All the information found on Bill Viola in this post was taken from Art, Performance, Media 31 interviews by Nicholas Zurbrugg.
Viola is an artist that I can connect to in many ways, one of them being his definition of his work’s central priority as the attempt to give people “the possibility to experience things that I have experienced– revelations– in other way or another”. Viola also talks about the process of revealing something a little deeper, broader, or wider in his works, which speaks to me more than I’d expect. Connecting to that, Viola said in one of his interviews, that he is trying to give other people a chance to experience things that he has experienced. Talking in terms of moments, where one is confronted with a physical situation which causes one to see things in a different way.
Because I included his work Nantes Triptych, I want to include his concept behind it. Although people might see it as an appropriation of classical form, the idea was to create a form of consciousness. Viola said that when one sees the triptych, one is participating in a structure of consciousness which has to do with the cosmological significance of heaven, earth, and hell, which is part of our modes of thinking now.
My favourite part of the interview
Viola said: You don’t have to look for the history of art in museums, it’s in our behavior, in our blood and gestures, as Rilke says. So that interests me a lot, that kind of classical form–how that affects who we are, and how we think about the world, and then, by a sort of resonance, it also very literally evokes a certain period in art history and makes a direct connection which I really feel we are experiencing again.
