While the argument will largely address Viola’s more recent and allusive installations, it is necessary to my story to begin with an earlier, and I believe most seminal piece, more narrative by comparison to the later works, which will introduce my narrative’s main threads. It is an installation I first encountered in the 1996 exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform Lives, a major exhibition that took the rather unusual position (at the time) of seeking to revive the sacerdotal role of the artist in the postmodern era. In this exhibition, Viola joined the ranks of such luminaries as Joseph Beuys, Francis Bacon, Anselm Kiefer, Barnett Newman, and Ad Reinhardt, among others. Viola’s contribution to that exhibition was his 1983 installation Room for St. John of the Cross, the work to which we now turn.
1. This study makes no claims to a comprehensive or exhaustive interpretation of the whole of Viola’s output; rather, my interest is in a select group of works, seen through the lens of Christian mystical theology and the philosophical sublime, in a way that may well provide a methodological framework for investigating other examples within the artist’s oeuvre, both past and ongoing.
2. Gablik, Reenchantment of Art, 11.
3. Author’s interview with Bill Viola and Kira Perov on August 19, 2013.
4. Lefebvre and White, Bergson, Politics, and Religion.
5. Interview, August 19, 2013.
6. Raney, “Interview with Bill Viola,” in Raney, Art in Question, 84.
7. Duve, Look: 100 Years of Contemporary Art, 14.
8. Taylor, Disfiguring, 46.
9. Elkins and Morgan, Re-Enchantment, 229.
10. Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art, xi.
11. Ibid.
12. Ibid.
13. Walsh, Bill Viola, 57.
14. It must be said upfront that, in my recent interview with Viola, the artist made clear that his interests were less in religion and theology, or in any one particular religion, and more in the spiritual and its cultural manifestations.
15. Promey, “‘Return’ of Religion,” 48.
16. Belting, Art History after Modernism, vii.
17. Romaine and Stratford, ReVisioning, 5.
18. John the Scot Eriugena, in Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 1:186.
19. As this study relies heavily on the work of James Elkins, it is incumbent on me to acknowledge at the outset Elkins’s most recent rejection of the sublime in such a context as an inefficient and moribund category, as “weak” and “damaged goods.” It will be obvious to the reader that I do not follow him here. See Elkins, “Against the Sublime,” in Hoffman and Whyte, Beyond the Finite, 75–90.
20. Danto, Abuse of Beauty, 148.
21. Townsend, Art of Bill Viola, 118.
22 López-Remiro, Writings on Art, 133ff.
23. Elkins, Pictures and Tears, 18.
24 Reinhardt in Franke, On What Cannot Be Said, 2:47.
25. Ross, Bill Viola, 152.
26. Jean Baudrillard, “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Foster, Postmodern Culture, 128.
27. Hedges, Empire of Illusion.
28. Ibid., 52.
29. Viola, in Campbell, “Bill Viola,” 91.
30. Viola, Reasons for Knocking, 278.
31. Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion, 116. See also Heartney, Postmodern Heretics.
32. Romaine and Stratford, ReVisioning, 17.
2 In the Dark Night of the Soul
Room for St. John of the Cross
I entered I knew not where and abided without knowing, transcending all knowledge.
—St. John of the Cross, “The Dark Night”
In 1983, Bill Viola first exhibited the sound and video installation, Room for St. John of the Cross (see Figure 1), a spatial, temporal and aural environment comprised of a small black box enclosure—approximately 6 x 5 x 5.5 feet—confined within a larger darkened room, itself measuring 14 x 24 x 30 feet; on one side of the enclosure is a small window through which glows a soft incandescent light. As viewers approach, stoop and peer through the small aperture, rather awkwardly, like a penitent in a confessional, into an otherwise inaccessible room of white walls and dirt floor—a room minimally furnished with a wooden table on which are arranged a pitcher, a glass of water, and a four-inch color video monitor—they hear the barely audible incantation, in Spanish, of St. John’s love poetry.
Figure 1.
Figure 2.
Composed between 1577 and 1578, the religious reformer created this work while imprisoned for nine months in a space the same size as the cubicle and subjected, through daily torture, to what he called his “dark night of the soul.” That “night” was a profound dread-filled experience of abandonment, not only by his faith community but by God himself, as if God had turned away and “left him to dissolve painfully into the dark void of his prison cell.”33 It was from this intense feeling of abjection and solitude, however, that St. John composed this most passionate poetry, in which he speaks of an inpouring of grace, of profound and ecstatic love experienced as an imagined journey through the night, soaring over city walls and mountain peaks. Outside the small cell, in Viola’s re-staging, viewers are unsteadied by a quaking large-screen video projection of a snow-covered mountain range filmed in black and white, exteriorizing the sensation of boundless and weightless flight, and all this accompanied by the unrelenting roar of wind and white noise saturating the room. Meanwhile, on the small video monitor inside the cell (see Figure 2), another mountain view glows quietly and motionless in vivid color as natural light shifts in real space and time. At once viewers are made to feel their own incarceration in the larger room, invited to imagine the imprisoned reformer, and to contemplate the meaning of his (and our) suffering in worldly confinement. For St. John of the Cross—as for us—from this isolation and privation will come inwardness and introspection, from negation of the self in this world will come contact with transcendence and with an all-consuming love latent in the self that endures suffering. Indeed, Viola remembers that, as a young artist in 1983, this piece marked a turning point in his life, a “coming out” he’s called it, creating a work amidst “intense” criticism, based on the suffering and ordeal of a Christian saint (“everything those guys hate”), and a declaration of sorts, despite the prevailing winds of criticism, that as an artist he had an interest in spiritual things.34
The Apophatic Tradition in Christian Mysticism
In a 1997 interview, Viola remarked on his discovery of the figures of Early Christianity and the 16th-century mystics John of the Cross and his mentor Teresa of Avila, as well as the earlier 14th-century Dominican German monk Meister Eckhart and the anonymous author of the medieval text, The Cloud of Unknowing, all within the Christian tradition of the via negativa:
The via negativa in the West is connected to a shadowy fifth-century character known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Aeropagite, who . . . described an immanent God . . . as opposed to the transcendent God of the more familiar via positiva, over and above all and outside the individual. The via positiva describes God as the ultimate expression of a series of attributes or qualities—good, all-seeing, all-knowing, etc.—of which human beings contain lesser, diminished versions . . . The via negativa, on the other hand, is the way of negation. God is wholly other and cannot be described or comprehended. There are no attributes other than unknowability. When the mind faces the divine reality, it seizes up and enters a “cloud of unknowing,” or to use St. John of the Cross’ term, “a dark night of the soul.” Here in the darkness, the only thing to go on is faith, and the only way to approach God is from within, primarily through love. This is why much of St. John’s poetry reads like classic love poems.35