Art and Spirituality: Bill Viola

Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist, who was born in 25th of Jan1951, age 59 in New York. His works reflect Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian Mysticism. When he received U.S. Friendship Commission Fellowship to live in Japan, he wanted to study "Zen Art," traditional ink painting, but a Japanese friend suggested him to go to a temple and study Zen so that everything he did will be Zen art.


Silent Mountain, 2001

"Silent Mountain is part of a series of works called The Passions made following Viola’s participation in the 1997-1998 Getty Research Institute Scholar Year. The series explores the power and range of human emotions. A feature of the portraits and tableaux of The Passions is the removal of sound and the incorporation of time, which relocates the subjects to a place and dimension outside our own. The resulting extended silence, reminiscent of devotional paintings, goes against the tempo of mainstream film yet remains capable of expressing wonder, misery, ecstasy and rage. In Silent Mountain two panels show a man and a woman. The scenes were shot separately, each in 45 second takes stretched into 8 mins 18 secs. The figures express intensifying signs of emotional stress. She contorts, hugging herself twisting and crouching, he holds his head in agony, with gestures that at times emulate classical poses. They stand in parallel isolation, unaware of their companionship. Each in a private emotional trajectory bound by profound grief or remorse. Their agony ends in a scream, in a sudden explosion that is both an expression of their pain and a release from it. Viola has said that Silent Mountain is "probably the loudest scream I’ve recorded"."

http://www.tba21.org/program/exhibitions/9/artwork/399?category=archive (accessed 29 Aug 2010)

"Here I was thinking about passions, being drawn to the fire of extreme emotions-intensity being something that had interested me for much of my artistic life-and yet knowing that one of the fundamental definitions of enlightenment concerns extinguishing the flames. Kazuaki Tanashashi tells us that "nirvana" is from a Sanskrit word that means "putting out the fire," pointing to a state of freedom from burning desire or anxiety, from the enslavement of passion I discovered that in the passions there was also this other, less dramatic side of the emotional energies; this is where the real heart source of this work lies."

Baas, J. and Jacob, M.J. "Buddha Mind in Contemporary Art". University of California Press: Berkeley. 2004.

My analysis is based on the contents that I read, and the short clips from youtube. I felt that the video was capture of coming in terms with disappointment, anger, frustration, etc, and what goes on within the human system in extremely emotional state. It was like a cleansing process of mind, and the state before we understand what it means to see grey area (or black and white), and then coming to the state of nothingness.

References:
http://www.billviola.com/biograph.htm
http://www.tba21.org/program/exhibitions/9/artwork/399?category=archive
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IEVZ1gN4fB8&feature=related