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Transcript of the John Tusa Interview with video artist Bill
Listen to the interview with Bill Viola
At first glance the image looks motionless, it's on a high
definition plasma screen of course, but the stillness of the face or
the group or the surface of the water is visually familiar, then as
you look the image moves fractionally, very, very slowly,
hypnotically. And the faces break into the deepest of emotions,
the groups create a kind of balletic interplay between the
individuals The water is disrupted by bodies plunging in or
triumphantly emerging. You continue looking as each
incremental movement creates it's own point of drama, not as an
isolated moment, but as a continuum of experience.
Is that a slowed down film or a moving image? Neither, it's a
video piece by the American artist Bill Viola. There's no one quite
like him, one critic has called him the Rembrandt of video art,
another has credited him with re-inventing the language of art
no less, others though have queried whether Viola, a Californian
devoted to Buddhism, Sufism, and Christian Mysticism, offers
more than vacant exaltation and fast food spirituality.
Viola has reached this position at the age of only 51. He has
more than a hundred works behind him. The first work that
really brought him wide acclaim in Britain was the Nantes
Triptych of 1992 - three large side-by-side screens, showing a
woman in labour, a man submerged in water and the face of the
artists' mother as she lay dying. The shock of his parents' death
wrenched Viola's work, onto a new level of intensity and personal
awareness, and that piece is in Tate Modern. In 1996 he created
a single work for Durham Cathedral, where a naked human form
appears from the depths of the water, breaks surface, draws in
breath and then sinks back. Typically for England , more fuss
was made about the nakedness of the body, than about the
spiritual significance of the image.
By now Viola was well into the exploration of themes of spiritual
and universal experience. Last year his show at the D'Offay
Gallery, in London 's West End , revealed works of extraordinary
emotional range. From the quietism of Catherine's Room, to the
visual and aural intensity of Five Angels for the Millennium.
There, five bodies erupt from the depths of the water. Ah, water,
a running obsessive theme, explained apparently by the artist so
near death from drowning as a young boy. In Berlin his latest
and most ambitious work is called Going Forth by Day, a
projected image cycle in five parts lasting 35 minutes. The five
parts deal with birth and fire, the Path, an endless journey
through life, the Deluge when a physical cataclysm overcomes
the order of everyday life. The Voyage, of death and rebirth, and
First Light, with a moment of pure ecstatic renewal at its climax.
It's Viola's most ambitious work, both as an artist and as a film
But let's go back to the beginning. There was no art in your
home, so where did the impulse for the visual come from?
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I.M. Pei
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Bill Viola
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
1 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
Well, I would have to say, I was born with it. The family story
that was told to me was, I was sitting with my mother one day
when I was just about three years old and she was trying to
draw things on a piece of paper for me and I apparently
wrenched the pencil away from her and drew an almost perfect
speedboat, with the bow cresting up above the waves and
everybody was astonished and my mother kept this picture.
When I got to kindergarten the teacher was already singling out
my paintings and drawings to put up in front of the class and on
the walls and pretty much was always an artist in that way in
terms of the visual.
And you did drawings ten feet long as a child didn't you?
Yeah, I invented this planet that was inhabited by humans and of
course aliens, I forget the name of it... oh it was called "Clamph"
and I started drawing the landscape of it, in a kind of a
horizontal almost oriental scroll like way, and I kept adding with
sticky tape more and more sheets of paper, until I was out at
about ten feet and then I had the great idea, if I do say so
myself, to end the landscape on the final sheet and make it
identical with the beginning of the landscape on the first sheet
and I wrapped them around and put the last piece of tape
And what are you doing today? [laugh]
Exactly, except it's really expensive tape [laugh]
When did you discover that you had this condition called
Dysgraphia, where I think the brain wants to write words as
Actually I only really discovered or deduced that I had that by
the fact that our eldest son has been diagnosed with that and
I've just seen so many similarities, between us and how he's
been growing up, that when we were told about this which I
hadn't any idea about, I just saw myself cause I remember
struggling with trying to logically put together concepts and
trying to form ideas in time in a way that was sequential and
even to the extent that when I would go to the movies, even as
an adult with my wife, and of course, being in America most of
these films aren't terribly complex and I would have to lean over
and go, what's going on? You know, because I just figured later
and I'd always watched movies like that, I was being completely
carried away by the imagery, you know, and I wasn't focused on
what the characters where saying, and I wasn't really able to
follow the plot too well.
But as far as you're concerned, also there's another aspect of the
way you're mind works that you've said, a lot of you're images
are based on sound or generated by sound, how does that work?
Well, if you really consider a blind person... part of the training
that one goes through when one becomes blind, lets say, rather
than being congenitally blind, is how to read the world through
sound, the remaining active sense. And therefore the cane,
which I always thought as a kid was simply... just so you moved
it out in front of you, so that you didn't bump into anything... is
actually a sound producing device, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap,
tap, tap... that creates the awareness of space through echo,
which we all know submarines and marine creatures such as
dolphins and whales have used this sort of echo location. So for
example, right now in the digital age, I can stand here with
these microphones we have, and this digital recorder, I can clap
my hands and we can record that, and I would be able to put
that sound into a computer, do some acoustic analysis and be
able to put together a rough image of the room, simply by the
delay at which the various echoes, the wave fronts came back
from the various surfaces in the room. So sound is really space,
it's a sense that exists all around us, you hear things behind you
that you can't see and in my mind when I work I really have felt
the limitation of the camera and therefore have always recorded
simultaneous sound and picture, which you can do with video as
opposed to film, it's a part of the same machine, as a way to get
this larger field of experience into the recording itself.
But the sound is often, usually very subtle, isn't it, it's very often
the merest background, or very suggestive, but I suppose that's
what you're saying, that the mere suggestion of sound, to you
produces the intensity of image?
Yes, as long as the sound is not music or dialogue, which it most
commonly is in films, basically because they, ultimately they
kind of arise from literature, I mean whether they're the actual
depiction of a novel or written by some screenplay writer as a
new original screen play they're still, kind of, derived from
written language. So I've really not been that interested as you
know, in the two major components of films, dialogue, therefore
plot and music. And as long as those more self conscious
elements aren't put in there as a way to move the action forward
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BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
2 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
and do all of the things that those people do and some of them, I
should add, quite effectively and impressively, then what you get
is you get this more passive reception of sound, whereby two
microphones in a stereo configuration at right angles to each
other can produce a very three dimensional impression of the
sound field, of the cars going on the street, the rain drops hitting
the pavement, and they can appear to be at different distances
from you and you can really feel like you are immersed in a, kind
of a, somewhat of a three dimensional space, which is kind of
what's going on in the gallery. Even though having said that
there been, you know, numerous examples of where I actually
kind of constructed a sound track around an image, using at
times, most often some sound that was actually recorded with
the image, but I see video as an image slash sound medium.
One other of course early experience of a very, very different
kind was your near-drowning, did you nearly drown?
Well, I've kind of replayed that a number of times in my mind.
Talking to a trauma physician once in Phoenix Arizona and we
were sitting there over dinner, small group, museum people take
you out and there's a couple of other kind of art collector types
around and this guy's kind of looking at me, I felt there was kind
of connection and finally by the time dessert came he leaned
over and said, have you had a near death experience? And I was
just shocked, I thought what is this guy trying to come on to me
or what's going on here, and then he proceeded to tell me about
people in the emergency room that, you know, have basically
clinically died and come back and he's seen that a lot and he
just... and he knows these patients throughout life cause some
of them he keeps track of. And he knew. And I never really
thought about it in those terms, but what happened was, as I
found later, it had all the classic elements of that. I was jumping
off a raft with my cousin, my uncle was on the raft, and I had
one of those inner tubes, those inflatable inner tubes and I'd
literally just forgot to hold on. I jumped in, plunged under and
within an instant I was in this completely magical, extraordinary
world, of colour, blues and greens, I saw plants sort of wafting in
the currents, there were fish, and I was so fascinated and
captivated and felt so comfortable. And the feeling I had, I mean
as a ten year old, you know your emotions are really major part
of your consciousness, so the memories were mostly feeling
memories and I remember this big hand coming up, grabbing me
under my stomach and yanking me up, and it was so rude, it
was an interruption and terrible feeling, it was disappointing, and
then broke the surface and then I remember spitting, then I
started crying and then I became a ten year old boy who was
terrified. But the feeling is I glimpsed this world, that was one of
the most beautiful things I've ever seen.
And what was the sound of it?
Er you know what, gee that's interesting, I don't seem to really
remember the sound of it.
That is peculiar isn't it, that the most important physical
experience that you've had ......
.....Didn't really have a sound. And speaking about sound Peter
Sellars the opera director who is a dear friend of mine, was here
and he knew that I was working on this piece and he just on his
own accord just came to Berlin to be here when it was shown,
and of course being Peter Sellars he didn't come for the big
power dinner after the opening, he came four days early when
we were still aligning projectors and doing technical adjustments.
And he had this book with him that he was reading, The
Illuminous Mind by Kalu Rinpoche, who is one of the great
Tibetan spiritual masters who passed away in 1989 and he read
me this passage, I was getting goose bumps, it was a passage of
a discussion of the transition through the various levels of the
"Bardo" states, as the deceased is moving on to the next life and
the next rebirth. And in this text that he was reading the last
stage one passes through, pure consciousness, almost dissolving
again into the universe to be reconstituted again, that last state
is defined by sound and it's the sound of the roaring waterfall.
The description of it is, that one is at the bottom of a huge
waterfall or buried under a mountain and there's this deep
roaring sound. Peter was reading this to me standing in my
piece, where the deluge had just come down, we didn't have the
sound on at the beginning, this huge amount of water pouring
out, washing these people away and right next to it on the right
is the Voyage a small house with the death bed scene going on,
with the man, the son and the father and the daughter in law,
you know and he... I'd never read this book. I might have heard
that sound then, I don't really remember.
So that was your experience and I suppose as result of that the
way in which you've used water, and the very powerful images
of bodies in water, whether in The Messenger in Durham
Cathedral which many people will remember, or in Five Angels
for the Millennium in London last year, where there are bodies
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
3 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
coming out of the water and then sometimes going back, and in
the very first image in Going Forth, where it represents both
rebirth and death, so you'd been recreating this experience of
near death drowning in your work in an extraordinarily
productive way.
Yeah, I guess so, that's something I've really been very reticent
to sort of pursue. You know I'm really happy to keep that very
intense experience in my life at a very young age, which I
consider to be a blessing, obviously since I'm still around to tell
the tale, that's one thing, but none the less, just to be able to be
given that knowledge, because after all human beings in our
lives and who we are, what we are, knowledge of death is the
supreme knowledge, that's why culture exists. That's why all of
these great works of art exist, and text and so on and so forth.
It's those of our kind who have come to the edge of that
But are you saying if I hear you right, you deliberately keep this
slightly at a distance because you want it to be there as a
reservoir of creativity?
I don't want to over analyse it, you know I think that's one of the
worse things that artists can do and I think that's one of the
most critical pitfalls, danger zones in the practise of
contemporary art today, in an age where theory has really taken
over. The theorists are really driving the research now, which if
you look at physics the same thing happens. It's like the
experimental physicists versus the theoretical physicists and
their relationships sort of oscillate over time. Well we happen to
be in art practise in a period where the theorists are driving
things very strongly, and I don't want to... and that in a way is
almost antithetical, to, to what works of art are, I mean the
presence of theory in an art work, or an artwork as a
demonstration of kind of theory to me seems really
ass-backwards. You know I love that quote from Proust where he
says... "A work of art that contains a theory is like an article of
clothing on which the price tag has been left!" So I just wanted
to keep that separate, but I would certainly agree with you and I
know it's true, but it's funny in this piece in The First Light, the
fifth image, it's kind of the end and the beginning of the cycle in
a way, but in actual fact the fire birth as you mentioned is, but
there's a moment in that piece, the rescue scene around the
water and the desert. There's four people who are left on the
edge of this body of water of unknown dimensions in the desert
at the breaking of dawn, you see the whole 35 minutes is taken
up with this sunrise, which we created with computer controlled
lighting in real time. You see the light coming and gradually
they're getting more and more tired after having been up on a
rescue operation, there's a woman who stands among them and
she is waiting for her son, who will not be coming back, there's
an ambulance that's there at the beginning and it leaves without
its flashers or sirens on there's no one left to rescue. And then
these people one by one get very tired and they fall asleep and
so it's just a four like sleeping people around this pool of water in
fact becoming the image of the very thing that they were
involved with throughout the previous night, and that is, they
become like dead bodies around the water. And while they sleep,
a disturbance appears on the water and this young man's face
appears and then his shoulders and chest and body and he sort
of effortlessly glides up out of the water dripping wet and floats
up into the sky. When he reaches the sky, the drips coming off
his clothing and body falling into this water become rain and a
big rain storm, one of those desert rain storm comes in from
nowhere and wakes up the sleeping people who totally missed
the event, and then they quickly gather their things and one by
one they move off as the sun is rising. Now the thing that really
made me somewhat nervous and that was one of the aspects of
working on this piece, is I was very concerned in professional
terms as an artist, making work where for the first time in my
life, this image of the man rising up was done with these wires
like in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, these...
I looked for them but I couldn't see them.
Yeah, well we... you know you erase them digitally basically. But
I realised you know, that I had never in all my work, done
something that had this degree of fantasy. I did a piece called
Five Angels of the Millennium which you mentioned and those
angels are in the weightless void of an underwater pool and
anybody that looks at those images knows that these are really
actually in a practical sense, literally there's a bunch of guys and
they jumped in the water at different times and the camera was
orientated in different ways, but it's completely natural, I mean
it doesn't defy any laws of physics that we know. And the same
with The Messenger in Durham . And this is the first time that
I've used this kind of technique, this technical trick, and I was
very concerned about it, you know.
Too artificial?
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
4 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
Yeah, I mean I think what my impulse was to do was when the
people were sleeping, the four actors that were lying there, we
had them stay in position, to position the guy in the water, what
I was really intending to do... I thought I should do, would be to
have the guy waiting above, and then he would literally just drop
into the water, make a big splash and submerge and I would run
the whole thing in reverse, which would be again, quote
unquote, natural.
Why didn't you do that?
I don't know.
Are you still uncomfortable with it?
No I've seen it here and we did three versions of the wire
removal and there were some problems we had with the high
definition making the smooth slow motion that I wanted, it was a
little unsmooth, it was jumpy and it looked, it just didn't look
right. And then once we clarified those technical issues, and it
was really literally gliding out and the wires were removed
perfectly instead a little bit, you know, dubiously, then all of a
sudden the whole thing locked in and now I just... I'm very
pleased with it.
The imagery, and as you spoke about it, the idea of people being
asleep when this extraordinary event happens, the Ascension,
the Resurrection? I mean you have strong streaks of Christian
Mysticism in you, you don't I think ever address the Crucifixion,
the Resurrection as such. Now are there elements of that in that
particular panel here or then again do you choose not to go quite
that far in expressing and interpreting the Christian experience.
Well that's a good question, I would say that certainly visually
that panel is based on or was inspired by guess is a better word,
because I don't sort of believe in or I don't practise with this
restaging appropriation kind of approach to things where you
sort of reproduce something. There's a painting by an artist who
I dearly love, called the Master of the Osservanza, he's a Sienese
artist from the 15th century. We don't know his name he did a
lot of work in the church of the Osservanza and so that's why
he's called that. There's a beautiful very famous resurrection
scene that he did of the soldiers just waking up, bathed in this
kind of mystical light that comes from nowhere as Christ is rising
up out of the tomb, in this case the door to the tomb, the lid on
the tomb is not ajar it's closed, even more mysterious, and that
early dawn light is breaking which as a student in University
when we were looking a lot of that imagery, I was so turned off
to it that I figured it was sunset you know. And of course now,
obviously it's dawn. There are flowers coming out of the ground,
there's fruit on the trees, it's the actual re appropriation of the
pagan fertility rites, which so many of Christian rituals and feast
days are, and this being this Vernal equinox. And so that was
sort of the visual inspiration and it gave me a lot to work with
thinking about how to sort of stage this thing.
The content was my own about the flood and the woman losing
her child and stuff, and I would have to say that I'd answer your
question yes and no. I am very conscious that I am using not
only just visual compositional elements that have been apparent
and used in Christian art, but actual... the content of the actual
meaning of some of these very important events for Christians.
And the way I look at it is that the resurrection happens every
spring, and we live through the resurrection every spring, human
beings are constantly being reborn, that the resurrection in its
more expanded sense and not focused on the very important
church holiday of Easter per se, and the whole story of Jesus
Christ per se, is a much more larger universal image for
mankind. It is the hope of renewal, it is watching nature every
winter die and every spring be reborn.
But you're not blotting out the particularity of the Crucifixion
you're just using the experience in a more universal way?
Yeah, I'm really interested in the root structures of experience,
because if you go way, way back, these things are so tied to who
we are as human beings they're almost, at this point I would
have to say, I would have to say they're kind of built into the
operating system. Whether the Christians acknowledge that
there is such a thing as the transmigration of souls as
Pythagoras taught, that there is such a thing as literally your
soul goes out of your body and eventually appears in another
body. Whether or not you subscribe to what Christians say, there
still is this imagery and this iconography and these beliefs in
rebirth. And the most powerful thing about the Christian
message and the Christian faith for me, what they gave to the
world, which other religions have a real hard time with, is they
brought the Gods, the sacred beings, the divine beings, down
right down to earth.
Into human form......
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
5 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
Right into human form to the point that they give birth like us,
and they suffer pain like us, they bleed like us, and they die like
us. That was so powerful that image of the Son of God, actually
dying a mortal death. And then of course you realise the image
of the Madonna and child, totally benign beautiful image that's
given comfort to millions of people around the world, is basically
a mother and child, I mean we've all experienced that, we all
know what that means, we all know the comfort that's in that
image. We all know unfortunately there is a large group of
people who also know what it means to lose a son. One of the
parents most absolutely worst horrific nightmares you can ever
imagine, is to outlive your children and here's this faith that
brings this very universal human elements and brings it into the
context of sacred...
The irony is... if it's irony, is that at art school you hated art
history, I think, and then you discovered the Sienese masters
and also if you said at the time that's your colleagues and your
contemporaries, what I'm really interested in is reinterpreting
Christian iconography, they would have said, you can not be
serious? Christianity please! So I mean you're, you're
wonderfully traditional and old fashioned, but did you actually
have to start to be brave to do this, or did you just say to hell
with it this is what I'm interested in and this is what I am going
to do?
I think probably the latter, I guess versions of that have
happened to me all along, that I always sort of just gone for it.
And the turning point for me in terms of your question is, 1983
when I just got back from Japan , where I really encountered
traditional culture, full on, really for the first time, and was
deeply moved and impressed by it. And someone had mentioned
to me I should read St John of the Cross's poetry, and I was in a
bookshop, there's this little thin paperback, Poems of St John of
the Cross and I picked it up and I read the introduction, about
this man's life and I was just so touched and I was shaken
because it was so much like the experiences that I had had and
so deep in a human way for all of us. And I was working on this
piece about inside and outside and I had this plan to build this
room within a room and very quickly it became this, I mean it
was like a flash... it was like the whole piece was there in front of
me and I didn't know what to call it, and so I just one day, the
little voice in my head says, "well just call it what it is", so I
titled it, Room for St John of the Cross, and in 1983 and
probably even now you just did not make works of art for
Christian Saints, I mean this was very uncool.
People said that did they?
Oh yeah, it was written about in the critics, oh yeah, definitely,
yeah, and then a lot of people who saw it appreciated the work.
Second only to the experience of near drowning, the sight of
your mother dying is certainly in your art as you created it, one
of the most important, if not the most important. As she was
dying, did you hesitate for a moment, about saying I can't put a
video camera on my mother's face and yet you did. How did you
go through that particular transaction with yourself or wasn't
there one?
It was a necessity sort of for me in a way, I mean you just feel
so helpless, here's your own mother in this state. She basically
woke up one night, in the middle of the night and she had a
brain haemorrhage, she woke up with a headache and an hour
later she was unconscious and my father called me from Florida
and I got on the very next plane. And then you arrive and there
she is with tubes and wires and you know little beeping sounds
and little oscilloscopes going on and it was a cruel irony, the
technological world that I've devoted my life to is now not only
keeping my mother alive but keeping her from me, because I'm
not the expert, you know. All families feel that when they go into
hospitals these days, it's like you are a complete lay person and
these experts know what they're doing and so you can't really
administer to your own parent and so you end up holding hands
a lot, whispering in their ear and stroking their head and stuff,
which we all did. You know there's a way that you are kind of
separate from her so I guess the helplessness of the whole
situation, over a period of time and it was three months from the
time that she had her haemorrhage to when she passed away
and she was in a complete coma, you couldn't talk to her. And
video for me has by that time, 1990 had become my own life line
to the world and I just felt that, I mean I had to do something I
was going nuts, and I asked my dad if I could... would you mind
if I...?
What did he say?
He said no, no that's ok luckily. He was pretty sensitive and I
think, it just, for me there was an image in front of me for the
first time in my life that I could not understand, I could not
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
6 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
accept, I could not grasp. It was like the forbidden image, the
worst image that you could possibly imagine and I just had to
not run away from that image or close my eyes to that image,
but go right through that image. So I took out the camera and I
made actually very few video recordings, a couple of days when
she was about, I'd say, maybe three weeks before the end and
then a very short little session a week before the end and then
the last image which is at the very end of Nantes Triptych, where
you're in close up on the face and you don't see the light in the
eyes anymore, it was taken late in the afternoon of the day she
passed away, she passed away at six o' clock the next morning.
Now when you did this, you've explained why you did it, but did
you think it was going to become part of a work of art.
Oh no, absolutely not.
This was a purely personal reaction, this is me, I use the video
and I have to try and interpret this event with my instrument of
This is, I'm drowning and if I don't hold onto some line I'm going
to go under. So that was absolute necessity and I just went back
home after that horrific event after the funeral and just took
those tapes, it was like the little box of ashes, I just like put
them in a little place on my shelf ....
So how many years later did you say that's going? ...
Well that was actually very soon later. What happened was that
to back up, 90... let's see, she passed away in 91, so in the end
of 87 I got a grant from German television, to make a film video.
What I proposed was to do a recording of the desert in various
states and that I would go out to the desert for six months,
instead of the very normal and familiar and usual two weeks or
three weeks which I had been doing for years. I really wanted to
see what would happen if you got beyond that taking, taking,
taking that you always feel with cameras and I said what would
happen if I lived in the image and how would I change over the
course of time, you know, in the process of spending six months
out there. What happened was, for me anyway, is I met this
massive writer's block, half of the way in and I just could not
pick up a camera, it seemed ludicrous I was like in the most
incredible spiritually awe inspiring landscape, one of them on the
planet, the American South West. And there I was with this little,
little kind of tiny tube, with a little hole in it, that every time I
put it up to my eye, it was almost painful, it was cutting out all
the good stuff, it was ridiculous.. And then from that point on I
went on this downward spiral of starting and stopping, and I just
was like going down these blind alleys, for a year and a half and
then it finally, the whole thing dried up and for the first time in
my life the whole creative force that had carried me so far, that
was the reason why in kindergarten the teacher put up little
Billy's drawing and nobody else's, all of a sudden I didn't have
anything left. It was truly frightening and I was just completely
depressed and immobilised, and that's when the phone call came
from my dad, "mom's sick, get on the plane." And I flew there
and I had 185 tapes at that point, 20 minutes long, each of raw
material sitting on my shelf from the desert, from all this stuff.
And I got on the plane and I went there and this event
happened, I finally got back home and I get back home and
waiting for me, from the funeral, is this letter, "we are going to
ask request that you send back the money, unless we have a
rough cut on the producer's desk in six weeks". And I was like,
"oh man, you know, we have to give back the money", and we
didn't really have the money, but we will have to give it back
somehow, I just couldn't handle it. So finally my wife Kira said,
no, we have to do something, and the last place I wanted to go
was the editing room and I forced myself to go in there and I
pulled out all this desert footage. And then like a ton of bricks hit
me, what I was really working on. I went to the shelf pulled
those images off, put them in the machine, and sat with one
hand up to my face, cracking a little slit in my fingers looking at
this image that I didn't ever want to see again...
Of your mother dying?
Yes and then forcing myself to log it ... gradually make peace
with it and then all the desert stuff just came right into that and
I made this piece called, The Passing.
Now you filmed your mother, you have appeared yourself
occasionally, most of your pieces otherwise, I think the great
majority are done with actors, even when they are actors who
are expressing very, very painful intense emotions. Have you
ever been attracted by the idea of doing portraits of real people?
I mean, surely there have been extraordinarily expressive forms
of portraiture, ... have you tried it, rejected it, abandoned it or
Do you mean actors aren't real people? [laugh]
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
7 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
They're not expressing their own emotions, they do the emotions
you tell them to express.
It's interesting though, wait a second, what I learned working
with actors and I've only really, the first project I did with
professional actors was in 1995 called The Greeting, with the
three women based on the early 16 century Pontormo painting,
and I was very uncomfortable in the whole situation and when
the commission came through from the National Gallery in
London to do a piece based on the work in the collection, and I
had been working on Hieronymus Bosch shortly before that time,
and then I began... I realised I wanted to do this quintet, these
five people undergoing intense emotional stress because I was a
scholar in residence at the Getty Research Institute in 1998 and
that theme of that year which was I guess why they invited me
was representing the passions, and we looked at the passions in
different artworks in art history and philosophy, it was real
interesting and a real interesting mix of people and what
happened was, that that kind of triggered me in being right there
with the collection in the Getty to sort of study and look at, really
took me to another level and actually gave me a way to get into,
to understand the old Master paintings that I'd been interested in
for many years before, so I knew I wanted to do something with
actors and that's really when I kind of started.
And what happened to me at first was, I first called up the
woman who's in the Greeting, Susanna Peters and I said
Susanna you've got to come and I want to do some one on one
stuff with you and I really wanted her to sort of take me through
the ropes of how to direct someone in a very intimate way, like
close up in your face, like getting someone to cry. So we spent a
couple of days together and I was very nervous about it and very
uncomfortable and to the point when she really started crying I
just grabbed some tissues and got up immediately and walked
up in front of the camera and gave her a tissue, she said, what
are you doing? With the tears running down her face. And so I
finally... she kind of was really great, very gentle, very
understanding and she kind of showed me what it was like and I
was so deeply impressed, I know what you're saying, it's not her
emotion, but I'm sorry she was also... she was really crying. She
had to go somewhere in herself that was real to express this
emotion. That was very powerful.
I can understand that and it does come over very powerfully, but
I'm still curious that you wouldn't want to do this, or try this with
individuals, yes or if you took someone famous, I mean what a
challenge that would be, a challenge of portraiture.
Annie Leibowitz recently did a huge photo shoot in the White
House with President Bush and his team. And they're very, very
interesting, but can you imagine circumstance, where they said
come and do what shall we call them, one of your slow-mo
portraits of the President, of Rumsfeld, of Cheney, wouldn't that
be fascinating?
Yeah, because you know what would be fascinating about it?
Time is truth, is the revealer, that's where the mystery lies and
you give it enough time, anything and you will see some
semblance of the inner reality of something. When you live with
someone for a whole day, or a week, or when someone sits and
you sit with them not for a ten minute coffee or even an hour
coffee heart to heart, but if you sit with them for two to three
hours and you don't feel obliged to talk and you get an incredibly
real portrait of what that person is. And we're doing this for the
radio and I think it's appropriate to mention here that I've
always been fascinated with, driving somewhere and listening to
the radio and hearing those voices, Robert Siegel , Neal Conan
all these people on American public radio. And I have images in
my mind, very vivid clear images of what these people look like
and every once in a while in the newspaper one of them will
appear in the context of an article and I will go, that's not what
he's supposed to look like, I never thought, no that's totally
wrong, and I used to kind of realise of course, that yeah I was
wrong, because that is the real Neal Conan or Robert Siegel and
that's really what they look like. But really I'm serious, I've come
to seriously believe that the image that I have had of those
people I couldn't see, is the real image, is the feeling-being
image of a person. The way people with mental disabilities or
autism sometimes are said to see through, the famous story of
the people in the mental Institution when Reagan came on to
give his speech without the sound, they all broke out into
hysterical laughter, they said why are you laughing, they said
he's lying, and they could hardly speak. I really believe that that
thought -being image is with us all the time, and even if you're
talking to someone in front of their face, what's going on in your
inner psyche is this being-image is residing in there, it's not a
visual image. I mean the term persona in English comes from
ancient Greek and persona doesn't mean person, it means the
kind of inner essence of the person, and if you look at the words
persona, per through, sonar sound, it means from ancient Greek,
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
8 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
to hear through, to hear through what? To hear through the
mask, because when they did the dramas, they were all wearing
masks, because we are all wearing masks.
We give ourselves away with our voices.
And when you hear through the mask, you're going beyond the
mask inside, and so that's what's really important to remember
about visual images in the age of visual images. Is they can be
masks and shields and they can cover up the reality.
And time can help you to see through that.
But time will eventually wear that down.
You work a lot with technicians, the production list for Going
Forth by Day is almost a production list for a Hollywood movie so
to say, you couldn't do it without them. But what is the
relationship between what you want to do and the frustration of
having to work through other people, or is this something that
you have had to learn, that you can only realise your vision
through other people?
Yes, precisely, I was not born to be a director, not only was I
very shy as a young boy, but also I was always very private in
my drawings and different artworks that I made at various points
of my life are always the way for me to engage the world without
having have to be in it, without having have to meet it head on.
And here in this later period in my life where I've come to the
limits of my technical knowledge and expertise and the kind of
ideas I'm trying to grasp right now are bigger than me and
bigger than everyone around me, that I can't literally do it
myself, that I've had to rely on these experts or specialists to
help with certain things.
But you're not driven by the latest technological invention, what
you want to know is what is going to be able to realise the idea
that you have?
Oh yeah, the idea has to precede technology, I mean that's what
we are, you know, we are beings who have incredible
extraordinary, technological apparatus to keep us alive, keep us
functioning and moving us forward. The human brain is probably
one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth,
I think it is quite honestly. But that is driven by, not by some,
you know, technician from MIT trying to make the latest coolest
computer, that's like driven by some larger thing and the same
why is a thorn on a branch of a bush? Does that thorn know
about an animal that's going to come up and try to eat the
flowers, how could it possibly know that, you know, but it's
So we're being driven forward in increasing layers of complexity
and density, by something else, and that of course is in a
fundamental way, kind of nature of religion, in any kind of
spiritual discipline to try to touch the untouchable.
Is this the role for art in the 21st century. Do you think art has a
more important role in the 21st century than it was sometimes
thought to have in the materialist 20th?
Yes I do very strongly, I think art has a more important role to
play in this century than it has had to play in a very, very long
globalisation, which is an age of fear, it's an age of uncertainty
for many of us, it's an age that is characterised by the free flow
of information and not only the free flow of information but the
uncontrolled flow of information not in the sense of political
regimes, but in the sense of like, you can't stop the water, it's
like leaking everywhere and it's just flowing out of everything,
everything is getting wet. That's really what globalisation is
about, and it's not coincidental that the primary fear of
individuals in the global age is loss of identity. I mean we talk
about identity theft, we talk about loss of language, loss of
culture, loss of currency, we're talking about loss of all of the
unique things that make you unique in the age where
everything's being connected and so the real fundamental basis
of our species as the, kind of, inheritors of the planet in a way,
at this point in history, being empowered and thrust upon us by
technology, as Houston Smith great scholar of world religions
has said, the two forces that have most made you who you are,
in the most intimate way in a broader societal way are
technology and revelation.
Those two forces are converging in the 21st century, in ways we
couldn't imagine. And in the age where all these cultures are
getting thrust into each other, have no sense of understanding
what true inner, is the world of someone living in a small village
in an Islamic country is, compared to ourselves here in the West,
where all of these cultures, conditions, traditions, races, you
know societies are really literally being put in direct contact with
BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
9 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM
each other, the only possible way to connect with other people is
through what was always considered to be the fundamental
aspects of the human condition, and that is, we are all born, we
are all... come from some kind of family situation, we feel love
for family members, for friends and we have emotions, we have
the human passions of an inner life, of feelings and we will die.
And those universal themes of human existence are no longer
just, sort of, artistic aspects, you know, to using an artistic way
or just something that you have in your private life, separate
from the world you live in, and it's your own subjective life, and
fine I don't want to know that, this is our society with it's rules
and everything, those in the 21st century are the only possible
So they're essentials for survival.
That's the only way to talk to each other. So art has this real, ...
it's a vital place and a vital role to play in this global world.
Do you feel you have any idea of the sort of creative journey
ahead of you, because after all at 51 you are young?
This is true, well there was a TV series, when I was young called
the Little Rascals and it was made in the 30's by Hal Roach. And
it was about this band of little kids that had all of these
misadventures. And there was one moment when they got on a
hand made carts, to go speeding down the hill, of course with
the steering wheel that broke halfway down and they went
spinning out of control. And at one point the back end of this,
this wagon thing kinda carried around right next to the front end,
it was in fact right in front of the driver and little Stymie the little
black kid, in the group, like was shocked, his eyes were real wide
and he looked right at Spanky the little kid behind the steering
wheel... driving the little cart and Stymie said, where are you
going? And Spanky said, I don't know where we're going, but
we're on our way. So that's were I'm going, don't ask me where,
but we're on our way.
Bill Viola thank you very much (laughs).
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BBC - Radio 3 - Bill Viola Interview
10 of 10 4/06/13 9:54 PM