Last year Bill Viola's video The Messenger was the visual arts hit of the Festival. Projected on a huge screen, it depicted a body slowly becoming visible as it approaches us, rising up through deep water, breaking the surface and gulping in air before sinking away again. An image that is both simple and powerful, technically straightforward and metaphorically rich, and refreshingly free of the wilful obscurity that dogs so much video installation.
So why not have Viola back for a return visit? Which is exactly what the Festival has done. Again he is showing just a single work, but this time around it is a triptych, featuring three simultaneous projections side-by-side. The images and ideas that make up the Nantes Triptych, as it is called, typify Viola's enduring preoccupations, which have to do with nothing less than the strange and mysterious nature of our experiences as sentient beings in the world. Now in his late forties, Viola is, as someone once remarked, more or less the same age as the technology he uses.
But, though he has always pushed the limits of available technology, and is technically skilled to a degree others working in the medium must envy, he is not a technology junkie, and his work is content, not technology-driven. His most frequently quoted remark makes that clear: "The real investigation is of life and being itself. The medium is just a tool in this investigation." Or, again: "Real raw material is not the camera and monitor, but time and experience itself, and the real place the work exists is . . . in the mind and heart of the person who has seen it."
He is an American, the son of an English mother and a father of German-Italian parentage, not an untypical state of affairs in the US where, as he put it, "the shadow of Europe is always behind you." His third level studies coincided with an era of experimentation in the arts and brought him into direct contact with areas of performance, musical composition, film and the then fledgling video. Vitally, from early on he regarded film and video not as ways of reproducing images, but as processes in themselves. In his early twenties he spent some time in Florence, haunting the cathedrals, relishing their extraordinary acoustics. And sound remains a central facet of his work. Deserts, for example, is a full-scale 35 mm film made in co-operation with Ensemble Modern and inspired by Edgard Varese's music, juxtaposing images of literal and metaphoric deserts. A lot of his early videos involved elements of performance art, but it was soon clear that he was an artist capable of employing video as an artistic medium in its own right, and by the late 1980s he had amassed a huge, highly influential body of work.
Three sequences make up the Nantes Triptych. On the left, we see a young woman giving birth and holding her new-born baby. In the centre, we see a figure, a man wearing nondescript clothes, suspended underwater, alternately just drifting, immobile, and then thrashing about. But the central image is on a transparent screen, so the figure is floating not only in the water, but also in the air. On the right we witness, rather shockingly, the last moments of an elderly woman. Viola is fully aware of the shocking nature of these images of ebbing life. But their power derives from their authenticity. They are, he says, like "wake-up calls" for the spirit. The triptych spans human life, from birth to death. In terms of its format and iconography, it is a recognisable variant of an altarpiece, but without the fixed symbolism of an institutional religious setting. Viola is aiming for a more universal level of instinctive understanding.
However, there is nothing ironic about his use of the traditional altarpiece triptych form. It is not a knowing quote, as it would be in the work of post-modern or neo- conceptual artists. Rather it is an acknowledgement of his own involvement in an existing tradition, and evidence of his belief in the inherent power of certain forms, objects and materials. And, for that matter, of certain places. The resonance of place, too, is important to him, as evident in travels that take him to locations around the world, to sites regarded as significant in various cultures. He seems to believe that art is, literally, another way of knowing, non-rational, non-deductive, more closely related to the emotions than the intellect. This view prioritises what he terms "associative patterning" over linear reasoning. At the same time, he does recognise that without the application of analytical intelligence, art will be effectively consigned to the realm of indiscriminate subjectivity.
One problem, however, is the formulation of a critical language outside of traditional aesthetic and rational criteria. There are strong mystical overtones to his work. These range quite freely across the cultural and religious spectra, from Judeo-Christianity to Tibetan Buddhism, Shamanism to Sufism. He views mystics not as proponents of particular varieties of religious faith, but as critical sensibilities within a given culture. Essentially, his view of mysticism boils down to a lineage of thinkers who focus on "inner realities". He remarked in one interview that: "One of the great milestones of our century has been the transporting of ancient Eastern knowledge to the West by extraordinary individuals such as the Japanese lay Zen scholar D.T. Suzuki and the Sri Lankan art historian A.K. Coomaraswamy."
To some extent this had to do with a rejection, typical of his generation, of a familiar Christian theology, for the exciting unfamiliarity of Eastern thought. But in time he realised that the same concerns that interested him in Eastern mysticism - the complete otherness and unknowability of God, who can only be approached from within, through love - were there, albeit suppressed, in the history of Christianity. It convinced him of "the universal nature of mystical experience," independent of institutional religions. His Room for St John of the Cross, for example, is dedicated to the 16th century mystic who was charged with heresy, confined for six months to a tiny cell and periodically tortured. In these conditions the saint composed a celebrated body of poetry about ecstatic love and nature. Viola arranged a still life table (a recurrent motif) within a tiny room, set against a huge, roughly made video projection of the Sierra Mountains, with the wind roaring.
A key work, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, from 1986, is to some extent an exploration of several distinct consciousnesses, or "self-worlds". Many other pieces exhibit a similar desire to gain access to the inner world of the imagination, to enable us to see anew what it is to be alive. Hence the bid to confront us with the ordinary realities of life and death in the Nantes Triptych. Birth, living, and dying "are mysteries in the truest sense of the work, not meant to be solved, but rather experienced and inhabited".
The Nantes Triptych can be seen at Portview Business Park on the Newtownards Road, from November 12th-29th, from 1 p.m. to 9 p.m.
