Everything conspires to overload the senses: the empty incandescent rectangles of color, entirely encompassing your field of vision; the sheer glowing silence; the lack of footing, or anything solid, in the world of the canvas; the weird sense that the color is very far away, yet suffocatingly close. It’s not a pleasant feeling: you feel both threatened and comforted . . .23
We should take note here of the phenomenology of suffering and threat, challenges to one’s sense of security, safety, and earthbound sanctuary. The sublime is both inviting and fearsome.
Disembodied color for Rothko, in its boundlessness and separation from (withholding of) the represented object—that is, the negation of figuration, contour, narrative and even of space—and the stripping away of incident in Barnett Newman’s monochrome fields, seem to transcend the material environment in which they appear, establishing an amorphousness that is immeasurable and unquantifiable, with the numinous potency of nothingness, which for these artists was profoundly spiritual. This is echoed in both the words and images, particularly in the Black Paintings, of Rothko’s and Newman’s contemporary Ad Reinhardt, and in his poetic positionings against the “idolatry” of all external representation.
Leave temple images behind
Risen above beauty, beyond virtues, inscrutable, indescribable
Self-transcendence revealed yet unrevealed
Undifferentiated unity, oneness, no divisions, no multiplicity
No consciousness of anything
No consciousness of consciousness
All distinctions disappear in darkness
The darkness is the brilliance numinous, resonance . . .24
Yet, we may reasonably ask, can such an experience be had from video, a most material, technological, and scientifically-grounded medium, yet one which, since the late 1980s has assumed a position of legitimacy, even prominence in the art world?
Bill Viola had been drawn to the nexus of art and technology as a student in the 1970s at Syracuse University, mainly as a means for exploration of the self and spiritual development. In an interview given in 1997, he remembers:
Something that has been a part of me as long as I can remember [is] the excitement of the new technique. I grew up in a postwar generation. A big influence on me was the World’s Fair in New York in 1964–65, which was about as close to industrial Utopia as you can get. For me it was essentially a bunch of dark rooms with images projected in them, a series of installations, but cast in “technology is good, the future is positive” kind of mode.25
For artists and audiences raised in an era of media saturation, video is a way of participating in and reacting to what Jean Baudrillard, French philosopher, sociologist, and cultural theorist, referred to as the “ecstasy of communication” or the “obscenity of the visible” and its destructive work of cognitive fragmentation—he calls it a “new form of schizophrenia.” The centrality of the television screen, for Baudrillard, forces the “promiscuity of networks” and the “total instantaneity of things” and, through overexposure, urges the “end of interiority and intimacy,” where we are no more than “a switching center for all the networks of influence.”26 This is the post-Enlightenment evolution of visual modes within culture as spectacle. More recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and critic Chris Hedges has examined this cultural mediocracy in his jeremiad, Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.27
The flight into illusion sweeps away the core values of the open society. It corrodes the ability to think for oneself, to draw independent conclusions, to express dissent when judgment and common sense tell you something is wrong, to be self-critical, and to acknowledge that there are other views, different ways, and structures of being that are morally and socially acceptable.28
Yet Viola’s work, I want to suggest, uses the technology of spectacle against itself, in resistance and opposition to the medium’s materialist attitude and this-worldly motivations. While thoroughly in accord with cultural critics like Hedges on the intellectual and spiritual degradations of contemporary media saturation, Viola urges:
The big responsibility right now is to develop an understanding and awareness of the effects these images have. We are in a situation now culturally, whereby the people who have created this huge machine which is inundating us, flooding us with images—every night every hour every day all around us—have no knowledge or awareness or understanding of the real effect those images are going to have on us . . . The entire society is illiterate, and they are being controlled by the people who can read, that is the controllers of these images, the image-makers.29
As a time-based medium, video art allows for manipulations of the ordinary experience of time; it is a non-narrative time which in Viola’s work is represented in the form of large, slow-moving, mesmerizing images; it is an art of duration and absorption, through which the artist shows us “the hidden dimension of our lives” and a return to interiority. “Human beings,” the artist argues, “as all living beings, are essentially creations of time.”30 Exploiting the possibilities of electronic technology, Viola, we will see, creates a disrupted representation and de-familiarized embodiment of movement and time—slow motion, time-lapse, acceleration and deceleration—to explore the dimensions of the human condition and to encounter the “unseen.” Indeed it may be argued that video (and perhaps even the Internet) has provided a technological base for religion’s re-entry into public awareness.
We are, then, returned to the question with which we began, prompted as it was by James Elkins’s modest but fertile examination of “the strange place of religion in contemporary art:” Is it possible thinking past the mutual mistrust of art and religion, to re-read and re-engage spiritual themes within postmodern culture? Is it possible to propose an alternative perspective on the “human condition,” one that speculates on the place of the numinous and a life of faith in contemporary art and culture, and opens up the field of inquiry to include appreciation of affective nuances of lived encounter? In effect, the goal of this study will be to test the adequacy of visual culture to lived human experience and to the deeply felt life, and in so doing to consider the key features of any contemporary theological aesthetics—that it be revelatory, participatory, and transformative. We return to Elkins’s eloquent reminder that we must continue to reflect on the relation between visual culture and the sacred: “It is impossible to talk sensibly about religion and at the same time address art in an informed and intelligent manner: but it is also irresponsible not to keep trying.”31
In that which is hidden, I shall argue, Viola offers moments for a self-revealing divine. He will be read, then, as a theologian whose medium is light, movement and sound, rather than words; and while my focus here is on the Christian strain of that visual theology, it is important to note—and I will do so where appropriate—that the artist’s deep familiarity with and expressions of the divine across a number of faith traditions, both Western and Eastern, inform his work. I will approach the work as offering a phenomenology of hope, such that we, as beholders, remain receptively open to the overwhelming possibility, indeed the promise, of the “appearance” of God. Further, this study will develop a method for what James Romaine calls a “critical-devotional reading” of visual theology which “takes seriously the nature of religious art as sacramental, revelatory, and inspirational.”32