“Self-annihilation,” Bill Viola had remarked in a similar context, “becomes a necessary means to transcendence and liberation.”145 This is perhaps best expressed, as a single piece, in his 1996 The Crossing, comprised of a two-sided screen projection, reminiscent of the color fields of a Rothko canvas. On one side (see Figure 4), a single man walking toward the viewer from a distance comes into view; he stops, then accompanied by a sound rising to a deafening roar, he is overcome by a rising sheet of flames (see Figure 5); on the other (see Figure 3) , a slow drip of water becomes a deluge—images of immolation and inundation, the self-emptying of man, divine acts of creation, purgation, and destruction.
Figure 3.
Figure 4.
Figure 5.
The Passions
On a more unassuming scale (measuring only 19” x 15”), yet part of the larger Passions series, is Viola’s Man of Sorrows (see Figure 6), which draws on a theme central to the history of Christian art, Christ as the Man of Sorrows, a name which derives from the Book of Isaiah in which a humble suffering servant is foreseen as the messiah, savior of the Jewish people.146 Here is the Isaian text:
He was despised and rejected by others;
a man of suffering and acquainted with infirmity;
and as one from whom others hide their faces
he was despised, and we held him no account.
Surely he has borne our infirmities
And carried our diseases;
Yet we accounted him stricken,
Struck down by God, and afflicted (Isa 53:3–4).
Figure 6.
Viola’s Man of Sorrows is the portrait of an anonymous individual’s encounter with deep sorrow and loss. Like traditional devotional icons of the suffering Christ, we are presented the image of an ordinary man in tears, weeping without explanation in a pain that only intensifies, and framed in standard portrait style displayed on a small, portable, table-top flat-panel screen. The artist describes the image as offering a painfully “privileged window into a private, intimate moment of extreme anguish.” Throughout the slow-moving sequence (approximately eleven minutes), the man remains
. . . immersed in a world of sorrow. Waves of emotion open and unfold subtly across the man’s face, his actions . . . further slowed and expanded in time during playback. With the image cycle continuously repeating and his suffering unrelenting, he remains in a state of perpetual tears and eternal sadness.147
How, then, do we respond? With fear or trust? With disdain or hospitality? How should we respond? Do we engage or look away? We are caught here in moment of appeal to moral conscience, a sacred summons to the holiness in the everyday.
A closely related work, Dolorosa (see Figure 7), from 2000, similarly depicts and evokes suffering. Two images now, a woman and a man, presented like family photographs on individual digital flat screens, framed together like a hinged votive image. Related but separate, the artist describes, the “two are seen in the throes of extreme sorrow, with tears streaming down their cheeks. Their actions unfold in slow motion and the sequence is presented on a continuously repeating loop, placing the individual’s temporary state of crying within the larger domain of perpetual tears and eternal sorrow.”148 Speaking more broadly of Viola’s work, art historian and curator Michael Rush writes: “Displayed as single projections, diptychs, or triptychs each of these works is characterized by extremely slowed down movements of men and women in modern dress portraying ‘characters’ from the earlier paintings. Eyelids can take several minutes to close, as do arms raising up in supplication or extending in an embrace.”149 In our examples here, Viola is clearly aware of the widespread and powerful spiritual practice of faithful meditation on the image of the suffering Christ and sorrowing Virgin, and has studied late medieval images of this kind, such as Dieric Bouts’s Christ as Salvator Mundi (see Figure 8), (c.1450) and Mater Dolorosa (see Figure 9), c.1480/1500. In Salvator Mundi Christ is posed frontally with his attention locked on the viewer. Viola’s denim-shirted man weeps; his head, first inclined to one side looks up in supplication, brow furrowed and tears stream down his cheeks; his pain deepens, peaks, then subsides. But he never shrinks from our view. Instead, like Christ as the Man of Sorrows, he holds himself up to be contemplated, urging an ethical response. Here again is Isaiah:
Figure 7.
Figure 8.
He was oppressed, and he was afflicted,
Yet he did not open his mouth;
Like a lamb that is led to the slaughter,
And like a sheep that before its shearers is silent,
So he did not open his mouth.
By a perversion of justice he was taken away.
Who could have imagined his future?
For he was cut off from the land of the living,
Stricken for the transgression of my people (Isa 53:7–8).
Much of the Passions series, and other even more recent work, is in fact indebted to Viola’s studies in the 1990s of Western art, particularly Medieval and Renaissance devotional painting, and a return to the functions of such art as a path to spiritual growth. Far more than contemporary re-stagings of art history, however, Viola’s deceptively spare video and sound installations go beyond representation to pursue the ancient theme of revelation within the layers of human consciousness, challenging a viewer’s expectations and conditioned viewing patterns. Most were shot on 35-mm film at very high speed and slowed down drastically, so that almost imperceptible shifts are observed; these are then transferred to digital video and played on flat screens. Viola himself explains that these works are meant to “cultivat[e] knowledge of how to be in the world, for going through life. It is useful for developing a deeper understanding, in a very personal, subjective, private way, of your own experiences.”150 Critic Donald Kuspit accounts for this poetics of light and time as “conveying a radical state of consciousness inseparable from the awareness of mystical personal sensation. They seem not just to alter one’s consciousness but to uproot one’s being.”151
Figure 9.
The Quintet Series
In one sub-group of The Passions, the so-called “Quintet” series—comprising The Quintet of the Astonished (see Figure 10) , The Quintet of Remembrance (see Figure 11), The Quintet of the Silent (see Figure 12) and The Quintet of the Unseen (see Figure 13)—the artist stages four groups of five figures in individual videos to explore universal human emotions of sorrow, anger, fear, joy, rapture—scenes much distilled from the narrative environments of earlier work like Room for St. John of the Cross. Each unifying theme—bewilderment, memory, the unspoken and the unseen—are familiar tropes by now. The series, we know, was inspired by the group of four figures surrounding the central figure of Christ in Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of c.1490–1500, Christ Mocked (The Crowning of Thorns) at the National Gallery, London (see Figure 14); it depicts four soldiers, beholding the face of Christ in the center who does not return their mocking looks within the pictorial narrative but rather gazes directly out of it, at us the beholder. In Peter Sellers’s evocative description of the Bosch painting as it is seen by Viola we should hold in mind Viola’s Man of Sorrows: