VIOLA~Bill. The Passions.*

€60,00

Author: Sellars, John Walsh, visual documentation Kira Perov~Peter
Publisher: Getty publications, Los Angeles
Year: 2003
Artist: VIOLA~Bill
ISBN: 0-89236-720-2

Softcover, 298 pages, 10 1/4 x 10 1/4 inches, 250 colorand 30 b/w illustrations, Squarish 4to, folding wraps
As New.

Bill Viola: The Passions.





The Passions explores the genesis and meaning of this extraordinary suite of works and examines the intellectual and spiritual concerns that have preoccupied Viola over the years and formed the foundation of his life's work.

Human emotions are the subject of The Passions, a series of twenty video works made by the contemporary artist Bill Viola (b. 1951) during the past two years. Since the mid-1970s, Viola's video installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory, and self-knowledge. In these new works he has grappled with one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of emotion by depicting the facial expressions and body language of models or in Viola's case, of performers.

The book is published in conjunction with an exhibition which will unveil Emergence, a new work in the Passions series commissioned by the Getty on view at the Getty Museum from January 24 to April 27, 2003, and at the National Gallery, London, from October 22, 2003 to January 4, 2004. In an opening essay, John Walsh traces Viola's career and examines the intellectual and psychological concerns that have preoccupied Viola over the years. Walsh then offers a first-person account of Viola's filming of Emergence. A conversation between Viola and Hans Belting reveals Viola's current interests and the role that older works of art have played in his development. Peter Sellars meditates upon the spiritual foundation of Viola's work. In addition, Viola presents both images and texts that served as sources for many of the Passions works. Finally, Kira Perov contributes her own documentary photographs and compiles richly illustrated frame sequences from each of the twenty Passions pieces, accompanied by descriptions by Viola.

John Walsh is director emeritus of the Getty Museum and curator of the exhibition. Hans Belting is professor of art history and media theory at the School for New Media in Karlsruhe, Germany. Peter Sellars is a theater, opera, and television director, and professor in the World Arts and Cultures Department at the University of California, Los Angeles. Kira Perov is an arts administrator, editor, and widely-published photographer. She has worked closely with Bill Viola, her partner and husband, since 1978.

Bill Viola (b.1951) is widely recognized as one of the leading video artists on the international scene. For over 30 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, and works for television broadcast. Viola's video installations total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. His single channel videotapes have been broadcast and presented cinematically around the world, while his writings have been published and anthologized for international readers.

Since the early 1970s, Viola has used video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences 'birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness' and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach.

Viola received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973. Since then he has produced over 150 works that have been shown in museums, galleries, film festivals, and on public television worldwide. During the 1970s he lived for 18 months in Florence, Italy, as technical director of production in one of the first video art studios in Europe, and then traveled widely to study and record traditional performing arts in the Solomon Islands, Java, Bali, and Japan. From 1980-81 he lived in Japan with his wife Kira Perov on a Japan/U.S. Cultural Exchange Fellowship, where he studied Buddhism with Zen Master Daien Tanaka and was artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi research laboratories. In 1984 he was an artist-in-residence at the San Diego Zoo in California for a project on animal consciousness.

Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995, premiering an ensemble of five new installation works titled Buried Secrets. In 1997 the Whitney Museum of American Art organized Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey, an exhibition that traveled for two years to six museums in the United States and Europe. He was invited to be a Scholar-in-Residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles in 1998, and later that year created a suite of three new video pieces for the rock group Nine Inch Nails' world tour. His 1994 videofilm Deserts, created to accompany the music composition of the same name by Edgard Varse, received its American premiere at the Hollywood Bowl in August 1999 with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. His most recent project is a large scale, five-part projected "fresco" cycle in digital High-Definition video, Going Forth By Day (2002), commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin.

Viola is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a John T. and Catherine D. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989, and the first Medienkunstpreis in 1993, presented jointly by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, and Siemens Kulturprogramm, in Germany. He holds honorary doctorates from Syracuse University (1995), The Art Institute of Chicago (1997), and California Institute of the Arts (2000) among others, and was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. He lives and works in Long Beach, California, with his wife and manager Kira Perov and their two children.

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