By karenmmartin on situated
Yesterday I caught the last hours of the last day of the Bill Viola exhibition. The exhibition was almost entirely new work, displayed in both the Haunch of Venision gallery, Piccadilly and St. Olave’s College, London Bridge. I am a big fan of Bill Viola’s work and as I went around I overhead comments on ‘the simplicity of his symbolism’ and the quantity, quality and scale of the work was very impressive. However, I was also struck by the effect that the work had on the audience in the galleries. Each of the video pieces lasted for between ten and fifty minutes. And in each space (there were four galleries in each venue) people sat, or stood, and watched for the entire length of each piece. In silence.
What is it that is so hypnotizing in Bill Viola’s work? As in the previous pieces I saw, the work shown here generally played at an incredibly slow speed. You might spend ten minutes watching a dot of light growing bigger in the centre of the screen before recognising it as the shape of two figures entwined and immersed in water. Another ten minutes might pass before a sudden burst of sound and movement breaks the spell. Yet despite the slow playback speed there is constant movement in each piece. Falling drops of water, flickering fire or sunlight and shadows moving across a landscape captures your attention. This reminds me of Josephine Plett’s hypothesis in her Unit 14 technical dissertation ‘Gazing at the Sea’. She suggests that the reason we find the sea so mesmerising is that our mind is constantly trying to make sense out of the patterns we perceive in order to predict what will happen next. The unpredictability of the sea makes this impossible and as a result we become entranced by these patterns.
Finally, to make a probably obvious point, it is the total sensory experience of viewing the work that affects the experience. The work itself is very powerful but the complete experience comes also from the scale and format of the projection, the location of the projection in the space and even the choice of the space itself. The pieces that held people’s attention yesterday were the ones in spaces which did not act as throughways to gallery spaces beyond. And, for me, the best pieces were the ones that were not in a ‘gallery’ space at all.
Josephine Plett’s dissertation is unpublished though available in the UCL library. I hope she would not mind me referring to it here..
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* Posted on: Sun, Sep 3 2006 7:47 PM
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