Bill Viola: Slowly Turning Narrative

Bill Viola (b. 1951) is a pioneer in developing video as a major art medium. For more than forty years, he has made work that addresses life, death, and the intervening journey and is rooted in both Eastern and Western art and spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Born in New York City, Viola graduated in 1973 from the College of Visual and Performing Arts of Syracuse University, where he studied electronic music, performance art, and experimental film, and created his first videos using the recently-invented portable video camera/recorder. After graduating, Viola spent eighteen months working in Florence, surrounded by Renaissance art and architecture. Later, a fellowship allowed him—along with Kira Perov, his wife and collaborator—to live in Japan from 1980-81, studying Zen Buddhist philosophy and experiencing the architecture, calligraphy, Noh theater, and many other aspects of Japanese culture that have influenced his work. Viola then moved to Southern California, though extensive travels have taken him to destinations including the Solomon Islands in the South Pacific, the deserts of Tunisia, Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, Hindu fire-walking ceremonies in Fiji, and Native American archaeological sites in the Southwestern United States. Viola represented the United States at the 1995 Venice Biennale; two years later a major survey of his work traveled internationally, including to LACMA. He currently lives in Long Beach.

Viola’s Slowly Turning Narrative, an immersive environment of image and sound, encompasses presence and absence, childhood and aging, creation and destruction, the many and the one. This presentation marks the first time the work is on view in this country in twenty years, and it is just as relevant now as a reminder of our shared humanity. In the artist’s own words, the work “is concerned with the enclosing nature of the self-image and potentially infinite (and therefore unattainable) states of being, all revolving around the still point of the central self. The room and all persons within it become a continually shifting projection screen, enclosing the image and its reflections, all locked into the regular cadences of the chanting voice and the rotating screen. The entire space becomes an interior for the revelations of a constantly turning mind absorbed with itself. The confluences and conflicts of image, intent, content, and emotion perpetually circulate as the screen slowly turns in the space.”