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Bill Viola: the Passions

Essays by Peter Sellars and John Walsh
The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles in association with the National Gallery, London, 2003, 290 pp., 250 color and 30 b/w illustrations, Trade, $75.00; Paper, $45.00 ISBN: 0-89236-720-2

Reviewed by Chris Cobb

ccobbsf@hotmail.com

The very art of painting has met its biggest challenge ever: Bill Viola's the Passions. If you think I'm kidding, or overstating Viola's impact as the world's best-known video artist, then I invite you to seek his work out. While it's true that photography has largely replaced painting in terms of having a central role in contemporary art, until now video hasn't really caught up. In his work Viola asks 'What if?.' His large group of works included in the Getty's exhibition entitled the Passions is inspired by numerous religious paintings that date from the medieval era through the renaissance, touching upon works by Dirk Bouts, Hans Memling, Jan Van Eyck and Hieronymous Bosch among others. The Passions not only take advantage of the thin, flat panel plasma video monitors, but they add motion as well. Any book on the exhibition would have to be of tremendous quality. And it would have to take into account the context of the numerous themes in Viola's work.

So it comes as no surprise that the Passions is one of the best-illustrated art books to emerge in the past few years. Published by Getty Publications, no expense was spared bringing the holder of the book as close as possible to experiencing the printed page as video art. Especially enticing are two foldout sections: Catherine's Room and Surrender. In Catherine's Room, a series of five panels illustrate a single day in Catherine's life. Her activities and the absence of heavy-handed metaphors lead the viewer to identify with her and feel her entire life from birth to death. Surrender is a powerful work where separate images of a man and a woman are placed so there is a sense that they are reflecting each other's movements. Along with a description of the work, the book has a double sized fold out that shows a dramatic moment in the video. As their reflections ripple on the surface of water they become visual abstractions of themselves. And this makes the book well worth taking a look at. On the other hand Viola's art can, at times, come off so clean that it almost feels like advertising for some unnamed product. Perhaps an ironic lesson we learn from this book is just how much beauty is used to sell things and how seldom it is used to teach us about ourselves.

 

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Updated 1st November 2003


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