Expanded memories: to mark his major exhibition opening in Japan this month, Bill Viola talks about his philosophy of art

Apollo, Oct, 2006 by Martin Gayford

Just as art historians have debated the origins of painting in oils, so they have sought the beginnings of video art--but with rather more precise results. The first video art to be created came about, it seems, when the Korean-born artist Nam June Paik turned a portable camera on a papal procession passing down Fifth Avenue, New York, in 1965. That makes video just 41 years old--considerably junior to painting. On that momentous occasion the celebrated video artist Bill Viola, born in 1951, was just 14.

Since then the medium--which still seems very new to many in the art world--has undergone several technical revolutions. That became clear during a day I spent with Viola, talking and watching him at work in Laser Pacific, a cutting-edge editing laboratory in Hollywood, where TV soaps and advertisements were being honed all around us, in rooms kept icy cold for the benefit of electronic circuits. There is no better place to grasp that we are living in times of astonishingly rapid change.

Viola compares our high-tech world to the early renaissance: 'The age we live in is so similar to the 15th century. There was a brand new way of making images at the beginning of the 15th century--perspective painting--which is a lot like 3D computer graphics today. You had oil paint, similar to digital photography, which could be continuously retouched--it wasn't like fresco, where you make one stroke and you can't change it. Then in the middle of the century Gutenberg came out with the printing press--and that's the equivalent of the internet: an explosion in information.'

Video art is of course a by-product of television; it was never intended to be an artistic medium. It came into being when artists discovered the first portable video cameras, and began creatively misusing them. 'When I started in video', Viola recalls, 'the problem was that it was so primitive by today's standards. The image was black and white--period. There was no colour in portable video. Colour was in these big, boxy cameras in professional television studios that were out of anyone's reach. Over the years the technology has evolved. Image quality has got better, easier to control, more consistent. Display devices, screens, have become better.' Videos were first shown on monitors--television sets. Then came projection, and plasma screen. The past 15 years have brought Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) screens and High Definition Television (HDTV), which works by digital means. Both of these are media as different from the early flickering, fuzzy, black-and-white video cameras as a Van Eyck oil is from a charcoal sketch.

Viola uses everything technology offers. He has employed LCD screens, for example, to make works that hang on the wall like moving easel paintings--and in many cases made references to art of the 15th and 16th centuries. A work such as Catherine's Room (Fig. 3), on five LCD screens, is like looking into a series of predella panels beneath a Florentine altarpiece. But each shows a moment--sleeping, sewing, washing--in a contemporary person's life.

[FIGURE 3 OMITTED]

'Now', says Viola, 'we have the widest range of media I've experienced in my lifetime. The palette has vastly expanded.' Each innovation in visual technology holds expressive possibilities for him. Of LCD screens he says, 'They were startling the first time I saw them. I felt like there was no protection any more. This was hyper-realism--not a hint of a veil. You felt you could just put your hand in it. Even the reflection on the glass wasn't there any more. It was the transparency I was really drawn to, and the quality. At the same time it always felt artificial, and that fascinated me.'

On the other hand, as in other art media, there is no such thing as direct progress. Viola remains equally fascinated by low-tech imagery. 'I was always nervous of these advances, because they were always trying to make everything look more slick, and like glossy magazine photos that the Hollywood guys love. Of course, I like texture, and darkness and aberrations.' Some of the imagery he created for the production of Tristan und Isolde seen in Los Angeles and Paris last year was shot using a 30-year-old camera. A sequence shows two lovers walking in a darkened wood, romantic, mysterious and gloriously grainy--but the grain, as Viola's wife, Kira Perov, puts it, is 'enhanced'. High-definition digital technology allows him to blow up the images from this ancient equipment and instead of producing a massive version of an old TV picture--complete with scan lines--he makes the fuzz beautiful, 'like salt and pepper'.

Whereas the people surrounding him in Hollywood are trying to create an illusion of reality, Viola has always been interested in pointing out that what we see is an illusion. In that, he is an extremely philosophical artist, and, be once memorably remarked, a video camera is actually a philosophical device. What exactly, I asked, did he mean by that?

'It's a representation of the world, it's not the world. You're given a reflection of the object, but the mirror is not as faithful as we would like to believe. So in a video image we have a way of regarding and analysing and discussing this world that's in front of our senses right now. You have a representation that is close enough, so that is recognisable. But it's not the same. Bruce Naumann taught me this. A work of his that affected me most profoundly was his fabulous Video Surveillance Piece (Public Room, Private Room), 1969-70. That consisted of two identical spaces, with a camera and a monitor in each--but the monitor was connected to the camera in the other. One was sealed, the other had an open door, so you could walk into it. So you go into the open room, see a monitor on the wall, and the camera scanning. But the room on the monitor shows an empty room. And your image is being shown in an empty room. All of a sudden, you have parallel worlds. That made me highly aware that these tools were not just fun things to use, or a metaphor for painting. But that they were actually capable of deep philosophical discussion of human existence. I've been working off that, in one way or another, for most of my life.'