Boussoles elles & eux Mystical accords Bill Viola creates his videos as one would meditate, focused on the present moment. On show at London’s Royal Academy, his disarmingly slow tableaux vivants echo drawings by Michelangelo. How much time should you take to look How should we face death? Do those ing scenes of immersion, symbolized by at a work of art in a museum? Bill Viola who have passed on truly disappear? Is bodies plunging into water. The exhibi- sets his own tempo: “Time is the raw there an endlessly renewed cycle in tion is a kind of rippling baptism, from material of my work. People who experi- which death is not the end, but rather which the viewer does not escape ence my exhibitions leave the world of one of the stages? How do we earn the unscathed. The emotional impact is over-activity and excessive information right to eternity? Some 15 drawings by deliberately pushed to extremes. and enter another rhythm,” he told me Michelangelo resonate with 12 Viola three years ago, when I visited him in his videos, which have the aesthetic power Moments of grace In Japan, Viola home in Long Beach, in southern Los of digital paintings. Both the American studied with a Zen master who gave him Angeles. The interview went on and on, and the Florentine are hyperbolic in some advice: “When you create a work, as did he. Time sped by in the privacy of style, the former incorporating special take care to push it to the most incandes- his office, which was unsullied by any effects, the latter demonstrating extreme cent point.” The video artist took the les- kind of screen. “I never read my e-mails expressiveness on paper. Michelangelo’s son to heart. I can still remember the here,” he said. Kira, his longtime wife religious images of the Virgin and Child, story he told me, as I noticed a smiling and partner, was seated across from him. the Crucifixion and the Resurrection portrait of the Dalai Lama behind him. The mirroring of this legendary couple may not be large-format works, but they “In Japan, I had hung three drawings on reminded me of one of Viola’s famous are as striking as Five Anglfes or the Mil- the walls of my room. I showed my Zen works, The Veiling (1995), consisting of lennium (2001), an installation by Viola master the first one and explained my suspended scrims on which are projected consisting of five videos on large screens intentions at length. He coughed slightly. images of a man and a woman moving (Departing Angel, Birth Angel, Fire I started explaining everything all over slowly toward each other. In Viola’s Angel, Ascending Angel, Creation Angel) again as he looked at the second draw- office, stones and small bowls filled with featuring bodies slowly rising up or ing, and he coughed louder. I wondered sand were arranged on the low table, plunging into water. “I often use slow- what was going on. I repeated my expla- and small leaves were drying on the motion techniques, because it gives the nations in front of the third drawing; he desk. The bookshelves reflected a life- viewer time to enter deeply into the turned to me and hit me hard on my long spiritual quest: works by Ibn Arabi, work and into himself,” he told me in forehead. I was stunned. He then yelled, a 13th-century Andalusian philosopher, Long Beach, as he poured tea with the ‘too much information!’” stood alongside poetry collections from slow gestures of a master of ceremonies. The Western world is based on thinking, the Tang dynasty, the Tibetan Book of While Viola explores the hypnotic quali- but that day Viola understood that art is the Dead, treatises on Greek mythology ties of slow motion, Michelangelo, on sometimes based on an acceptance of and books on Masaccio and Michelan- the other hand, seems to have been mysteries. “I don’t always understand gelo. Today, the pioneer of video art drawing while on speed, swept up in his what I’m doing as I’m doing it. I enter a balks at giving interviews, so I found his own fervor, a Mannerist ahead of his trance-like state and I draw on metaphors earlier words, scribbled hastily in my time. The exhibition is conceived as a to express what comes to me. I use tech- notebook. “I discovered Renaissance art journey through the cycles of life. In one niques and large teams to interpret my in the 1970s, in Florence. I stayed in video, a submerged nude man rises to the visions. And afterward, I feel free.” Tuscany for more than a year; I visited all surface. In another, a female figure float- the museums and all the churches. A few ing on the water rises to face a wall of years later, I moved on to Japan. I received flames. After a few minutes, she stretches a fellowship in 1978, and it was an incred- out her arms, dives and disappears into ible period, when I had to assimilate her own reflection, while the water and another culture. Since then, I have trav- fire gradually merge into one. And in yet eled all over the world with Kira, and I’ve another, rain turns into a waterfall to understood that there are underground awaken an inert man. His body gradu- passageways between different worlds.” ally rises up until it finally disappears. The rain eases up, until just a few drops Dialogue with an angel With the cur- run across the empty slab. Viola often rent exhibition at the Royal Academy of films a body’s final voyage, and for this Ci-contre : Tristan’s Ascension Arts in London, which highlights his man who very nearly drowned as a child, (The Sound of a Mountain Under affinities with Michelangelo, I grasp the water is a leitmotif. “I experienced a a Waterfall), 2005, installation vidéo de Bill Viola. importance of these words today. Nearly sense of weightlessness that changed my Opposite page: Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound five centuries separate Viola from the life. I have always wanted to return to of a Mountain Under a Waterfall), 2005, Renaissance master, but the dialogue the greenish-blue world I saw that day. video/sound installation, Bill Viola. between them is based on the same eter- In retrospect, I think I had a mystical nal concerns. Why is life so ephemeral? experience.” Viola is constantly recreat- 58 muesuM hsitirB eht fo seetsurT ehT - voreP ariK : otohP - oidutS aloiV lliB © : ertnoc-iC - voreP ariK © : etnedécérp egaP