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September 23, 2005
Bill Viola Reading
I really enjoyed this reading and totally appreciated getting the inside scoop on the way this artist thinks about his own works. I also think a lot of the points he raised can be applicable to other areas of work and life and general, such as his musings on phonetic language versus visual languages. This became most apparent to me upon reading the first few chapters of Marshall McLuhan's "Understanding Media" wherein he also explores the effects of visual media on a literary culture and the ways that they are negatively construed. The quote from Rumi really somes up McLuhan's entire thesis: media is an augmentation of our perception, and any forms of new media will affect the society's social structure, not through its content, but through the action of itself.
That being said, I do think Viola's interpretation of his particular medium's effect on the human condition is a bit lofty. He describes the image as "the key agent" acting between the hard world of reality and the soft world of the mind. Physiologically, this simply is not true. The senses of sound and smell, in particular, are much more intricately laced to a human's conceptual construct of the world around him than his sense of sight. Not everyone has a photographic memory, afterall, although we do often use sight as a crutch for interpretting things that we don't necessarily understand. But, knowing this, Viola does put an admirable amount of trust in his viewer when he says that his work really only exists in their minds. That's a statement I can agree with.
Posted by Roman, Christin at September 23, 2005 01:04 PM