Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney, until 5 September 2009

.”]HE LOOKS like a tidy chap, Bill Viola. A bit like a chartered accountant or – hey! – a sound engineer for Radio 3. Perhaps this is appropriate; he’s the video art man, the one who realised the possibilities of the medium – think what Man Ray did for photography, update the technology and you’ve got Viola.

He’s the Alexander Graham Bell of LCD/flat panel/plasma display/all surround installation video art. He’s got a BFA in Experimental Studios (yes – studios. It’s not a typo) from Syracuse University. And he does electronic music too.

The problem with pioneers (every press pack and biog on the web calls him that) is that they’re just that – they have the dubious distinction of thinking of it first. Then lots of youth with its jeans falling down – not tidy at all – jump on the poor pioneer’s efforts, refine them, extend them and pull them around until they’re unrecognisable.

Technology moves so quickly now that things are dated as soon as they’re invented. We’re such sophisticated viewers, accessors, downloaders. I thought this when I was in the Pier’s darkened rooms looking at this very important artist’s work. I’d just been in Edinburgh at the Dean Gallery – the ‘modern art’ one – the day before, checking out Paolozzi and the Surrealists – and how dated they seem!

Galleries freeze artists at a particular point in their development; this exhibition has four works which are all nearly ten years old. Nowadays, Viola is still travelling. He’s interested in primitive cultures, Buddhism, ancient traditions – he’s been in Bali, he’s looked at Native American rock sites, he’s taken his sons to a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama – and in 2005 he collaborated with Peter Sellers and Esa Pekka Salonen on a production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde – not for the faint hearted.

You can see work by him now in the Natural History Museum in London – part of their After Darwin, Contemporary Expressions exhibition, inspired by the great man’s clumsily-titled book The Expressions of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Viola’s still energised by the basic rituals which keep us all happy in the human zoo.

Two things occur to me. Being Time is a precise title; these images are about us in an intimate kind of way. They’re coolly shot; nothing intrudes between us and the image. It could be like looking at a Vermeer – except – it moves! Crucially, that changes the viewer’s perceptions and expectations. A lifetime watching telly – from the Lone Ranger to Big Brother – tells me that movement means action. But not here. Movement means meditation. Being Time also means – you are here, you the viewer, watching people like you; you’ve got a responsibility to pay attention and react.

Secondly, I think – we can’t leave the image alone; we have to make a narrative out of it. Just as you bring your own perceptions to a poem, so it is with these room-filling images. It’s impossible simply to view them as shapes and colours. Indeed, Viola would not want us to. He was studying medieval and early Renaissance devotional works, and coping with personal angst when he was putting these diptyches together; seen as a group, they read like a coping strategy for being human.

‘Catherine’s Room’ (2001) is a jewel-like series of observations of a woman, a room, some light and a cherry blossom tree in a square window. Very Dutch – down to the blue of the material she sews, the slant of the sun, the purity of the profile. It’s like a short story full of subtle clues – why has she moved the table? What happened to the flowers? Who are all the candles for? Does she always sleep alone?

It’s got a tranquillity and serenity that’s Zen-like, and because there’s no emotion in it at all, the viewer fills in the gaps. Sort of like seeing a series of stills from a Bergman film. It’s compelling – partly, however, because it’s nice. She has an apple, not a Big Mac. The postie doesn’t leave a bill. She does yoga, not a workout to Five Live. There’s no need to hoover. It’s like a parallel world. Bliss, really – a wee look at Catherine’s room, to remind us of spirituality and simplicity – then back into the grubby sunny Stromness street when there’s a few drunk boys spitting and swearing at the tourists…

‘Four Hands’ is just that. It’s described as four small flat panel display screens mounted on a wooden shelf, presenting moving images of four pairs of hands. Viola says they are ‘influenced by a variety of sources from Buddhist mudras to c17 English Chirogrammatical tables.’ They’re different hands, making shapes – heart shapes, cup shapes, praying and clenching.

I tried hard to see them as a sequence of ritual movements which define our humanity, our similarity to one another – but they left me cold I’m afraid. I thought they looked contrived and tired, and I wanted to see better hands – workers’ hands, foreign hands. Maybe it was just a failure of the imagination, on my part; or maybe it’s what I was talking about earlier – seen this, done it, old hat now, where’s Tilda Swinton really asleep in a glass case?

‘Silent Mountain’ (2001), we’re told, is ‘a study of the onset and aftermath of an explosive emotional outburst as it courses through the human body… a visual record of the human capacity to withstand self-destruction and strive for renewal.’

Well, what it really is is two actors, on a loop, getting upset and then calming down. Slightly different blue t-shirts, I noticed, and the bloke does a kind of girly thing with his hair when he’s really traumatised, whereas the girl has a certain conceit about her hands – excellent nails, no chewing at all. I hated it. You shouldn’t try and pretend trauma. Metaphor works; the literal doesn’t. If you want trauma, get to a war zone. Don’t give me two pretty people emoting.

I’d seen ‘Ascension’ (2000) before, but in a busy crowded gallery. In the silent Pier, this work is simply stunning; you realise the subtlety of the sound track, – there are whales there, and tug boats, and breathing – and you really experience the shock of the event – a man’s sudden plunge into another element – starry shiny pure water.

This work is like a poem sequence, rich with the metaphor I wanted, simple, dynamic, freighted with all the big questions we don’t quite like to ask – what will happen when I die? Are there angels? Will there still be a me-shaped space when I’m gone? Do we rise? The white shirt fills with water as the man sinks, and it looks like wings; the light – that same slanted light which is so persuasive and elegant in ‘Catherine’s Room’ – is like some sort of message of hope.

The veined feet are of course like Christ’s on the cross, and you look for the nail holes. The penis is visible – so you remember this is a real person, and you worry about how he breathes. The hands barely move until the very end, when there’s a gesture of supplication almost. The air bubbles have a life of their own – literally! – and once he’s gone and the water returns to its primeval sludginess, you feel the imprint he made on it.

Viola likes slow motion, and perhaps was one of the first to appreciate its possibilities – how we can focus intimately on our actions, and experience them in a new way, when we see them taken out of real time.

I’m not religious, but I do notice the marks we make on earth; and this work honours that. If you are religious, I suspect you will find deep comfort and solace from ‘Ascension’.

So – caught in the two thousands, this show, but interesting because of the flaws. Why don’t the ‘Four Hands’ and the ‘Silent Mountain’ work? Because video, like all art, has to show and suggest, not tell. I’m guessing Viola has learned not to be didactic any more. I suspect too that his new work is not so much about people, and more about place. In the end it all comes down to rocks and stones – they’re much more challenging than people. Perhaps he’d relish a bit of time at the Ring of Brodgar.

© Morag MacInnes, 2009

Links

• Pier Arts Centre
• St Magnus Festival