INTERFACE

REVIEW

Love/Death: The Tristan Project

St. Olave’s College, London
21 June - 22 September 2006

Reviewed by: Michea(fada)l (pronounced Mehall) O'Connell (a.k.a. Mocksim) »

A few years ago Immanuel Kant insisted that ‘consensus as to what is beautiful must remain free’. Later on Jean-Francios Lyotard suggested that the aesthetics of The Sublime ‘is not governed by a consensus of taste’ but in the midst of watching/meditating on Bill Viola’s Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (two of the films which arose out of  material Viola developed for a new production of Richard Wagner’s nineteenth century opera, Tristan and Isolde) these truisms feel hard to accept.  Don’t we human beings inherently find that certain kinds of imagery, composition or dynamics draw us in, absorb us completely or even have a hypnotic effect?  Blazing fires, flowing water, waves, looking out through the forest canopy, the visual impact of wind and air flow are always lovely or awe inspiring.  Also enormity, the idea of infinity or apparent catastrophe is profoundly fascinating at least when viewed from a distance.  Examples might be a volcano exploding, the night sky, the vastness of the sea or more horribly say the death of the world trade centre towers in 2001?  Bell Viola’s movies and their positioning and installation simulate similar effects, sometimes fantastically well.  On other occasions he slips up, the results are awful, a joke.

Viola’s work for the current London exhibition (called Love/Death: The Tristan Project) is spread across two sites, one central and the other near London Bridge.  With the second venue, St. Olave’s College, because it is on the edge of the city, the difference between the unimportant looking landscape immediately outside, and the dramatic audio-visual experience to be had inside the building is major.  Which is an understatement.  You may feel compelled to rush out, call in passers by (not least because entry is free), stop traffic, to proselytise on behalf of Viola.  This is despite the fact that only one of the rooms there really presented what this artist does best.  And unfortunately the man cannot seem to do anything else.  When he ventures away from the usual suspects in terms of raw material: ‘walls of fire, inverted waterfalls and levitating corpses’ (as listed in Time Out magazine) things start to look silly.  But it’s amazing that they don’t look silly already.  To use inappropriate analogies, Viola’s output generally has a lot more in common with Seventies rock opera than say punk rock.  The latter genre was less easily mocked because like so much art in recent decades, it intelligently, at least partially, ridiculed itself, protecting it from satirical criticism.  One could have imagined easily a French and Saunders type piss-take of most of Viola art.  This is perhaps because despite his significance in the world of art and The Passions at the National Gallery in 2003/04, Bill Viola is not as so widely know in Britain as Hirst or Tracy Emin say.

St. Olave’s is a fine venue containing a big church-like space, an internal balcony which allows work to be viewed from unusual angles and a surprising spiral stair-way, long enough to increase suspense by just the right amount, on the way up to a ten minute piece The Fall into Paradise.   The sense of anticipation here feels identical in fact to the way Viola uses suspense in his films.  Always there is a little more of a delay than expected but always enough is done to keep spectators involved.  And then comes the bang.  Once a climax is reached (and figures become instantly recognisable say) others might stop but Viola pushes onwards.  This is not the stuff of classical narrative.  Mystery is smashed and then more created.  Basically you get the orgasm, the aftermath and then more aftermath.  At times this is crude, boring, like porn.  A video artist friend of mine slated the work at Haunch of Venison (the central London location), was delighted by the pieces mentioned above Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension but appalled by the other pieces at St. Olave’s.  “How can these be part of the same body of work?” she exclaimed as we watched an uncharacteristically low resolution video piece involving a couple wearing corny outfits walking through the woods and into the sea, holding hands.  There are a lot of these hetero-couple videos.  They don’t have the usual Viola impact: every action seems so clichéd, they’re like unreconstructed fairytales or clips from a rotten Hollywood romance.

Generally Bill Viola  makes the spectator notice.  Every aspect of how his films are presented is considered.  Dark cinematic spaces tend to trap the viewer and separate viewers from each other.  Sincerity is demanded.  Often pieces are displayed in portrait orientation.  Projection scale or screen size varies hugely from exhibit to exhibit.  Simple editing methods such as reversing the time-line, vertical rotation, slow motion or accelerated motion trough time-lapse photography are honest and just as useful for packing a punch.  The laws of gravity can be broken for example in a way which does not puzzle the spectator.  Viola plays with extremes in perspective.  What begins as an imperceptible dot reveals itself as two figures moving closer to the camera.  These unpretentious tricks serve to remind us of how overwhelming and important is our visual or eye/brain sense.  Viola’s work reminds us of how tiny and separate we are, of the need for surrender.  It is normal to take for granted the ways in which our consciousness is formed through an ability to detect movement, detail and what is at a distance.  The brain’s incredible ability to see can be problematic.  It is a small step from this inflated awareness to arrogance and a belief that we actually own the material which appears around us.  Viola’s work  points to this but I’m getting carried away, should stop here.  This sounds like cod-philosophy, west coast bullshit, pseudo-Buddhism.

Maybe Bill Viola should lighten up a bit.  But that would be ridiculous.  I suspect he’ll continue in the same vein, for as long as he can get away with it, engineering The Sublime through a tried and tested set of approaches.

Writer detail:

Google Mocksim to find out more

m@mocksim.co.uk| www.mocksim.org

Venue detail:
St. Olave’s College
Tooley Street London SE1 2JR

www.artnet.com/Galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=161&cid=101599&source=2&type=2 

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