- Venue
- St. Olave's College, London
- Location
- London
Initially published by roundtablereview.co.uk (now defunct) in 2006
A few years ago Immanuel Kant insisted that ‘consensus as to what is beautiful must remain free’; later on Jean-Francios Lyotard suggested that the aesthetics of The Sublime ‘is not governed by a consensus of taste’ but, in the midst of watching/meditating on Bill Viola’s Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (two of the films which arose out of material Viola developed for a new production of Richard Wagner’s nineteenth century opera, Tristan and Isolde), these truisms feel hard to accept. Don’t certain kinds of imagery, compositions and dynamic effects draw people in, absorb us or have a hypnotic effect? Blazing fires, flowing water, waves, looking out through the forest canopy, the impact of wind and air flow are inevitably lovely or awe inspiring. Enormity, the idea of infinity, or apparent catastrophe, is fascinating, at least when viewed from a distance. Examples include exploding volcanoes, the night sky, the vast sea and horribly, say, the collapse of the world trade centre towers in 2001 as seen from a distance. Bill Viola’s movies, and the methods of installation, simulate similar effects, and do so in style. But simulations always seem like a joke too.
Despite his significance as a seminal video artist and The Passions show at the National Gallery in 2003/04, Bill Viola is not as so widely know outside art circles. His work for the current London exhibition (called Love/Death: The Tristan Project) is spread across two sites, one central and the other near London Bridge. The difference between the unimportant landscape just outside the second venue, St. Olave’s College, and the dramatic audio-visual experience to be had inside, is major. St. Olave’s is a big church-like space. An internal balcony allows work to be viewed from different heights and angles. A spiral stair-way works to build suspense on the way up to his ten-minute The Fall into Paradise. Viola does seem interested in suspense. Always there is more of a delay than would be typical for basic entertainment purposes. Enough is done to keep spectator engaged though, before the reveal, when, say, figures become recognisable. This is not the stuff of classical narrative but the novelty tends to wear off.
Really, only one of the rooms presents the kind of installed video work the artist is best known for. When Viola ventures away from the usual suspects, his signature assets and motifs, namely, ‘walls of fire, inverted waterfalls and levitating corpses’ (as described in a Time Out magazine review) things start to look silly. His usual work can be problematic too, depending on your disposition, amounting maybe to ‘rock opera’. A French and Saunders piss-take of Viola’s art is easy to imagine. A video artist attending the exhibition with me, criticised the work at Haunch of Venison (the central London location), liked the pieces Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension, but not the other films, at St. Olave’s. “How can these be part of the same body of work?” she complained, as we watched an uncharacteristically low resolution video, of a couple wearing biblical outfits, walking through the woods and then into the sea, holding hands.
Generally every aspect of how his films are presented seems to be considered. Viola unashamedly produces spectacle and his work supposes or requires an earnest response. Dark cinematic spaces are employed so that people are separated from each other. Some of the films are projected in a portrait format. Scale and screen size varies a lot from exhibit to exhibit. Simple editing approaches and design methods, such as reversing the time-line, rotating vertically, slowing or accelerating motion, and time-lapse photography, are used. He plays with extremes in perspective: what begins as an imperceptible dot reveals itself as two figures a time later. These are unpretentious tricks. One effect is to remind of how tiny, insignificant and isolated individuals are. The films seem to demand surrender. It would be ridiculous then to expect him to somehow ‘lighten up’. Rather than deviating Viola will hopefully continue in the same vein, engineering the sublime through a set of tried and tested methods.
