ARTINFO

LONG BEACH, Calif.—Artinfo.com caught Bill Viola by telephone in his home here
just as he was dashing off to Paris for a second run of his opera project, Wagner's
Tristan und Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars. Viola is busy these days—opening this
week at James Cohan Gallery is his first New York solo gallery exhibition in five years,
featuring work related to the Tristan project, as well as other new videos.

Born in 1951, Viola began working with video in the 1970s and is today among the
best-known artists working in this relatively new medium; many of the videos he makes
are collaborations with his wife Kira Perov. His pieces reflect a strong engagement with
art history; some overtly reference Old Master paintings. (A few years ago, Viola was
the first video artist to have work acquired by the Metropolitan Museum of Art.) He has
represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, been chosen for the Whitney
Biennial and has been in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world.

Last December Tristan und Isolde had a test run in Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert
Hall in Los Angeles, where it was conducted by Esa Pekka Salonen. Its official world
premier was last April at the Opéra National de Paris, where it was again conducted by
Salonen. On Nov. 8 it has a second run at the Opéra National de Paris, with conductor
Valéry Gergiev. Performances there run through Dec. 6. The opera will return to Los
Angeles in March 2007 and will travel to New York's Lincoln Center in April 2007.

The exhibition at James Cohan Gallery runs Nov.5 to Dec. 22.

There was a lot of water imagery in your work for the opera, and in your work in
general. What does the image mean for you?

Death… life… time… memory… self-image… illusion… nirvana… a lot of things. I

almost drowned when I was six years old on a family holiday at Trout Lake in upstate
New York. It was possibly the most profound, life-changing and transcendent
experience I've ever had. It was accompanied by a complete lack of fear — only calm
and peace. When I think about it now it centers me again. I had no idea I was almost
drowning at the time. I'd practically forgotten the experience for many years until a
conversation I had with a friend when I was in my late 30s. I realized then how deeply it
was embedded in me.

In terms of video, it's interesting to note that when you look at Old Master pictures in
historical art museums, there are two natural elements are conspicuously under-
represented—water, up close and flowing, and fire. There are reasons for that—those
elements represent the fundamental dynamism of nature, and that's impossible to
embody in a static form.

Unless you're Turner…

Oh yes! He got it when he was out in that storm tied to the mast! So did the Abstract
Expressionists in a different way—they made the important breakthrough of equating
the fluidity of paint with the flowing of time. They were really painting time itself.
Whistler painted fireworks...man-made fire...

Yes, and when you understand paint as a liquid medium, there is an interesting
connection to the forces of nature, including the atmosphere in Turner's case. Scientists
describe atmosphere using the mathematics of fluid dynamics—they consider it to be a
liquid, always changing and flowing. When you make a video of fire and of water, the
resonance is incredible—a flowing stream interpreted by flowing electrons. I was drawn
to water intuitively, with a camera in my hand—drawn to its pulsing waves and
undulating surfaces, and of course, optically to the images it reflected.

I made a live camera piece in 1976, when I was 25, which was shown in the Museum of
Modern Art. (It was the first time my father recognized that I was a real artist.) I focused
a video camera with a close-up lens on a drop of water slowly dripping from a copper
pipe suspended from the ceiling. This revealed the existence of a perfect image of the
room within each water drop, which was then projected onto a large screen at the back
of the gallery. When spectators came into the space, each saw their own image moving
within the drop on the video screen. The drop would eventually shudder and fall,
landing on an amplified drum and making a loud sound.

Your use of water now, with waves hitting figures, and floods, and such, seems
more cathartic than in that piece...

Well, I thought of each of those drops as a life. For the Persian poet Rumi, each human
life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves
along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition
of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water
outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner
water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy
returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

There's a new, hour-long work in the show called The Darker Side of Dawn. It's a
tree filmed over the course of an entire day?

Yes, this piece deals with the cycles that comprise our inner and outer lives and that
connect us to nature in fundamental ways. They evoke an ontological experience that is
profoundly philosophical and ultimately spiritual. Specifically, it's a video recording of
one of those majestic California oak trees that we have here in the mountains around
Los Angeles. One day I was out in the countryside shooting footage for the Tristan
project on my camcorder and came across this extraordinary tree. I had an ecstatic
experience shooting the sunset behind it, but then realized it needed to be done as a
large projection in high-definition video to capture all the detail and subtlety of color.
So I called up my cameraman, Harry Dawson, whom I've worked with for over 13
years, and he went out the next weekend, found the exact spot and shot it.

The final piece is an one-hour long, 19-foot-wide, silent projection of the tree as it
moves from total darkness to the blinding light of the sun shining directly into the
camera lens, and then back again to darkness. It plays this way in a continuous loop.
The changing light and atmospheric conditions are subtle and extremely slow moving,
even though the entire event has been sped up in time-lapse. The change in light and
coloration is barely perceptible, more of a felt bodily sensation rather than a conscious
perception. Editing the piece was extremely difficult, and I worked on it with my editor
Brian Pete for an entire week of intensive looking. We could only really check our work
by watching the image in high-speed fast-forward or rewind when the rhythms of the
movement became visible.

It's a kind of metaphor, something to meditate on?

Well, it is a piece that you have to give yourself to, to literally enter its state of time. If
you breeze past it, it's just a still image of a tree. To answer your question, almost
anything can be an object of meditation. The entire world and our experience in it is a
metaphor. Things as fundamental as a tree passing through stages of light and darkness
have all become symbols in the hands of human beings and have passed into the
traditions of philosophical and religious discourse, as well as scientific knowledge. I
like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open, but what I was specifically
interested in here was creating something that referenced the sense of time in non-
human nature. Dawn and sunset are the times when Nature herself is unstable and in
flux. The nocturnal world and the daytime world are meeting, and for a brief time
coexisting. It's not a neat hard cut, but a blurred, irregular dissolve. These moments are
the seams in existence through which we can get a glimpse of the deeper, fundamentally
random, chance workings of a system in which we are only a small, insignificant player.

Your videos are often compared to paintings—some of them refer to specific Old
Master paintings—but sometimes that seems to be because people need a context
for video, so they compare it to painting. Do you think about paintings while you
are making your work? Do you use it as a reference?

I get a lot of inspiration from paintings. When I go to museums I generally make a

beeline for the painting galleries. I consider myself a painter in the sense of the tradition
of the handmade image, which takes us right back to the caves. That's my lineage,
though I use different tools. I also work with sound. But fundamentally I'm interested in
moving images.

Cézanne famously grappled with how to represent the world through painting in
his way... As a result he spent a great deal of time outdoors, meditating on the
landscape.

I see painting as an art of time. It's about being in that one place, focusing on that one
moment. The end result is directly related to the amount of time one spends with the
object of consciousness. My favorite Cézanne quote is, "Right now there is a moment of
time passing by, and we must become that moment." Notice he didn't say we must
capture that moment—he said we must become it. When you stay still and have to
render something, it's very profound and ultimately, as you say, meditative. It's about
presence and living in the moment. This basic technique of stilling the body and the
mind into extreme focus exists in all cultures and has always been considered one of the
most authentic sources of knowledge.

Your work is very reliant on technology, and yet there is a dark side. I read
something about iPods recently, lamenting that they put us all in our little worlds,
with different soundtracks...

Yes, I do see the isolation as a problem and politically dangerous, but through these
technologies it's also possible to have this unprecedented one-on-one, intimate way of
communicating with each another. Kira, my wife and working partner of 25 years, and I
are currently involved in a group project with the Dalai Lama for the Tibetan charities.
It's called The Missing Peace, and it's a call to action for world peace. The project is
based on the idea that DVDs spinning at 600 revolutions per minute are like miniature
prayer wheels. We're going to Dharmshala in December to meet him and make some
video recordings. I plan to create a series of portable digital prayer wheels that use this
intimate, highly personalized mode of communication to transmit blessings, prayers and
timeless teachings to be available anywhere anytime, on-demand for the mobile culture.

I'm fascinated by the idea that we are connected in a very intimate way, "plugged in."
That's precisely the mode you want to get to in spiritual practice. After all these years of
using video and connecting it to my own practice, I see so many parallels to
contemporary technology—everything from communication at a distance—someone
talking on his cell phone in front of you in a supermarket line, for instance—to
receiving an image of your mother over the Internet. In Cézanne's time, you'd just
assume that the guy's a nut talking to himself, or that the person receiving the image was
having a vision.

How did you work with the text and music in creating the videos for Tristan und
Isolde?

Wagner used music not to illustrate action, but to describe the movement of human
consciousness. He does illustrate some actions literally, but most other times, the
movement of the music is the movement of the inner lives of the characters. We take
that for granted today—every time you see a horror movie and you hear the creepy
music when a guy is walking down a hallway in the dark, that's Richard Wagner.

All these years using a camera, I've never really felt that it was solely a visual
instrument capturing light from the outside world. For me it was always dealing with
invisible things, like Cézanne's fleeting moment. So I've felt connected to Wagner since
I began listening to his music. If you are going to present images with music—two
time-based forms—they have to dance together, interact in interesting ways. That's why,
in terms of guideposts, the music came in last in the creative process, when I was
editing. The genesis of it was the libretto, which I was very comfortable with because
most of my work, in some way or another, comes from a text. And this one was a non-
Christian myth—one that is very rich and profound… and very Eastern. There are a lot
of Eastern influences in Wagner's work. The 19th century is when the foundational
works of the East were reaching Europe.The Bhagavad Gita was being translated into a
Western language for the first time, and Sufi poems were coming into Western
consciousness through people like Goethe. The spiritual heritage of mankind was just
beginning to circulate in a global way, inspiring artists and curious individuals, and
Wagner was one part of a larger whole that is still unfolding today.