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Bill Viola (new) |
On October 19, 2006, NY-based artist Robert Mangold gave a slide-illustrated talk on his work at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Mr. Mangold attributes his devotion to abstract painting to a life-changing visit to the Carnegie International in 1957, where he saw for the first time in person the works of New York School artists such as Pollock and de Kooning, as well as those of lesser-known European artists such as Alberto Burri and Antonio Tapies.
Mr. Mangold, who at the time was a twenty-year old student at the Cleveland Institute of Art, was stunned by the direct and immediate effect that the large-scale abstract paintings had on him. "They weren't pictures," he says, "They confronted you."
Although he has spun many variations over the years, Mr. Mangold's works are a readily- identifiable amalgam of painting, sculpture, and architecture. They often consist of three to five rectangular or polygonal canvases bolted together (sometimes only touching at a corner). He paints with a roller, usually using only one color per canvas. Then, he draws curving pencil lines, often circular or elliptical, that often flow from one canvas to the next and force the viewer to see the relationships among the canvases in a new way. For example, in his 1984 work "Four Color Frame Painting #9" at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Mr. Mangold links four rectangular canvases with a drawn ellipse. Mr. Mangold likened the overall effect to a "tussle" between the container/frame (the canvas) and the drawing within.
Mr. Mangold describes the process of making his art as alternating between the role of maker and the role of first viewer. Ironically, he adds that he was never very good at geometry.
Although he has considered making sculpture, Mr. Mangold loves the flatness of painting - the fact that there is only one (frontal) view. He likes the idea that taking in a painting doesn't involve time--i.e., you don't have to walk around it.
Mr. Mangold compared abstract art to music without lyrics. Although his work is sometimes likened to Minimalist sculpture, it stands apart in its emphasis on the visible hand of the artist - the drawn line.
On the opening day of the show "Hiroshi Sugimoto" February 16, 2006, Mr. Sugimoto, a Tokyo-born, New York-based photographer, was interviewed by Kerry Brougher, Chief Curator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Mr. Sugimoto has been interested in time-related projects since his student days. Early in his career, he was a dealer in museum-quality Japanese antiquities. His fascination with ancient images, and his curiosity about images that pre-date human history has led him in the last few years to begin collecting fossils, or as he calls them "pre-photography time-recording devices." In "History of History," a show that opens at the Sackler Gallery on April 1, 2006, the artist will display items from his personal collection, including antiquities and fossils. He plans to embark on a series in which he photographs the fossils using 19th century photography and lighting techniques.
The first room in the show displays images from the diorama series. The artist revealed several technical details of the shoot at the Museum of Natural History in New York. Looking at the dioramas with his naked eyes, Mr. Sugimoto found them rather obviously fake, but when he covered one eye to remove stereoscopic perspective (as a camera does), he realized that a black and white photograph might seem more real. So, he moved his large-format camera close enough to remove the frame that the museum puts around the diorama, used only the available museum light, wore black and used black backdrops to prevent glare and over-exposure of the backgrounds, and exposed the film at f64 for 20-60 minutes.
Mr. Sugimoto admitted that he tried some hallucinogens in the 1960s, and became very interested in how one's thinking and vision can be changed by such a small object--a pill. Always interested in psychology, he became aware of how tenuous reality seemed to him. In effect, he reverses the usual photographic process; he projects his inner vision onto reality. In a recent self-portrait as a blind photographer, Mr. Sugimoto shows himself as unable to look at the outside world.
The movie theater series derives from this inside-to-outside projection. Mr. Sugimoto had "a vision" of a glowing white screen caused by exposing photographic film for the duration of a feature film. He then tested the idea in an actual theater, and was pleased to find that it actually produced the result he had imagined. Asked why he didn't title the works in the series after the films that had been running, he commented that many of them were B-movies, and would have made for disappointing titles. However, he did recall that "Saturday Night Fever" was one of the films he photographed.
Mr. Sugimoto's waterfall series led his to his well-known seascape series. He was fascinated by how the same water and air was given different names around the world; he picked the sites for the photographs based on the names of the bodies of water. The photographs are very "precalculated"; to select the perfect days to shoot the night seascapes, he studied charts of the positions of the sun, moon, and planets.
The way his work is shown is very important to Mr. Sugimoto. For the Hirshhorn show, he designed some dramatic and unusual gallery layouts. At times, he's even displayed his photographs outdoors. For a Pittsburgh show, he hung the seascapes in an outdoor water cascade; during winter, they were embedded in ice. The artist wouldn't have minded if the elements had caused his photographs to fade, but they haven't done so.
Asked about influences on his work, Mr. Sugimoto cited Ansel Adams for his meticulous craftsmanship ("the spirit lives in the detail"), and the music of Mozart for its purity and mystery.
On February 16, 2006, New York-based, Latvian-born artist Vija Celmins (VEE'-A-SELL'-MINS) talked with Jeffrey Weiss, the National Gallery of Art's Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art.
Ms. Celmins says that art resides in the physical presence of the object (painting/drawing) itself. In some of her recent paintings of white dots against a black background, she applies a layer of paint, sands it, and applies another layer--building as many as twelve layers of paint.
Early in her career, working in California, Ms. Celmins made large paintings inspired by her Abstract-Expressionist heroes, such as Willem de Kooning. Realizing that such work was merely derivative, she began painting the objects in her studio, such as space heaters, hot plates, and food--striving for the sensibility and scale that she admired in Giorgio Morandi's work.
As she searched for additional images, the artist amassed a collection of black and white photographs ("the beautiful dusty grays") culled from library books. Recalling her youth in war-torn Europe, Ms. Celmins made paintings from photographs of war planes. (Unbeknowst to her, German artist Gerhard Richter also accumulated a large atlas of black and white photographs which served as the basis for his paintings, including several of American war planes.)
In the 1970s and 1980s, Ms. Celmins worked on a series called "To Fix the Image in Memory." She collected stones from the Rio Grande area, and displayed each stone beside a duplicate that she had cast in bronze and painted to match. "I sharpened myself on this work," she said. Although she claimed that it's easy to tell the original from the cast, Curator Weiss said he'd been unable to do so. Ms. Celmins encouraged viewers of these works to ask the question: was it (casting the duplicate) worth it?
Ms. Celmins' meticulous drawings of ocean waves, the moon's surface, and galaxies have drawn much attention. She says these drawings have nothing to do with the ocean or the moon and stars; they are more about the pencil and the paper, the modest nature of the pencil marks--i.e., the object itself. "The joy is in the aesthetics," she said.
Ms. Celmins had just seen the National Gallery's Cezanne show. She praised Cezanne's Provencal landscapes for showing that "you could bend the nature to make the art."
Ms. Celmins said that, from time to time, she stops making art and just thinks about art, but that when she again starts painting, the physical takes over and the thinking goes out the window. "Thank God," she added.
On September 28, 2005, Berlin-based, Canadian-born artist Janet Cardiff gave a slide and video-illustrated talk at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Museum commissioned Ms. Cardiff's audio walk "Words drawn in water," which can be borrowed at a lobby kiosk.
Ms. Cardiff began her career as a maker of prints and photo-based images, but in the early 1990s, she became more interested in sound, video, and installation work. In 1991, she made her first audio walk: "Forest Walk." The visitor carried a small audio tape recorder (she now uses iPods), and followed verbal walking instructions while looking about and listening to the recorded sound (as well as the ambient sound.)
The artist constructs her walks by developing a 10-20 minute route (longer would be too much to expect of visitors), and walking it over and over. Ideas begin to come to her. ("Play is especially important for artists.") She likes to lead visitors through a variety of spaces and sound environments (e.g., confined, wide-open, grassy, cobblestoned).
As she developed more audio walks, Ms. Cardiff became intrigued by the "intrusiveness" of sound. Unlike painting and sculpture (which always remain at some remove from the viewer), sound actually enters the body.
Ms. Cardiff often collaborates with her husband, film-maker George Bures Miller. These collaborations led to the development of video walks (made possible by the development of small, light-weight video cameras). A video walk differs from an audio walk in an interesting way: while the use of audio tends to heighten your ability to see, the use of video tends to desensitize you to sound. Therefore, to optimize the impact of a sound, Ms. Cardiff has sometimes had to cut the video off.
In recent years, Cardiff and Miller have developed a series of installations that simulate a theatrical experience in a small space through the use of binaural sound and hyper-perspective. The Corcoran Gallery of Art owns one of these works: "The Paradise Institute."
Ms. Cardiff's recent works have included a telescope that plays video, but reacts to the way it is moved. For example, through the lens, you may see a man leaning against a car, but a quick check with the naked eye reveals the same car, but no man. (The artist commented that viewers tend to believe that what they see through the lens is what is real.) She has also recently arrayed 40 speakers around a room, and programmed each speaker to play one of the 40 voices in Thomas Tallis' 40-part motet, "Spem in Alium." As the listener moves through the space, the sounds ebb and flow in ways that cannot be realized with standard two-speaker playback. She and Mr. Miller have also installed a major sound piece in the Eastern State Penitentiary Museum in Philadelphia.
On November 17, 2004, Danish-born, Berlin-based artist Olafur Eliasson delivered the first annual James T. Demetrion lecture at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Mr. Eliasson showed slides that revealed the astonishing range of his photographic, sculptural, and installation projects. He is well known for his recent installation at the Tate Modern in London--a stunning effect of sun and mist called "The Weather Project."
The artist discussed his fascination with the optical effects of color. He described color as a "cultural construct'--citing the oft-mentioned fact that Eskimo language has many words for "white," but one word that encompasses both red and blue. Mr. Eliasson has made several works in which the viewer's color perception changes as time passes. For example, a strip of projected light may initially be seen as cyan (greenish-blue). Then, as the eye adjusts, the green seems to turn pale, nearly white. Finally, when one looks away, everything turns red, as the eye manufactures the complementary afterimage. As in many of Mr. Eliasson's works, the viewer's position in time and space makes the work what it is.
Another theme running through the artist's work is a preference for "negotiating" the spaces that we make--rather than simply accepting a generic or standard approach to architecture, and public and interior spaces. He playfully subverted the staid atmospheres of Stockholm, Tokyo, and other cities by adding a harmless green dye to bodies of water--drawing attention to the often-ignored vitality of the flowing water. He added unexpected touches to indoor environments, such as installing an Icelandic lava flow on the floor of an Italian gallery. His "Reykjavik series" of photographs of buildings, currently on view at the Hirshhorn, calls attention to what happens when we fail to negotiate a wide variety of approaches.
A third idea that animates Mr. Eliasson's work is how easily our eyes are fooled into seeing depth. He has created anti-spective rooms, in which mirrors and the elimination of wall/ceiling and wall/floor joints attempt to subvert the viewer's assumptions about space and the way the body operates within it. The artist employs 10-15 architects, mathematicians, and other specialists to help him realize these complex projects. (He jokes that he needs a staff because when he is alone, he doesn't do anything.)
Finally, Mr. Eliasson spoke about his desire to eliminate the "boundary" between the museum experience and what happens after the viewer leaves the museum. He would be dismayed if his work had no effect on the visitor beyond the museum walls. He expressed delight at the way "The Weather Project" became an "out-of-control event" in which visitors felt comfortable laying on the ground to gaze up at the piece. In another project, Mr. Eliasson introduced an element of choice by creating two unlabelled side-by-side entrances to an exhibition--one was larger and brightly-lit, the other was smaller and dark. The visitor, whose normally expects to be guided around a museum by floor plans, audio tours, and signs, was suddenly confronted with the need to make the kind of decision (which entrance should I use?) that is utterly routine in life outside the museum, but somewhat surprising inside it.
On November 11, 2004 at the Corcoran Gallery, the Washington, DC-based artist William Christenberry discussed his work in a slide-illustrated talk.
Mr. Christenberry says that his drawings, paintings, sculptures, photographs, and prints nearly always concern "the landscape of my childhood." His work is filled with motifs from his native Alabama--red dirt, small wood or brick buildings, kudzu vines, gourd trees, road-side signs, and the Klan.
Dissatisfied with his early abstract paintings in the style of de Kooning and Kline, in the 1960s Mr. Christenberry began to take Brownie snapshots of the rural Alabama landscape. Two themes that recur in this work are tragedy (e.g., the decay and eventual destruction of buildings over time) and comedy (e.g., phallic road signs).
Since Mr. Christenberry makes return visits to photograph the same Alabama locations each year, his snapshots tell dramatic stories of the effects of time. An early photograph of a small wood house shows a scrawny vine twisted around a front porch column. In a photograph taken many years later, the vegetation completely obscures the house.
Eventually, Mr. Christenberry began making tabletop-sized sculptures of the buildings he photographed. These sculptures (don't call them models!) are often exhibited along with a selection of the corresponding annual photographs of the building.
Mr. Christenberry's sculpture also includes "Southern monuments" (constructions with surrealistic and dreamlike symbolism) and "dream buildings" (based on his dream of a windowless building with a tapering pointed roof). But he's quick to add that not everything in these works is overtly symbolic--e.g., he may include a ladder just to "breakup" a large volume with a linear shape.
Mr. Christenberry has not shied away from incorporating the dark side of his Alabama heritage into the work--e.g., images of hooded Ku Klux Klan members. In this regard, he is inspired by "Guernica," and Picasso's view that art is not made to decorate homes, but to serve as an offensive and defensive weapon against injustice.
On June 24, 2004 at the Corcoran Gallery, the Virginia-based photographer Sally Mann gave a slide-illustrated talk about her work. Ms. Mann described photography as inherently "dangerous" because it appears to depict reality, but is actually based on an "inherent mendacity."
Since her first museum show at the Corcoran in 1977, Ms. Mann's black and white photographs have been concentrated in two genres: portraits and documentary pictures of her family and neighbors, and landscapes of the American South. In her early career, she was the mother of small children, and she photographed whatever she could find around the house. For example, she filled her children's swimming pool with vegetables, and photographed them as they decayed. (This project ended when she tossed a smoked salmon into the mix, and it all turned to mush.)
In the 1980s, her photographs documenting the activities of her three small children, often nude, attracted criticism. Ms. Mann explained that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she rarely wore clothes until the age of six, and she raised her children in the same way.
Over time, her children seemed to recede from her photographs, and she began to focus on landscape. She had always used a view camera in her work, but she became increasingly interested in using techniques from the early history of photography, especially wet plate collodion on glass--a time-consuming and meticulous process.
These traditional techniques generate rich images that frequently retain artifacts of the process--such as scratches and dark smears. Ms. Mann feels that these images have a contemplative and memorial quality--resulting in a gravitas that perfectly suits subjects such as the Antietam and Manassas battlefields, or the countryside where Emmett Till was murdered. She says when she uses these labor-intensive techniques, it's not like she's taking a picture; it's like she's making an object.
Ms. Mann reviewed the origins of her current Corcoran show: "What Remains." The series began with her fascination with the bones and pelt of a beloved dog that had suddenly died. She then made two trips to a forensic facility in Tennessee where she photographed corpses that were allowed to decay outdoors for scientific study. She showed a powerful photograph of a decaying head that appeared to be lightly veiled, and revealed that the veil was actually a time-lapse exposure of rapidly moving insects. She then made photographs of the traces that remained after police killed an escaped convict a short distance from her home. Photographs of Antietam ("A serenely indifferent landscape") and her children complete the series. Re the latter, Ms. Mann said, "Contained within the loving is the inevitability of loss."
Ms. Mann described her best work as "completely serendipitous." She advises photographers to keep a camera handy since an opportunity for a great picture will arise when you least expect it.
On March 30, 2004 at the Corcoran Gallery, the New York-based landscape painter April Gornik gave a slide-illustrated talk about her work.
Ms. Gornik began painting landscapes in 1977, after she became dissatisfied with her attempts at making text-based conceptual art. Her early images derived from dreams. Throughout her career, she has painted physical landscapes that correspond to complex, sometimes contradictory, emotional states. For example an early image of two large rocks on a flat surface suggests a portal or gate, but could also be read as forbidding the viewer to go further. Other signature images include storms, trees, floods, and waterways.
Some of Ms. Gornik's most arresting images have a spare, Zen-like quality. She described such an image from 1983 as "barely there, but replete." She is inspired by the Japanese concept of "ma" in which spare imagery charges the intervening space.
Although she is inspired by American luminist painters such as Frederick Church, Ms. Gornik never includes people or animals in her work. She would rather give the viewers complete freedom to project themselves into her images. A friend told her that light is the protagonist in her work.
In the early stages of her career, Ms. Gornik's works were quite large--just short of mural size. After a 1990 show that was savaged by the critics, she had difficulty working for a while, but rebounded in 1993 by making her first small paintings and drawings, and eventually resumed making large-scale work. Although Ms. Gornik makes extensive use of photographic software to sketch, collage, and manipulate images, the final painting is a product of intuition and feeling, and doesn't portray a specific real world landscape.
On March 11, 2004, American figurative painter Eric Fischl gave a slide-illustrated talk at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. The Museum owns Mr. Fischl's 1980 black-and-white oil painting, "The Funeral."
Mr. Fischl trained as an abstract painter, under second generation Abstract Expressionists. He concluded that was simply not a good abstract painter, and agonized over what kind of painter he could become.
He began making figurative drawings on transparent paper, and decided that the figures were the members of a family. He pinned the drawings on the wall, and moved them around to create little soap opera-like dramatic scenes. Certain combinations seemed to pull his feelings together. In a sense, this exercise set the course for his career.
Mr. Fischl has been no stranger to controversy, beginning with his startling 1979 painting "Sleepwalker" which depicts a naked boy urinating in a backyard swimming pool, and continuing to this day. His recent bronze sculpture of a falling woman, unveiled on the anniversary of the September 11 attacks, was misunderstood.
Mr. Fischl's paintings often comes in pairs and trios, showing the same place at different times, or different places at the same time.
Even though virtually all of his work depicts the human body, Mr. Fischl has rarely used models, preferring to work from memory and photographs. However, for a recent project in Germany, he hired two actors and took several thousand photographs. Using a computer program, he manipulated the photographs until he discovered the images he wanted to paint. Unlike, for example, Gerhard Richter, he did not project the photographs onto the canvas.
Although he is extremely successful, Mr. Fischl describes the contemporary figurative painter's task as a "pain in the ass" because he must make up everything--his style, his technique, his subject. He contrasted this situation with that of 18th and 19th century French painting where the slightest deviation from established painting conventions would be widely understood by viewers.
Mr. Fischl says that he does not expect every viewer to figure out exactly what he puts into a painting, but commented that "everything you put into a picture, somebody can get out of it."
On September 9, 2002 at the Corcoran Gallery, the American figurative painter Philip Pearlstein gave a slide-illustrated talk about his work. According to the HMSG Web site, the museum owns four works by Mr. Pearlstein.
After studying art at Carnegie Tech in Pittsburgh (Andy Warhol was a fellow student), Mr. Pearlstein moved to New York during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Although art schools in the 1950s had stopped teaching working from the human figure, Mr. Pearlstein saw the figure everywhere--even in Franz Kline's canvasses. Studying the serial photographs of Eadweard Muybridge (also an obsession of Francis Bacon), Mr. Pearlstein carefully observed how the shapes of limbs and muscles change as the body moves.
After producing some work in the Ab-Ex mode, Mr. Pearlstein developed his signature style of painting one or two nude figures posed with visually-striking objects such as weather vanes, marionettes, and colorful patterned Native American rugs. He has always made a point of including in his paintings the mundane details of his studio, such as light sockets and floorboards, to ground the figures and avoid what he calls surrealist overtones. His explanation of why parts of the figures are sometimes cropped out of his paintings? He starts each painting in the middle of the canvas, and stops when he reaches the edge.
Over the years, Philip Pearlstein's work has attracted controversy. For example, his paintings of white models posed with African American marionettes were criticized as patronizing. On at least two occasions, his paintings were defaced. Mr. Pearlstein shrugs off controversy by observing that "an artist can not control the meaning of the work . . . all you can do is give the painting a title."
On April 4, 2003, Lee Aks, Sculpture Conservator of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, gave a lunch-time talk on his successful efforts to restore Henry Moore's outdoor bronze sculpture "Seated Woman" (1956-1957). "Seated Woman" required extensive restoration work because over the years, exposure to the elements had cracked and stained the work in several spots, and caused it to darken considerably.
As Mr. Aks prepared his restoration plan, the Museum's Curator of Sculpture traveled to the Henry Moore Foundation in England to speak with Mr. Moore's assistants, and learn as much as possible about the artist's intent for the work. Meanwhile, back at the Museum, magnet-testing of the work revealed that some of the iron rods used in the casting process (which should have been removed) had remained inside, and were probably responsible for some of the staining. Tests with a fiber-optic device threaded inside the sculpture confirmed that it would be necessary to remove the iron rods.
Removing the iron rods required the sculptural equivalent of major surgery. Square windows had to be cut into the bronze, and conservators reached inside the work to remove the deteriorated rods and clean up the damage they had caused. Then, skilled welders reattached the windows--without leaving any visible scars.
To correct the color of the sculpture and remove the stains, the surface was carefully bead-blasted until it was the color of pure bronze--a warm honey/gold. Then using the detailed information garnered from the visit to England, a four-step process of chemically treating the work produced the blue/green patina with black accents that reflects Henry's Moore's intent. (Some of the chemicals were so toxic that the conservators wore respirators while handling them.) Finally, lacquer and three coats of wax were applied to protect the sculpture from pollution, weather, animals, and other destructive forces.
The copper-clad wood base of the sculpture also required considerable restoration. Much of the wood had deteriorated, and had to be replaced. Several of the bolts that secured the base and attached it to the sculpture had deteriorated so badly that they had crumbled into dust. They were replaced with stainless steel bolts.
Restoration of this single work required several weeks of dedicated labor. The conservator's work is never done; Mr. Aks will soon begin the annual maintenance work on all the Museum's outdoor sculpture, following an unusually severe winter.
On November 21, 2003, Tatiana Bareis, a Fellow in the Conservation Department of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, gave a lunch-time talk on efforts to restore works by Color Field painters such as Morris Louis and Kenneth Noland.
Color Field works differ from traditional oil paintings in several respects that affect their durability. First, because cotton absorbs paint especially well, Color Field artists worked with unprimed cotton duck, which came in larger sizes than traditional linen canvas. Second, the Color Field artists used a resin-based synthetic paint called Magna. Magna dries more quickly than traditional oil paint, and stains the surface better--a key to the effects that the Color Field artists sought. Third, these artists usually worked on unstretched material; they often just stapled the cotton duck to the studio floor. (Kenneth Noland worked on as many as six images on a single roll of cotton duck, and cropped them into individual works after they were finished.)
The relatively large size of Color Field paintings means that they require considerable wood support. Over time, the wood releases acids that stain the edges of the works. Also, due to these works' popularity, they have been on almost constant display, accumulating considerable amount of dust and dirt.
Ms. Bareis described the recent restoration of Morris Louis' "Buskin." The canvas was removed from its wood stretcher, and carefully placed face-down on a plastic sheet. Then the painting was cleaned with an unusual technique. The Museum baked its own bread, and used the moist bread crumbs to gently absorb dirt and dust from the unpainted, and sometimes painted, areas of the work. It took two people (and two loaves) an entire day to clean the painting. (To prevent insect infestations, it is essential to vacuum up all traces of the crumbs. ) Finally, a support canvas was added to serve as a buffer against the wood, and the work was reassembled.
These techniques resulted in a brighter, cleaner work. The Museum hopes to use these techniques to clean many of the 50+ Color Field paintings in the collection.
On September 10, 2008, Long Beach, CA-based video artist Bill Viola delivered a Clarice Smith lecture at the Smithsonian American Art Museum. When he first picked up a video camera in 1970, Mr. Viola considered himself an avant-garde artist who, in the fashion of that time, disdained the making of physical objects like paintings and sculpture. Over the years, he's come to understand that the so-called Old Masters were really the radical avant-garde of their day (Michaelangelo was twenty-four when he made the Pieta), and that humans make physical objects (including art) in direct response to basic human needs. For example, a chair reflects our need to rest. Breaking the rules is itself a tradition, he said, "Ultimately, all art is contemporary."
Mr. Viola spoke of the extraordinary changes wrought by the Internet - a medium in which we're woven together by electronic impulses in symbolic form. In some ways, he said, the Internet aspires toward a state of "constant mental awareness," not unlike the aim of Zen Buddhism. But, he cautioned, it's also a medium in which those in power can speak to us directly - one-on-one - bypassing or distorting important indicators of truth-telling, such as tone of voice and facial expression. Though his art is video-based, he warns that the camera is dangerous - like someone is holding your head and not letting you move it, showing you only the things the film-maker wants you to see.
Creativity, Mr. Viola said, is making something new from something old. He described his quest to make "invisible images." Shortly after his mother's death, as he drove through the mountains near his home, he experienced the mountains as "totally transformed," though they were visually unchanged. "The dead," he said quoting a Senegalese poet, "Are not dead."
As a coda to his talk, Mr. Viola showed his silent film Three Women, in which three women (a mother and two daughters?) walk slowly toward the viewer, their images grey and grainy till suddenly and unexpectedly, the mother-figure steps through a curtain of falling water, emerging drenched, refreshed, and in color. She reaches back, and in turn, leads the younger women through the curtain. After some time on our side of the curtain, the mother figure turns and steps back into the grey area and gently brings the others after her - an extraordinarily rich metaphor for the cycle of birth-life-death that lies at the core of human experience.
© 2003-2008--John P. Cahill