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September 19, 2005
Bill Viola
I went to Bobst on Saturday to watch some more of Bill Viola's video works. The only media of his that they had there were the laserdisc Selected Works and the individual videos of the works included on Selected Works. A professor of mine had shown me these before in class a couple years ago, but I decided to watch them again all the same, and I am very pleased that I did.
I captured some stills with my camera that you can see on this Flickr set if you have the time. Above this entry I've posted a detail from his work Reflecting Pool that I am soooo enamoured with. This blown out image of a person suspended in midair communicates everything that Viola writes about in the photocopy that Jean-Marc gave us last week. He reveals his understanding of the relationship between the landscape and the "solitary individual" so brilliantly through this still image of a person gradually fading into the foliage behind him. He freezes a moment in fleeting human motion while allowing the subtle rhythms of the water below to carry forward in time. After reading Viola's notes on Hatsu Yume and how any change in the rock he was filming exceeds the sampling rate of video, I realized something that I hadn't thought about the first time I watched Reflecting Pool. It's not merely about the cycle of human life from birth to death; it expands further into relations of scale between human and nature.
Posted by Robert Croft at September 19, 2005 09:00 PM