Figure 10.
In the center, the face of God looks directly at us. The gaze is gentle . . . but increasingly penetrating as it makes an appeal to conscience. Christ’s eyes look out of the painting, cross time and space, and meet our own. His eyes meet our eyes, and search our heart. Jesus makes us the witness. The choices are now ours. The responsibility is now ours. We can’t pretend that we don’t know or that we haven’t noticed. The act of witness to suffering is life-changing. For some it will mean another hardening of the heart. For others it is the birth of compassion. We are the observer, and now we are the participant.152
Figure 11.
Figure 12.
This crossing of time and space in which occurs the meeting of gazes, the viewer’s and Christ’s, is what Emmanuel Levinas will call, as we shall shortly see, the “naked appeal of the Other,” the “silent speaking” that demands ethical response. In a spatio-temporal sense, there is, in that moment of beholding, a circular turning back, a semantic exchange where subject and object, self and other, are one. This moment in which the boundaries between divine and human, self and other, dissolve is a moment of mystical union.
Figure 13.
In a journal entry describing the work he planned to make at the National Gallery’s invitation, Viola noted:
Quintet of the Astonished: odd but careful spatial grouping, horizontal aspect ratio, high-speed film, delicate lighting, wardrobe character types, Bosch’s Christ Mocked in the National Gallery of London, the shifting surface of emotion and relation. Individuals run through a compressed range of conflicting emotions from laughing to crying, shot in high-speed film, displayed in high resolution, pristine, hyper-real. The emotions come and go so gradually, it is hard to tell where one begins and the other leaves off. Relations between the figures become fluid and shifting.153
In slow-motion replay that inhabits a space-time all its own, and resulting in exaggerated and high-definition gestures and expressions that change so gradually we observe nuances that would barely be noticed in real time, real space, or real life, Viola captures, as he puts it, “what the old masters didn’t paint” (Bergson’s “what is happening in the interval”)—that is, the in-between of emotion that springs from beneath the visible surface of observable phenomena, at the edge of perception in a liminal space of pure possibility where sensations are heightened—a place of “visionary merger with the divine,” as Donald Kuspit puts it.154
Figure 14.
In each of the four works that comprise the Quintet series, five people are positioned close together, as individually and collectively they experience “a wave of intense emotion that threatens to overwhelm them”155 in a kind of psychic disintegration. As the sequence begins, their expressions change, at first nearly imperceptibly—but made visible through extreme slow motion—as the emotion, unique to each person surges to an acute level. After peaking, it subsides, leaving each person thoroughly depleted, physically and psychologically. In another quite telling notebook entry, here on the idea of self-emptying and the annihilation of the ego through suffering, the artist identifies the apophatic breakthrough of such liminal events:
Breakdown—breakthrough. Reach the peak of physical existence—It is no longer possible to be in the Body. The pressure is unbearable. The load unsustainable. The weight pulling on the fettered soul excruciating. Release comes as a violent explosion—All emotions condense at a single point, a unity, and then race outward, splintering into shards and fragments flying off in all directions. The aftermath of this harrowing journey through the narrowest of apertures is both a release from suffering and the manifestation of that suffering—Joy and Sorrow, Exhaustion and Strength. Breakdown and Breatkhrough.156
In the Quintets, while in close proximity throughout the experience, the five individuals undergo the mounting emotion, with minimal direct interaction with or even acknowledgement of each other, but at the same time together in an experience of communal suffering, shared but articulated across differences. The figures maintain that dissociation from one another we see among Christ’s executioners in the Bosch painting, despite the tightly enclosed area. Likewise, the group stands before an empty background with no narrative setting or reference to the outside world.157 In preparing his actors for the Quintet video shoots, Viola provided each of them copies of poems from books in his own library by St. John of the Cross: “I wanted to give them historical reference points,” he said, “people who had been there before, in the regions of the human self that I wanted them to address.”158
Five Angels for the Millennium (2001)
Another multi-part work, again a sub-group within the Passions project, is Five Angels for the Millennium, 2001, which consists of five 7 x 10-foot individual video sequences each showing a clothed man emerging out of or disappearing into a pool of water—taken collectively, an immersive and engulfing experience of sound and light. In Departing Angel (see Figure 15) a single figure floats gradually into view and up to the surface accompanied by faint sound; in Birth Angel (see Figure 16), the figure shoots more dramatically through the frame as the ambient sound mounts; in Fire Angel (see Figure 17) the figure is completely submerged in water that has now taken on the color of a deep blood-red, while in Ascending Angel (see Figure 18) he is seen floating more tranquilly, face down, then rising, and Creation Angel (see Figure 19), where, amidst a crescendo of sound he appears from the back with arms outstretched in a cruciform gesture. Playing simultaneously and continuously repeating, the images are projected directly onto the walls of a large dark room, resonating with Burkean emphasis on the sublimity in darkness and obscurity. As Getty Director Emeritus John Walsh describes in the Passions exhibition catalogue:
Figure 15.
Figure 16.
Figure 17.
Figure 18.
Figure 19.
The “angel” in each appears infrequently on each screen, breaking through the surface in a sudden explosion of light and sound that interrupts an otherwise peaceful watery landscape. Weightless and motionless, the human figure enters into the depths of a mysterious underwater world, a luminous void of unknown dimensions, where the laws of physics seem suspended and the borders between the infinite cosmos and the finite human body merge.159