In Observance a queue of people—different ages, races, ethnicities—moves forward slowly, steadily, solemnly and ritualistically toward the viewer. Singly, one after the other, each pauses at the head of the line, visibly weakened by private yet shared emotion, their gazes trained on some unknown object or unseen (by us) tragedy. In prompting his actors Viola urged them to come forward to look at “something they’d rather not see . . . to say goodbye to someone who’d left them.”185 In sorrow or despair or grief they are witness to some tragedy or loss, like a modern-day lamentation—just out of sight beyond the frame, mesmerized by some petitioning force operating within our space. Sometimes gently touching, overlapping, or occasionally exchanging glances between them as they pass, they are unified by their shared desire to reach the front and engage with whatever or whomever is there, effecting a “crossing of gazes” as Marion would have it, two currents of consciousness pressing upon each other. There is a private intimacy in their silence, yet they urge us somehow to participate in their emotions.
Figure 21.
Figure 22.
Levinas calls this the “address,” the proffering to and petitioning force of the other, seeing in the other the inescapable ethical appeal that obligates me. He refers to this as the Face of the Other that speaks—makes meaning—not in a language of words or sounds, but as a call, a beckoning, a “Saying” (Dire) of our responsibility in relation to the Other. In this crossing of awarenesses we recognize the other person facing us as a free and self-determining subject with an ethical claim upon me rather than as an object at my disposal. The Face of the Other is the wordless discourse, the silent and unconditional ethical appeal that manifests pre-ontological intelligibility before language; Levinas’s is a philosophy deeply indebted to the apophatic and mystical tradition. Here William Franke glosses the philosopher:
For Levinas, the face-to-face relation of one human being with another is an origin for the intelligibility of things that does not presuppose any prior disclosedness of beings. Our being in relation to others, blindly and helplessly, without any conscious control or conceptual mastery, precedes all sense and intelligibility of objects that we are able to grasp and conceptualize . . . The ineffable transcendence discovered in the ethical relation to the Other cannot be comprehended and articulated, but rather dis-articulates me from my origin as self-conscious subject and freely choosing agent.186
What occurs in Bill Viola’s Observance is the viewer’s/my receptiveness to the world that, coming from the “other,” resounds in him/me. We are open to being “caught upon” by the image, instead of having authority of visual (and intellectual) possession over it; we are called into an aesthetic and ethical posture of attentiveness. Richard Kearny has referred to this as a moment of “holy insecurity,” an experience of “dispossessive bewilderment” wherein we become “attuned to the acoustics of the Other.”187 Like Marion’s icon, these images preserve transcendence by refusing the mirroring function of the idol, such that the viewer finds himself envisaged by the other. This is not unlike the “crossings” of ordinary space and time and the elements of “incarnational space” that occurs in the performance of sacramental ritual; and this itself has echoes in St. John of the Cross’s descriptions of ecstatic absorption in God and his own near loss of consciousness of his immediate surroundings, an experience nourished by the sacraments and liturgy. It is liturgical worship that activates all the senses, such that our bodies fully participate in the divine. And as Viola accounts for Five Angels and his other large-scale installations like Observance and the Quintets, these works “speak[s] to us in the language of the body . . . This corporeal language is essential in order to speak of certain things that can’t be discussed in any other way; or, to put it differently: these subjects need to be transmitted through bodily experience, otherwise they would only be descriptions.”188
These “subjects,” or “selves-in-process” as I’ve referred to them, are subjects-in-community, and thus profoundly ethical—in Observance the figures mourn loss in a communal setting. One is drawn toward the sublime and away from false and distorting constructions of the self, experienced perhaps in terms of astonishment because unaccustomed to such encounters; it is a profound relationship that provides the occasion for what theologian Stanley Hauerwas has called “unselfings”189—a disciplined overcoming of the self. “Self-annihilation” (the undoing of egoistic self), we recall Viola as saying, “becomes a necessary means to transcendence and liberation.”190
143 “The Dark Night” in Kavanaugh and Rodrigues, Collected Works, 416–17, 445.
144. Bergson cited in Guerlac, Thinking in Time, 74–75.
145. Walsh, Bill Viola, 52.
146. The piece was recently featured in the 2011 exhibition, Passion in Venice, at the Museum of Biblical Art in New York, an exhibition comprised of more than sixty works of art, ranging from painting and sculpture to prints and illuminated manuscripts, all exploring the rich and multivalent theme of “passion” within the Venetian artistic tradition.
147. Walsh, Bill Viola, 104.
148. Ibid., 76.
149. Rush, Video Art, 137.
150. Walsh, Bill Viola, 75.
151. Kuspit, “Bill Viola,” 145.
152. Walsh, Bill Viola, 172.
153. Ibid., 33.
154. Kuspit, “Deep TV,” 89.
155. Walsh, Bill Viola, 37
156. Ibid., 166.
157. Similar images in both composition and theme that Viola studied and drew upon during his time at the Getty, include: Andrea Mantegna’s Adoration of the Magi, c. 1500 and Dieric Bouts’s, The Annunciation, c. 1450–55.
158. Walsh, Bill Viola, 35. Included in Viola’s personal library he brought with him to the Getty were also the works of Meister Eckhart and the seminal study The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages, 1300–1500 by Henk Van Os (1995), and studies by scholar Victor Stoichita on the visionary experiences of Spanish Baroque artists.
159. Walsh, Bill Viola, 146.
160. Ibid., 216.
161. Ibid., 217.
162. Freeland in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 38.
163. See Kuspit, “Bill Viola: Deconstructing Presence,” in London, Bill Viola, 73–80.
164. Davies in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 152.
165. Ibid., 48.
166. David Jasper in Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 184.
167. Ross, Bill Viola, 143.
168. Walsh, Bill Viola, 216.
169. Viola, Reasons for Knocking, 154–55.
170. Marion, God Without Being, 9.
171. Bulhof and ten Kate, Flight of the Gods, 157.