MOVING FRESCOES

HUONG NGUYEN

ART 362

PROFESSOR ELLEN HOOBLER

OCTOBER 20, 2014

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Bill Viola may have been born to video as a medium, but he lives and breathes in the

spaces of Early Renaissance art. Citing his various influences, Viola is more likely to talk about

Giotto and the Assisi frescoes than Nam June Paik—in Viola’s own words, “video art’s original

master”1—and of the contemporary Abstract Expressionists and Conceptual artists, he mentions

them not at all. Many of Viola’s videos were in fact either directly or indirectly influenced by

frescoes from the Trecento and the Quattrocento, drawing upon their themes, their symbolism,

and most curiously of all, their techniques. Ascension (2000), Voyage (2002), and Catherine’s

Room (2001) are what I tentatively term his Moving Frescoes; all three recall the spiritual space

of the church, all return to the timelessness and universality of birth and death, and all remain

intrinsically indebted to the narrative techniques of fresco painters. In the Moving Frescoes,

instead of exploring video as a cinematic medium, Viola treats the video as “moving pictures”

and treats the video series as Renaissance artists would the fresco cycle: like canvas for the epic

themes of life, death, birth, and rebirth.

“In the [early Renaissance] world,” Viola writes, “[i]mages become “frozen moments.”

They become artifacts of the past. In securing their place on earth, they have accepted their own

mortality.” The invention of the “moving pictures,” which far predates the invention of the

video, “[liberated the image] from its prison frozen in time.”2 The extreme slow-motion of many

of Viola’s videos dramatizes this liberation. In Ascension (fig. 1), a man slowly plunges into

1 Martin Gayford, "The Ultimate Invisible World," Modern Painters 16, no. 3 (2003): 25, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

2 Bill Viola, “Video Black – The Mortality of Image,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, (California: University of California Press, 1996), 481, http://wiki.dxarts.washington.edu/sandbox/groups/general/wiki/b94dd/attachments/6bbf8/viola_VideoBlack.pdf (accessed October 20, 2014).

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water feet first, his arms outstretched in mock of the Crucifixion.3 The Crucifixion is, of course,

one of most predominant themes of Early Renaissance artists, and in effect, Viola had used the

additional dimension of time that video has afforded him to paradoxically depict a single,

meditative moment of profundity. Writing of another slow-motion Bill Viola video, Grace

Glueck observes that the technique “[suggests] the stasis of looking at paintings.” 4 Indeed, many

of Viola’s Renaissance-inspired works create within the dark viewing rooms of art museums “a

place of silent worship,”5 much like the frescoes had done for their church. The audience is

captivated by the shafts of light in lieu of the halo, piercing the luminously blue water and

languishing on the contours of the man’s body. The sound design is entirely solemn and diegetic,

a steady rumble of the water punctuated by the crash and by the bell-like tinkle of bubbles

breaking. The frame refuses to move. This is not cinema. This is painting.

Yet the moving picture, though no longer frozen, is nonetheless mortal. “Once there was

a train of images sequentially unfolding in time,” Viola muses, “there was ‘a moving image,’ and

with it, by necessity, a beginning and an end; mortal images, with the camera as death.” 6 As we

watch Ascension, we watch an image practically die. The iconography of Ascension echoes it;

lest we forget, the Crucifixion is about the death of Jesus Christ, and the man in the video

likewise drops incrementally out of frame then, essentially, slowly drowns to death. But even his

3 “Bill Viola ASCENSION,” Des Moines Art Center, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/pages/Bill-Viola-ASCENSION.aspx.

4 Grace Glueck, "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely," New York Times 152, no. 52254 (2002): E30, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

5 David Packwood, "Saving Postmodernism's Soul: Bill Viola's The Passions," Art Book 11, no. 4 (2004): 8, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

6 Viola, “Video Black – The Mortality of Image,” 481.

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death does not return the image to its initial state—only until the shafts of light finally die out,

bringing the water back to its dark mystery, does the video end, and then, loop back to itself.

Artists in the Medieval and the Renaissance were not merely depicting single moments,

however. What they were interested in were stories—Biblical stories, Creationist stories, and in

attempt to tell complete narratives, they collapsed moments together in one single painting.

Rogier van der Weyden’s The Dream of Pope Sergius (1430s), for instance, is composed of

several events and reads from left to right. To the left of the painting, an angel appears to Pope

Sergius in his bedroom, and to the right, the Pope meets various subjects in the courtyard; and

yet even farther right and further back, the Pope appoints Saint Hubert as the new bishop.7 It is

from this painting that Viola would borrow not the myth, but the techniques themselves.8

Voyage (fig. 2), Viola’s fourth video in his Going Forth by Day exhibition, pays blatant

homage to The Dream of Pope Sergius. To the left of the frame, an old man is dying alone in his

bedroom. His son and his daughter-in-law arrive at the door, struggling with the lock and unable

to enter until it is too late. To the right of the frame, the same man, his wife, and their worldly

possessions depart on a boat, traveling to the afterlife on a river that must reference the Styx.9

This is the very same conflation of moments favored by Renaissance artists. Moreover, the

composition and the color palette of the video deliberately recall Weyden’s painting; Voyage is

vibrant and crisp with red roofs and blue expanses of vast sky, echoing the schemes of the

7 “The Dream of Pope Sergius,” The J. Paul Getty Museum, accessed October 20, 2014, http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=696.

8 Bill Viola, Mark Kidel, and Fiona Mackenzie, Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart, DVD, (Bristol: Calliope Media, 2003).

9 Milly Heyd and David Heyd, "Perception as Missing: On Bill Viola's Going Forth by Da," Notes in the History of Art 22, no. 4 (2003): 33-34, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

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Quattrocento painting; in both works, the walls of the bedrooms on the left are also peeled back

—impossibly—to reveal the intimacies within. This open-wall technique, explains Viola, as well

as the act of playing with sense-of-space in order to manipulate simultaneity and sequentiality, is

a lost art.10 Viola rediscovers and employs such arts here, albeit not precisely per the prescription

of the Early Renaissance painters. The conflated moments in Weyden’s painting are ostensibly

simultaneous but read as sequential. Events in Viola’s video, on the other hand, really are and

really read as simultaneous. The remarkable thing here is that Viola chooses to use a medieval

technique instead of more conventional and more modern devices to depict simultaneous events,

such as cuts, and such as actually moving the camera and thereby moving the frame. The greatest

audacity of Bill Viola’s videos is that he works from the bleeding edge of technology but reaches

back in time for everything external to it, grasping at something close to, perhaps, timelessness.

To that end, Viola’s themes are unfailingly universal and timeless. Christians, insists

Viola, do not own the Crucifixion or any other spiritual symbolism.11 Viola himself mediates

between Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Sufism,12 and is “transcendent,” Murray writes, for his

“artistic return to the sameness of spiritualism.” Viola “[relies] on stripped down mythical and

universal formulas of transcendence, rebirth, struggle, and love to drive his intermixed spectacles

of videomatic movement and virtual reality.” 13 With this common symbolic language at its

10 Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

11 Packwood, “Saving Postmodernism’s Soul,” 8.

12 Ziad Elmarsafy and المرصفي Adapting Sufism to Video Art: Bill Viola and the“ ,زيادSacred / : والمقدس ڤيوال بيل الڤيديو فن في التصوف ,Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics ”,تجلياتno. 28 (2008): 127, http://www.jstor.org (accessed October 20, 2014).

13 Timothy Murray, "Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality," Substance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 31, no. 2/3 (2002): 270, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

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disposal, Viola’s artwork proceeds to ask us to “find a place of silent contemplation or prayer, or

the possibility of seeing unto ourselves,” and “focus our minds on what the Buddhists call ‘the

silent life.’”14 The act of introspective meditation transcends culture and time, argues Viola, and

it is art that can bring the internal product of meditation out to the external. Through art, we are

able to connect to other people and cast ourselves out to the world.

Viola, through the Moving Frescoes, is attempting to connect with the Old Masters. As it

were, the “Old Masters” is as much a misnomer as a signifier of retrospective respect; the artists

must have been young once—and in the time of the Proto-Renaissance, they were young men

themselves, experimenting with techniques and aesthetics and radically changing the face of

art.15 Technology has marched on since the time of Giotto and Brunelleschi, but Viola feels that

artists continue to reach for the same ideas.16 Faced with questions about the artificiality of

Hollywood filmmaking methods, Viola refers back to Giotto: Painting in the period before

Brunelleschi’s discovery of one-point-perspective, Giotto’s landscapes and building inevitably

look “phony,” like “theater sets.” But, pointing emphatically to his chest, Viola says, “I realized

that what [Giotto] was going after was not about rocks and trees and how real they look…it’s

what’s going on in here, that’s the fidelity he was going for.” About the Old Masters in general,

and about the pensive figures in centuries-old paintings, Viola professes, “It’s about the depth

that’s within people, and when you’re seeing those people, you’re having a moment with…

another person from [the ages] no longer with us.” 17

14 Packwood, “Saving Postmodernism’s Soul,” 10.

15 Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

16 Bill Viola and Bonnie Clearwater, Bill Viola: Liber Insularum (2012), from MCH Swiss Exhibition, http://vimeo.com/55512273 (accessed October 20, 2014).

17 Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

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Going back to Voyage, that it belongs in a five-part video series installation piece is

another reference to Early Renaissance frescoes—that, of the fresco cycles.18 Talking about

Giotto’s frescoes in the Mother Church of the Franciscan Order in Assisi, Viola gushes, “You get

absorbed in each of these panels, but in reality the piece is the entire space in which you are

surrounded by images.”19 The Going Forth by Day exhibition taken as a whole evokes the

spiritual space of chapels and churches, which normally featured fresco cycles about the lives of

either Biblical figures or various Saints.20 In the Trecento, Giotto illustrated the life of Saint

Francis in frescoes running from left to right, along the walls of the church, and in the twenty-

first century, Viola tells the story of a single human life set against the backdrop of the life cycle

of nature, propelled by the Christian myths of Creation and Last Judgment. Composed of five

videos arranged from outside in and from left to right in the viewing room, the exhibition tells

five different, linear stories, but “the experience,” Milly and David Heyd write, “…is cyclical.”

The first video, Fire Birth, evokes the beginning of life, both human and primordial, and the last

video, First Light, signifies ascension. The Heyds assert: “[T]he topic of the work is the cycle of

nature (the four seasons) and the cycle of human life (birth-life-death-rebirth).” 21 The theme of

life and death indeed permeates most of Viola’s oeuvre—he has been obsessed with it ever since

his mother’s succumbed to cancer.22

18 Which is to say, I can still legitimately title the collection Moving Frescoes, even though The Dream of Pope Sergius remains, defiantly, oil on panel.

19 Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

20 Heyd, “Perception as Missing,” 30.

21 Ibid.

22 Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

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Catherine’s Room (fig. 3) hails from the same sort of thematic playground. The

installation is composed of five video projections, arranged end-to-end, and records the

progression of a single day of a woman inside a sparsely furnished room. The trees branching

across the windows of the rooms though, as they sprout flowers and shed leaves from panel to

panel, hint at a bigger time scale. In the first panel, the woman gets up; it is early morning in the

spring. In the second panel, it is simultaneously afternoon and summer, the third, sunset and

autumn; the fourth, cold night and winter. The fifth panel is pervaded by the darkness and the

quiet of death and “void.” 23 Bill Viola says that the installation is “the linking of a life to the

larger cycle of nature, which are eternal because they are cyclical.” 24 The intensely private and

intimate life of a woman becomes, suddenly, cosmic.

Catherine’s Room’s technique is borrowed this time from “15th-century Italian

Renaissance predella panels, sequences of small narrative paintings in Christian art that were

used to depict the life of the saints.”25 The individual video panels are not so slowed down as

Ascension but they might as well be. They tell no story on their own—each is more of a snapshot

in the life of the woman named Catherine than anything else, but the narrative, as with the

predella, can be found in the spaces in between. “We really exist in between the empty spaces in

reality," Viola says, "the space between physical objects.” Mark Hansen writes:

The time‐image involves an opening of the image to something not only outside the

frame but outside the whole set of images that can potentially be framed. That is why the

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Camille Hong Xin and Bill Viola, “Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill Viola,” Art in America, February 15, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-features/interviews/bill-viola-moca-north-miami/ (accessed October 20, 2014).

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time‐image must be situated “between images”; only by opening an outside, an interstice,

between two images can cinema present a direct image of time.26

And, of the Quintet of the Astonished (2000), one of Viola’s slow-motion works, Hansen argues,

“Viola’s intention here, as in the Passions project as a whole, is to capture the transitions

between emotional states, what his inspiration, the Old Masters, ‘didn’t paint, those steps in

between.’” 27 Catherine’s Room, in the service of the narrative, eschews this transitional state.

Some critics are unconvinced. Grace Glueck’s review for the New York Times reads:

“But for all [Going Forth by Day]’s scale and ambition, its ingenuity and technical

accomplishment, it poses several problems. For one, making the video medium into a homage to

painting—even as brilliantly as it has been done here—seems to violate the spirit of both.” 28

Daniel Kunitz, writing for New Criterion, suggests that Viola is not a film artist, and that “he's

essentially a ‘painterly’ and sculptural artist.” 29 Does my naming this collection “Moving

Frescoes” betray this? But that, I think, is an exercise in reductionism. Examining Viola’s videos

in any sort of detail is necessarily a philosophical exercise, engaging in the way Viola portrays

time, through time. “When we’re talking about space we’re really talking about time,” Viola

suggests in a 2012 interview, 30 bringing Einstein’s space-time continuum theories into a

discussion of art. There is something very science-fiction-y indeed in the way Viola uses space to

26 Mark Hanses, "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004), http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?AccessToken =9I5QIIX8XDXX9E55QQUD45ZK14D58QIXI1&Show=Object (accessed October 20, 2014).

27 Ibid.

28 Glueck, "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely," E30.

29 Daniel Kunitz, "Compressed narratives, minute actions." New Criterion 20, no. 6 (2002), http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

30 Viola, Bill Viola: Liber Insularum.

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collapse time, and uses time as an extension of space, come to think of it. Nonetheless,

Ascension, Voyage, and Catherine’s Room all suggest that as the artist’s canvas becomes digital,

it also turn porous and malleable, and Viola has melded into them, in the end, an acute sense of

history and place, delicate and fluctuant though that place is in the unending cycles of death and

rebirth.

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WORKS CITED

“Bill Viola ASCENSION.” http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/pages/Bill-Viola-

ASCENSION.aspx (accessed October 20, 2014).

Elmarsafy, Ziad and . المرصفي 2008زياد . “Adapting Sufism to Video Art: Bill Viola and the

Sacred / : والمقدس ڤيوال بيل الڤيديو فن في التصوف Alif: Journal of Comparative ”.تجليات

Poetics, no. 28: 127-149. http://www.jstor.org (accessed October 20, 2014).

Gayford, Martin. 2003. "The Ultimate Invisible World." Modern Painters 16, no. 3: 22-25.

http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

Glueck, Grace. 2002. "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely." New York Times 152, no. 52254:

E30. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

Hansen, Mark. 2004. "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life." Critical Inquiry 30, no.

3: 584-626. http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?AccessToken=

9I5QIIX8XDXX9E55QQUD45ZK14D58QIXI1&Show=Object (accessed October 20,

2014).

Heyd, Milly and David Heyd. 2003. "Perception as Missing: On Bill Viola's Going Forth by

Day." Notes in the History of Art 22, no. 4: 30-38. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed

October 20, 2014).

Kunitz, Daniel. 2002. "Compressed narratives, minute actions." New Criterion 20, no. 6: 47-

49. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

Murray, Timothy. 2002. "Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality." Substance:

A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 31, no. 2/3: 265-279. http://www.ebscohost.com

(accessed October 20, 2014).

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Packwood, David. 2004. "Saving Postmodernism's Soul: Bill Viola's The Passions." Art Book

11, no. 4: 8-10. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

“The Dream of Pope Sergius.” The J. Paul Getty Museum. accessed October 20, 2014,

http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=696.

Viola, Bill. “Video Black – The Mortality of Image.” In Theories and Documents of

Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter

Selz, 476-486. California: University of California Press, 1996.

http://wiki.dxarts.washington.edu/sandbox/groups/general/wiki/b94dd/attachments/

6bbf8/viola_VideoBlack.pdf (accessed October 20, 2014).

Viola, Bill, Mark Kidel, and Fiona Mackenzie. 2003. Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart. Bristol,

England: Calliope Media.

Viola, Bill and Bonnie Clearwater. Bill Viola: Liber Insularum (2012). From MCH Swiss

Exhibition, http://vimeo.com/55512273 (accessed October 20, 2014).

Xin, Camille Hong and Bill Viola. “Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill Viola.”

Art in America, February 15, 2013. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/news-

features/interviews/bill-viola-moca-north-miami/ (accessed October 20, 2014).

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Figure 1. Bill Viola, still from Ascension, 2000.

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Figure 2. Bill Viola, still from Voyage, 2002.

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Figure 3. Bill Viola, still from Catherine’s Room, 2001.