography. Visitors who wander into “Bill Viola: The Passions” expecting a traditional picture gallery will be surprised to discover that the framed “paintings” are actually videos displayed on flat screens and that they portray people silently plumbing the heights and depths of human feeling as they respond to situations that can only be imagined.

“It’s shocking for a show like this to be at the Getty, and the shock in front of ‘Emergence’ will probably be stronger than anywhere else,” says John Walsh, the director emeritus of the museum, who specializes in historic Dutch painting but has immersed himself in the newest of new art as curator of Viola’s exhibition.

“This thing looks and acts so much like an older piece, but it is not only not an older piece, it is moving, and it is an enactment of the strangest miracle you ever saw,” Walsh says. “The feelings are a mixture of lamentation and joy. Where does that leave us? Should we be happy? Should we be sad? Is it even richer than that? More complicated?”

Viola isn’t much help. “Of all the pieces in ‘The Passions,’ I can’t quite put my finger on this one,” he says. “That may be because it’s too new.”

Stage and opera director Peter Sellars weighs in on “Emergence” in the exhibition catalog: “Birth and death images hold and touch each other in a miraculous embrace that gives comfort but that will never be comfortable.” In a recent telephone conversation, Viola says, Sellars told the artist, “You are going to be dealing with that piece for a long time. You will never get to the bottom of it.”

TRANSFORMATION

Visitors who want to do more than scratch the surface of the exhibition -- never mind get to the bottom of it -- will need to spend a couple of hours in the galleries. Most of the works were shot in a minute or so on 35-millimeter film at very high speed, to maximize the quality of the images. Then they were transferred to video, which is much more durable. While editing the tapes, Viola took enormous artistic liberties, manipulating colors, drastically slowing the action and further stretching selected footage.

Most of the finished works run for 10 to 20 minutes. The exception is “Anima,” a three-panel work in which a minute of action has been stretched to an hour and 22 minutes. In that piece, movement is so slow, it’s all but imperceptible.

The entire “Passions” series is a breakthrough for Viola, a pioneering video artist who lives in Long Beach and is known for exploring the relatively vague terrain of human consciousness in wrap-around environments. But “Anima” is the most exciting technically, he says. “It has the odd distinction of being a still-image piece that moves, though that sounds like a contradiction. It moves at the same speed as a shaft of light coming in through your window in the afternoon.”

“The Passions” is a continuing series that currently consists of 20 works. The 12 examples in the exhibition, made from 2000 to 2002, are connected by medium, message and aesthetics, but the formats vary. “The Quintet of the Astonished,” featuring five figures who undergo different waves of intense emotion simultaneously, is projected from the rear on a large, wall-mounted screen. Ten smaller pieces are shown on LCD (liquid crystal display) flat panels or plasma displays. Several of them incorporate two or more screens -- mounted on walls, side by side or one above the other, or hinged and free-standing, like frames for couples’ portraits.

In addition to the works in “The Passions” series, a five-part projection piece, “Five Angels for the Millennium,” is installed in a darkened L-shaped room. Shot in a swimming pool, it consists of five 8-by-10-foot moving images of a clothed male figure plunging into water.

“ ‘Angels’ is connected to ‘The Passions,’ ” Viola says, “but it embodies the deeper regions of where emotions take us when the context starts to drop away. Also, it’s a kind of nocturnal piece; the rest of the images in the show are more like day pieces.”

For Walsh, “Angels” is “about some form of transformation or ascendance, a body being transformed into something else,” and he keeps wondering if it should be considered one of the “Passions.” “We knew it should be shown with them,” he says, “but whether by contrast or because it is part of the larger idea of the show was something we talked about -- a lot.”

BIRTH TO DEATH

Viola, 51, has made a name for himself internationally as an artist who explores his own dreams and fears; he also has played a major role in bringing video into the mainstream of contemporary art. Video art has become a staple of the international art scene, but Viola stands alone as a poet of human emotion. In 1989, he received a John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, a coveted honor popularly known as a “genius” award.

Throughout most of his career, he has revisited themes that involve cycles of time, birth, growth and death. Most of his imagery comes from contemporary life, but in the past few years he has increasingly drawn inspiration from earlier art.

He traces some of his interest in art history back to “a dumb Mom gift,” the Time-Life Library of Art, which his mother gave him when he was about 30. “Of course I hated it,” he says, “but when I started to read it, I found that it’s really good because it re-creates the time when the art was made. It was eye-opening for me as a technological artist because it made me realize that technology has always had a vital place in art, whether it’s paint in tubes or camcorders.”

Viola made an auspicious connection with Old Master painting in 1995, when he represented the United States at the Venice Biennale with “Buried Secrets,” a five-gallery installation. The final segment, “The Greeting,” was a slow-motion piece based on 16th century Italian mannerist Jacopo Pontormo’s painting “The Visitation.”

Viola became intrigued with the possibilities of using actors, sets, costumes and theatrical lighting -- and in shooting fast and playing slow to create a flow of motion. He also wanted to pursue biblical subjects portrayed in historic paintings.

All that had to wait while he dealt with a traveling retrospective, organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1997. But Viola made some headway while the exhibition was touring. In 1998, as a guest scholar at the Getty Research Institute, he participated in a program devoted to “The Representation of the Passions.” Interacting with other visiting scholars and doing independent research, he read, compiled notebooks, made sketches, and collected books and photocopies in preparation for the videos that would become “The Passions.”

Viola also spent a lot of time in the museum’s Old Master galleries. Accustomed to making artworks that filled entire rooms, he became fascinated with the world that was tightly contained in devotional paintings. “I just wanted to be in there with those people. I wanted to inhabit that space,” he says.

Around the same time, Tom Paglin, an engineer who has worked with Viola for 15 years, brought him an LCD panel. “I was just floored,” Viola says. “I had never seen an image like that. There were no scan lines. The images had this kind of creamy, satiny surface; it wasn’t electronic-looking. And I could pick up the panel; it was the same size as an art book.”

Viola has sustained his art primarily with grants, commissions and purchases by museums and special collections that can deal with unwieldy artworks and technology. Creating small, portable videos would open his market to private collectors with smaller exhibition spaces, but marketability wasn’t the first thing on his mind.

As he thought about the new technology, he began to connect it to 15th century panel painting. “It isn’t much of a leap,” he says. “Those artists had a similar issue; they were trying to make portable art, mini altarpieces that people could fold up and take with them.” The notion of freeing himself from big projection spaces was almost as appealing as the quality of the imagery, and he was on his way to “The Passions.”

ARTIST AS DIRECTOR

He had a lot to learn.

For one thing, he needed actors. For another, he had to learn how to work with them.

Viola began to think of emotions as his primary colors and to visualize trajectories of feelings that he wanted to portray. Instead of imagining a scenario that might provoke those feelings, he would draw a horizontal line, then divide it into arcs of happiness, sorrow, anger and fear. Then he invited a few actors to his studio in Long Beach and asked for help.

“The breakthrough for me was when I was working with Susanna Peters,” Viola says. “She was really sad and the tears were coming and, right in the middle of it, she asked what I wanted her to do next. There was a Susanna who was crying her eyes out and a Susanna who was watching and asking, ‘OK, what do we do next, Bill?’ What shocked me is that I had to direct the actors while they were doing a piece. I thought I could just set it up. I had to learn that I could actually talk to them while they were in a crying mode and they could stay there, almost as if they were in a trance.”

Early on, Viola consulted with Weba Garretson, who has a broad background in dance, performance art and music. She plays the older woman in “Emergence” and is in several other “Passions.” In her first session with Viola, he asked her to show him how her face would change when she expressed happiness, anger, fear and sorrow.

“We were thinking in terms of improvised performances where I was going through emotional changes that were very intense,” Garretson says. “It’s an amazing way to work. You don’t have a plot, you don’t have a character, you don’t have a script. You have to ask yourself, ‘What would put me in a state where I was sad beyond belief?’ and let your imagination take you there.”

In part, she drew upon her experience as a singer who interprets the feeling of songs. Viola also created a context for the actors by giving them poetry to read and images to look at and by posting reproductions of artworks in his studio, she says. “You know you are working in a special world. You aren’t doing Shakespeare.”

Nonetheless, working with Viola calls for intense concentration. Even as he guides the actors through peaks and valleys of emotion, the camera makes a frightful racket. “It shoots a thousand feet of film in 45 seconds and it sounds like a cosmic vacuum cleaner,” Garretson says.

While “Emergence” presented technical problems with its rising figure and cascading water, other pieces dealt with “a pure emotional arc,” she says. Doing these works was like “going on a journey with Bill,” she says. “He experiences the whole thing with you.”

Still, the actors don’t tell Viola what they are thinking about to evoke the requested emotions. “He is your audience at that time, and he lets you know what is coming through,” Garretson says. “But I think he wants viewers to just look at an image and bring their own thing to it.”

“The Passions” series includes moments of joy, but far more sorrow. Several pieces suggest that the actors are reacting to death or other deeply wrenching losses. But Viola thinks this is simply a reflection of real life.

“We are suffering beings,” he says. “Sometimes when I look at people in the airport, having coffee, I just want to cry. They all seem so innocent and caught up in their own little worlds. Tears, for me, are one of the most fundamental forms of expression, and they are appropriate in so many disparate cases, from saying hello to saying goodbye.”

WRITING SONNETS

The idea of showing Viola’s work at the Getty arose while he was a visiting scholar, says Walsh, who witnessed the creation of some of the “Passions” and wrote the primary essay for the exhibition catalog. “When he began talking about making small-screen pieces, it seemed to be a whole new idea,” Walsh says. “It was Bill Viola writing sonnets, Bill the symphonic composer doing chamber music.” For Walsh, a scholar of older art, it was also an opportunity observe a living artist’s encounter with art history.

Viola was invited to participate in “Departures,” the Getty’s first major exhibition of contemporary art, curated by Lisa Lyons and presented in 2000. He couldn’t fit that show into his schedule, but Walsh pursued the idea, which eventually led to the current show. It runs through April 27, then travels to the National Gallery in London from Oct. 22 to Jan. 2, 2004, and to the Munich State Paintings Collection in spring 2004.

Walsh says that booking the show in “two other great centers of advanced thinking in the history of art” is no accident. “It’s not just that artists are interested in the history of art,” he says. “It’s that art historians are looking at connections with contemporary art that are more than cause and effect, what led to what. They are interested in the larger, more serious, more spiritual dimension of new art and in trying to draw lines to the meanings of older art.”

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‘Bill Viola: The Passions’

When: Tuesdays-Thursdays and Sunday, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Fridays-Saturdays, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Closed Mondays.

Where: Getty Center, 1200 Getty Center Drive, L.A.

Ends: April 27

Price: Free; parking, $5

Contact: (310) 440-7300