Bill Viola in conversation with Christopher Zimmerman
CZ: Your single-channel video works from the 1970s and 1980s are being screened at Images and Views of Alternative Cinema in Nicosia, Cyprus, which is essentially a festival devoted to experimental film. What are your thoughts concerning the fact that your early videotapes are being presented in an ‘experimental film’ context rather than in a ‘video art’ context? What are the significant differences between video and film and between the developments of these two art forms? And furthermore, in what ways do experimental film and video art relate to each other?
Bill Viola: Basically, the single channel works were born in a very specific kind of way and that was in the spirit of experimentation. This word ‘experimentation’ came to be used generically and then even abused over the years. But when I started—the first time that I touched a camera and was trained on it was in 1970 during my junior year of university—it was experimental because the equipment was not reliable; it was not ‘formatted’. Video was not looked upon in a positive light, if at all, by the higher powers, such as the television studios, the commercial television networks, as well as, and very importantly, by the world of film, most specifically by avant-garde filmmakers working outside of the mainstream. The experimental filmmakers really looked down on us. In a way, it was kind of silly since they had gone through this thirty or forty years earlier. All of these experimental filmmakers, going back to Germany in the 1930s with Oskar Fischinger and others, really did some amazing experiments. It’s so interesting how each generation comes along and wants to think that they were the ones who were pioneering everything.
But our work in video was truly experimental. It was also communal because the groups that we had were collectives. What these social groups did was to create an environment for experimentation to flourish in places like New York, London, in places like Japan, in France and Italy… And these were the beginnings of what became video—of what we call video art. Of course now, it has burgeoned into a massive art form that is going beyond art itself and becoming a kind of ‘fabric’ in terms of how our global culture functions.
CZ: When you first started experimenting with video and playing around with these new tools, there wasn’t a ‘tradition’. This was at the very beginning of video. While you could not draw directly from the history of the medium—because one had yet to be established—you were left to experiment freely without being subjected to the burdens of a tradition looming over you. How do you see your videos from earlier in your creative life relating to your career and to the overall trajectory of the development of video? And, how do these early experiments relate to our contemporary situation?
Bill Viola: Well, we had the good fortune of being born at a certain time. One’s place on earth should not only be discussed in terms of one being born in Milwaukee versus Kansas. It’s really about where you are in the timeline; that is the most significant thing. Being born in 1951 when television was pretty much coming of age and then going to university when portable video was basically coming out were very fortuitous. I couldn’t have planned it better myself. So, these sorts of ‘markers’ are critical, and I think that the way that the work has evolved over these years is directly connected, like a tree, with where it was ‘planted in the ground’ and with how it was growing and how it was changing. I think that because the filmmakers kind of got out of the way, we were able to experiment and work unhindered. They did really look down on us. I have to say that as I got a little older I started to look back at some of those early things and asked myself, ‘Did we really think that this was going to change the world?’ I mean I can’t believe that we thought that. But now, at an older age, looking back on my own work, I am starting to look at it in the way that the experimental filmmakers looked at it—‘this is just amateur stuff’. (Viola laughs). But seriously, it was very serious work. There were fistfights over this work. There were these incredible screening centers all around the country, in Europe as well, in Japan. They would have these video nights, and the coolest thing about it was that it was not like just going to the movies. You didn’t see a film or a moving image for a certain period of time and then just go home. The party started when the last frame flew by. And then, then, people got up, the wine came out, and I remember staying for hours in these places, where people just went at it about what this was, about what it could be; it was electric. It was like the French Revolution planned in a little tiny house with twenty people.
CZ: Utopian visions…
Bill Viola: It was really exciting, and you felt the electricity. People were drawn to it magnetically. Even though it was primitive and low-res—it was just ridiculous that this stuff was even functioning—everyone who saw it caught that glowing monitor, that glowing screen and knew instantaneously that this is not cinema, not photography; this is something really, really new. And that’s what got us all so excited that we just stuck with it.
CZ: I am fascinated by your observations in your writings about the development of film coming out of photography, whereas video developed much more out of audio technology. You write that you started to see the video camera as closer in operation to a microphone than to a film camera. Video is musical in a sense. How did this realization change your approach to your work or open new paths of exploration for you?
Bill Viola: For me, because I started both in sound and in video, I had a great advantage in the sense that sound is a performative medium. It is not like photography, and therefore it is not like film, because film arose out of photography. It is fundamentally different. You could say that technically there are discrete frames in video, but it is nothing like what film is with actual celluloid that you can spread across the table and look at the frames. Whereas, video is a vibration. So, it is much more akin, right from its origins, to music than it is to film. Basically, video transcended the notion of discrete frames and made those frames electronic in nature, which means that they are malleable. And most importantly, the single, essential aspect of it all is that it is in real-time. There is no memory in video, unless you record it onto some device. But if you place a film camera and a video camera side-by-side, with the film camera you have to wait until the next day to get it processed, so on and so forth. With video, what you see through the eyepiece is what it is. The only way that you could see that again is to rewind the tape and start again. So, it’s totally temporal. It is movement par excellence. And then you realize that this is exactly what a human being is. A human being is not a static physical object; a human being is a biological thing that is growing and morphing and changing. Every seven years, all of the billions of cells in our bodies get replaced one by one. Now we are well into the digital age, and we are learning and knowing more about this stuff than we ever did before, but, when I started, these were things that we were trying to get our minds around. We were trying to understand, and we somehow knew that this was different and that this was going to change the world. There was no question about it. I am kind of amazed that it has gone as far as it has, but I wanted to keep going.
CZ: The program of your single channel works will be presented over three evenings in Nicosia. I organized and subtitled each of the three thematic sections using a note that you wrote in 1986: ‘Vision as reception’, ‘Vision as reflection’, ‘Vision as projection’.
Bill Viola: This is really great. Thank you for that. I can’t tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you have gone back to this world, as it existed at the time. What happens in art and in every age of humanity is that someone figures out how to make a 25-foot high statue of Zeus rather than a five-foot high statue of Zeus, and everyone says ‘wow’ (Viola laughs); then shortly after that people forget how monumental a task that was, and they just move on. And then someone else comes up with something equally astonishing, and it just keeps going. At some point you have to look back and stop and freeze frame things to see where the state of things really were. This is really wonderful.
CZ: This note from 1986—‘Vision as reception’, ‘Vision as reflection’, ‘Vision as projection’ suggests that you are seeking a kind of vision that diverges from how we typically use the term ‘vision’. What is your conception of ‘vision’ exactly and has it changed since this time? Could you elaborate on ‘Vision’ and these three articulations of ‘vision as…’?
Bill Viola: The key operative word in that is ‘vision’, of course. Vision is not just something that pertains to the eye. If you really look at the history of humanity in an open-minded kind of way, you immediately come to the conclusion that what we see with our eyes is not the main thing going on here. What is going on is a kind of vision that is a creative process that assembles a set of captured light waves, or captured thoughts, or something that is flowing and that enters a receptive device, biological or mechanical, and transforms that device as a way to make sense of it, as a way to make sense of what one is seeing, doing, and thinking and of all these other ways that images and ideas come into our bodies. So, vision is the key thing.
‘Reflection’, ‘reception’, and ‘projection’ are the three modes of vision basically. Reflection is where I would put the visionary stuff. (I think that it is astute that that is how you assembled this thing and organized the pieces that you chose.) The reflection part of it has to do with self-image and self-reflection and is something that has been in existence in human culture for tens of thousands of years. I recently saw Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams. It is one of the most profound pieces that I have ever seen; I wept, I just wept. These lions and rhinoceroses that were painted by these people thirty or forty thousand years ago are pristine because of the way that this cave was protected after a landslide. You look at these cave paintings depicting animals moving about, and there are lines radiating behind them to show the speed at which they are running. Painted on the walls of the cave are these beautiful, undulating images—truly incredible artistic achievements in the rendering of images. You see these images and realize that this is vision coming into someone, being transformed, and then sending itself out again. This is the reflection part because the purpose of it isn’t to make a cool picture of a lion. The purpose of these cave paintings is to stimulate the care of self, the being, the soul. And this is what happens in this movie. It’s the first time that I have seen cinema put to the task for which it was made, which is to present images of ourselves, not in a mundane way, a crude way like in most movies today, but really as the deepest, deepest form of contemplation on what it means to be human and what it means to be alive. This is ‘vision as reflection’.
‘Vision as reception’ is, in a way, what we are going through now. We have so many ways to receive images, so many ways to receive ideas and thoughts, and it is kind of overwhelming. And yet, this immediately calls out for some sort of storage device. The reception of knowledge, the reception of light, the reception of heat, and the reception of pain and suffering are real. This is another kind of vision that human beings need because this is the emotional content, which, again, is so often short-circuited or made frivolous in a lot of commercial filmmaking.
The third mode—‘vision as projection’—is what the ancients, particularly in ancient Greece, recognized. There were two competing theories in the ancient world. One was the idea of vision as introversion, which entails light or some corpuscular material coming into the eye and stimulating a receptive device. There were various ideas about what exactly this was, but it is the idea of something from afar coming into this little hole in the eye—the pupil—and then being registered. At the same time, they had a competing theory, which was the extroversion theory of vision, which did not win out, unfortunately, in the end, but I totally understand what it was about. It’s about the soul and about the inner self and not the outer world. In this model, your desire or part of your being travels out from the eye and can travel across vast spaces until it hits the first object that it finds, say a mountain range in the distance, and therefore you know that thing; you see that thing. For me personally, this is a much more evocative and interesting way to think about vision, and I did these pieces, which are about this idea that comprehending something is a part of you, in your self, in your being. This kind of vision actually goes out to touch that object. There is a lot of stuff in the Islamic world that has to do with the idea of vision as an extension of the sense of touch.
CZ: There is an insistence throughout your work and your writings that what is at stake are the ‘larger’ questions of life. Technique, technology, the medium are essential only as tools for explorations of the fundamental philosophical questions of existence, experience, memory, time, of what lies behind the smooth veneer of accepted reality. For me, you are ‘doing’ philosophy with your work, that is philosophy in the deepest, broadest sense. Might you elaborate on this idea that what is ultimately at stake in your work is philosophy? And, of course, there is a sense that your works are spiritual exercises of sorts.
Bill Viola: Right…which is a kind of philosophy. I don’t think these things should be separated as much as they are: one in the philosophy department, the other in the religious studies department.
CZ: Certainly we separate philosophy from the spiritual in Western traditions. You have a deep experience in the East and in Eastern religion—traditions in which spirituality, religion, and philosophy are not separated.
Bill Viola: They didn’t go through Descartes. Cartesian thought was a devastating blow to the quest for knowledge; we are still trying to recover from Descartes. But in response to your question, if one uses the term ‘philosophy’ or ‘philosophical inquiry’ in a larger, broader sense, I would agree; yes, absolutely, the work is philosophical in nature. I suppose also that one could argue that the idea of philosophical query itself ultimately comes back to questions about the self—the knower trying to understand the known. I think that this is really the goal, not just of philosophy, but of human life. That’s why we’re here on the planet. That’s why we have these questions. That’s why we try to understand them; we try to make sense of them; we try to make systems out of them; we try to make logical deductions out of them; we make gobbledygook; and we make colored patterns out of them. Over and over and over again, we are trying to make sense of the world, of the universe in the largest way. I think art is really an extension of that, and therefore I think that art is a kind of philosophy. I do not in any way mean to be disparaging about what real philosophers do. I have met several at various times in my life, and I have absolute respect for what they are doing. They are really down at the razor’s edge trying to figure this stuff out. But, again, I always turn it back to the self. This is what I learned in Asia. The Asian systems did not split things off like Descartes did; they kept everything whole and understood immediately that what you see outside when you walk around is a kind of façade. This does not mean that it is not real, but it is not the ‘real real’, as Buddhists have told us for centuries.
An image can be beautiful but lack depth, and the real philosophers and artists just want to get through this façade; that is just layer number one. The camera provides a beautiful depiction of layer number one. But, we need to go deeper than that, and the ultimate place where this can happen reminds me of the Shinto shrine in Japan that I visited when I lived there with my wife Kira in 1980-81. The first thing that you see when visiting a Shinto shrine is a small staircase that goes up to one of those beautiful, quite formidable Japanese gates. Hanging down in front of that gate is a curtain with three strips, typically, of fabric, and the wind blows through the curtain affording one momentary glimpses into the inner courtyard. If you get through the gate, there are two more layers—there are always three in Shinto. The second is inaccessible to the layperson; only the spiritual priests go in there. And after that, there is an inner, inner sanctum. It does not even have a cloth; it is a locked door. When that door is open for certain rituals, the final image of Shinto becomes apparent, and what that is, actually, is a highly polished, silver disk sitting on an altar. And what is a highly polished silver disk? It reflects right back at the person who is looking at it. This is one of the great, great ideas in the history of humanity, one of the greatest presentations of religion that I have ever seen. I think that it is absolutely brilliant. It is the closest thing to the realistic picture of what it is all about, which is to reflect. And that’s why our lowly camera, which we all dearly love, those of us who work with this medium, actually has a really important part to play in our understanding of the inner dimensions of life, an understanding that we so desperately need.
—transcribed from a phone conversation recorded May 27, 2011
Copyright © 2011 Christopher Zimmerman and Bill Viola
This essay was originally published in the 2011 Images and Views of Alternative Cinema festival catalogue (Nicosia, Cyprus).
