Bill Viola's Vision Illuminates at ICA

Bill Viola's new series of installations, "Buried Secrets," attempts to deal with issues of communication and miscommunication in a modern world, through manipulation of audibility, visual diffusion of images, juxtaposition of sound and vision and soundless gesture. Though the "message" of each work seems at times overstressed and obvious, ironically this frees the mind to focus on the pure, sensual beauty of the work as a whole.

The first of the five installations, "Hall of Whispers," is a pitch-black narrow room lined with video monitors showing black and white images of people struggling to speak through bound mouths. Muffled groans surround the viewer in the darkness. The "message" here, at least the one stated by curator Marilyn A. Zeitlin as "the frustration and vanity of communication," seems simplistically overt. But the images of the faces themselves are so interesting, so cragged with subtle shades of dark and light, depth and surface, that their collective, somewhat pat "meaning" does a disservice to their visual complexity. There is also a certain ludicrousness to a message of "non-communication" being communicated so thoroughly through Viola's work.

The second installation, "The Veiling," is similarly far more tactilly complex than the supposed "message" intended by the work. "The Veiling" consists of a series of gauze shrouds hung in parallel rows from one end of a small dark room to another. Video projectors hung at either end of the rectangular room each project a different image, and as each image is diffused through each successive shroud to the point at which they meet in the center, the images get increasingly indistinguishable. The curator's notes claim this is a statement on "gender". To apply such a clinical, stalely academic categorization as the term "gender" to such a luminous, sensually affecting, eerie work is to limit its importance. With "The Veiling" as with "The Hall of Whispers," it becomes clear that the genius in Viola's works are in his vision, not his voice. Even the trite titles of the installations show that his strength is less in his verbal "messages" than in his manipulation of tactile experience.

This conclusion becomes even more apparent through a comparison of the weakest installation, "Presence," which relies entirely on the spoken word, versus the most potent installation, "Interval," at which visual images are presented so quickly as to defy cognition. "Presence," in which the audience sits on a bench in a dim room while an audiotape of a woman's fretting over her childhood is played at varying levels of volume and clarity, is a tribute to the most banal of self-help confessionals, rather than focusing the audience's attention on a little examined sense, the nature of sound. "Interval", on the other hand, strips the audience bare of its expectations of cognition and easy assumptions. A video of a man bathing and one of unidentifiable, feral activities are played in alternating, ever shorter segments. Rather than presenting a narrative puzzle for the audience to work on, the piece becomes more incomprehensible the longer it lasts, forcing the audience to accept their experience in sensual rather than intellectual terms. In this sense it succeeds where the ultimately boring "Presence" could not.

After all this visual and aural input, the final installation of the series, "The Greeting," is a break-through exploration of the power of a single, wordless gesture. In this video, presented simply in an empty room on a conventional screen, two women are approached by a third who embraces one of the women and whispers something in her ear. A few seconds of film is stretched to twenty times its original length, and every subtle, lovely element of the total motion is exposed to attention our impatient eyes would typically be unable to observe. The piece is simple, monumental, beautiful and holy.

Viola's Buried Secrets is a transforming experience on the cutting edge of video art, a rare and moving opportunity that should not be missed-- for its sensual if not intellectual, power. It is ironic that this newest of artistic genres, video art, should have the effect of reviving an "old fashioned" artistic philosophy-- that the experience and beauty of art itself can be more significant than its message.