Bill Viola
by Harriet Zinnes
Text matters to Bill Viola. His exploration of the moving image is not merely the employment of a new technology. The text of explanation in the catalogue of the work, Going Forth by Day, therefore, matters. It is simply not enough to view his five-image sequences playing simultaneously in the large gallery of the Guggenheim Museum that will be on view through January 12, 2003. At least to this viewer within the colorful carefully arranged seqiences of moving images lies a hidden meaning beyond the obvious visual unfolding. That meaning lies in what the text tell us is a literal translation of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, "The Book of Going Forth by Day"–a guide for the soul once it is freed from the darkness of the body to finally ‘go forth by the light of day.’ Since what the viewer sees in each sequence is seemingly ordinary days with ordinary people even though there are unusual rocks and a significant water and what becomes a symbolic boat. Certainly unusual things do happen—-as they do in ordinary life. But for the viewer the difficulty of interpretation lies in the arrangement of the sequences. As the text in the catalogue explains, "The work is experienced architecturally, with all five image sequences playing simultaneously at one large gallery. To enter the space, visitors must literally step into the light of the first image. Once inside, they stand at the center of an image-sound world with projections on every wall. The story told by each panel is embedded within the larger narrative cycle of the room." And here is the difficulty, for, as we are told, "viewers are free to move around the space and watch each image panel individually or to stand back and experience the piece as a whole." One stands and moves around, and what one sees are ordinary people with ordinary tasks and quotidian life except for the first (or is this the right word?) sequence that probably is behind the standing viewer where figures of all dress and race are walking slowly toward a goal that never is explained. Clearly symbolic, one knows even here without text that there is a beginning and an end both of which are unknown and mysterious and with a purpose never to be revealed. But the rest of the sequences have people in active and purposeful motion: a knocking on a door (that is never opened, however), people busy removing furniture from a home that later has a conflagration, men on water near a boat that finally leaves its pier, etc. Of course it is all mysterious as well as ordinary with appropriate sound. And what is the mystery produced by Bill Viola in his sequences that are each approximately thirty-five minutes in length and play simultaneously on continuous loops?
We are not in Hollywood. We are witnessing digital constructions that hold the mystery of time, that hold, as the artist related in his talk to the press, "things that have no end." Here what unfolds is what the artist calls "the human vision not to be bound by time." Clearly a man of great spirituality and of great humanity, the artist wants to depict and to sound "the language of the global world," where we are "together as human beings." So it is that the projected image cycle in five parts uses episodes at the time of the summer solstice, late afternoon at the time of the winter solstice, then dawn, and the time of the vernal equinox. There is no question that what we have in these images via high technology is the story of Christ (and therefore of a communal humanity) even as in one image we see a wounded tall figure leaving the solid earth for the mist of heaven.
