It’s been suggested that moving pictures represent an advance over still images insofar as the latter are unable to depict movement, to do any more than suggest its absence. Bill Viola’s new video works (all 2001) are about movement, but they evidence a kind of nostalgia for the stillness of paintings and photographs—as though the dependence on motion were symptomatic of a deficiency of memory, a lack of monumentality. Viola proposes a compromise: Slow movement down so radically that it seems to approach stillness asymptotically. The best way to see the motion in these pictures was not to look at the images steadily but to look away for a while and then turn back. They retain the monumental quality of a still image, its availability for contemplation but by magnifying movements in time, increasing their temporal scale, so to speak, video becomes a kind of microscope enlarging things in space, submitting them to an almost forensic scrutiny. In this way Viola aims to synthesize the individually inadequate programs of painting and photography on the one hand and of cinema and video on the other.
Perhaps Viola also wants to synthesize religion and magic with science and technology. Certainly his big video-projection installation Five Angels for the Millennium seems to want to depict miracles: Figures suddenly shoot up out of water as if ascending to heaven. But miracles are elusive. You spend a long time waiting, you don’t know for what, and then something’s happened almost before you can register what it is. With its five screens often nearly as dark as the space around them, Five Angels is about unframed, ungraspable experience. The eight other, smaller-scale works here, on the contrary, were contained, iconic. The hinged diptych Mater—showing the heads of two women, apparently mother and daughter—was displayed much like a pair of family photos on an end table, for instance, while the larger wall-hung diptych Surrender, also shown at this year’s Venice Biennale, suggested a Caravaggiste painting. In both, a kind of piety is foregrounded: the intimate, filial piety invested in family portraits—here magically given life, as if by the viewer’s adoring gaze—or the public, churchly (or simply art-historical) piety pertaining to devotional painting.
Viola’s work has always tended to be overwrought, so these are not just slow-motion images of people-they are slow-motion images of people self-consciously emoting. Four Hands focuses on pairs of hands ostentatiously worrying each other; the anguished writhing of the two figures in Silent Mountain would probably be unwatchable in real time, Still worse is the righteous quietude of the figure in Catherine’s Room as she goes through her simple routines (meditating, writing, lighting candles) in an ascetic atmosphere somewhere between that of Fra Angelico’s cells at San Marco in Florence and a Shaker village. And yet as Surrender reminds us, Viola can at times surpass his pretensions. Here, in what might be a kind of indirect response to Caravaggio’s Narcissus, Viola both identifies the surface on which the image is projected with the reflective surface of water and denies that identification; he both invokes the claim to represent reality and defies it. To plunge into the reflection, to go behind or beyond the image, as the two figures in Surrender do, is not simply to destroy it but to demonstrate that one never knew just what one was seeing anyway. More than deepening or prolonging the image, movement undoes it.
—Barry Schwabsky
