Chris Townsend (2)

"Woodman's pioneering style and technique have made her one of America's most notable and well-respected photographers of the late 20th century." —Aesthetica

The precocious and brilliant American artist Francesca Woodman, is one of post-war photography's most original figures. This important book includes a major review of her life's work based on research by art historian Chris Townsend, together with extracts and facsimile pages from Francesca's personal journals edited and curated by her father, George Woodman. This unique and much-admired book is now available for the first time in paperback.… (mehr)

Perhaps the greatest measure of Bill Viola’s success is the way he has effortlessly navigated his way from video to installation art, and along the way helped to pioneer new challenges for the viewer. A feted and critically acclaimed artist who has produced a corpus of innovative and influential work, Viola really needs no introduction. His disciples and acolytes crowd the pavements outside the halls where his exhibitions are staged, giving rise to the dubious appellation of the ‘Steven Spielberg of Modern Art’.

This collection of essays by a nucleus of contributors inside and outside art history goes a long way to explaining what makes Viola the global phenomenon tick. Every aspect of his art and influences is put under the microscope here: emotional reaction, the sublime, Renaissance art, Asian spirituality, and contemporary Russian art. The range of topics suggest the plethora of approaches open to the student of Viola’s art, although, inevitably, some may be superhighways to new vistas of interpretation and others critical cul de sacs.

Perhaps what unites all the authors in this book is their belief that Viola’s art, despite its reliance on high technology and clinical exhibition strategies ultimately is able to reach people on an emotional level. Like the Spaniards who clamoured for a more public sign of emotion from the British over the London bombings, Viola’s art challenges non-emotional response. But as Chris Townsend says in his introduction the sort of emotional charge with which Viola’s work is imbued could not be possible without the actual presence of the spectator; to appreciate Viola, you have to really get involved, physically experience all the sights and sounds of his installations. But beware, since the experience can be overwhelming, which is why Cynthia Freeland links the concept of the sublime with Viola’s ability to move the spectator. His technique of showing his movies in extreme slow time captures something of the infinite vastness of the sublime in Burke’s sense. Here, “time turns into space”; the slo-mo explosion of water drops in a work like The Crossing (1996) opens the spectator to wider perspectives of beauty and wonder.

However, despite this sense of wonder that Viola’s installations impart, the art form does have its limitations as Otto Neumaier shows. For him, the viewer is not able to see every component of the Viola machinery, and so a loss of control is experienced at not being able to overview. The problem is that Viola is operating on an entirely different time scheme to everybody else, “turning documentation into surrealist dream” in the eloquent words of David Morgan. His essay, concentrating solely on Viola’s video art tests the metaphorical possibilities of video, especially the way Viola can position the viewer relative to the work itself. An intriguing installation, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1982) containing a chair complete with headphones facing a monitor showing Viola confronting the viewer, suggests an invitation to converse with the master.

Such an installation evolved from Viola’s Zen Buddhist training. Here, we have the contemporary art equivalent of a mondo or dialogue between master and student in Buddhism where a koan or question is directed towards the learner. Viola, the Zen master of modern art, has all the answers, and the bewildered viewer-apprentice is expected to find them. Viola’s interest in such proselytisers of Zen Buddhism as Suzuki and Coomaraswarmy is fully set out in Elizabeth Ten Grotenhuis’s essay on his use of Asian spirituality, and in an essay dedicated to explicating one work, The Greeting (1995), Jean Wainwright sees traces of it in Viola’s response to Renaissance art. Thus, The Greeting with its referencing of Pontormo’s Visitation (1514-16) explores the hidden essence of the pre-modern pictorial tradition, and offers Viola the opportunity to transform it. As Wainwright points out, by changing old master art into film, Viola’s art aspires to the condition of some modernist pictures, which attempted to paint motion, such as Balla’s Dynamism of Dog (1912). Yet, Viola’s videos do not attempt to critique time, but instead try to show it as a new way of seeing driven by a deep spirituality which Viola garners from a variety of sources ranging from Sufi mysticism to St John of the Cross.

In one of the most interesting essays in the book, Chris Townsend deconstructs Viola’s Room for St John of the Cross (1983) laying bare its concealed structures and strategies. Comprising two closed spaces showing images from the world, the installation should be seen less as a model of private subjectivity, and more of a dialogue between self and God, self and community, and most significantly of all, artist and spectator. This is no monkish, sequestered cell in which the soul confers with itself, but a more communal space into which we can look. Drawing an interesting parallel between religious confession and this installation, Townsend argues that Room for St John of the Cross with its apertures suggests transparency rather than occlusion, as would have been the case with the relationship between confessors and the community in the early modern era. It is worth comparing Townsend’s essay with David Jaspar’s on Viola’s The Messenger (1996), which when shown in another religious and public space, Durham Cathedral, became a site of contention because it was a video of a naked man swimming in water.

Closing the volume, Antonio Geusa describes the reception of Viola’s art at the Venice Biennale of 1995 by neighbouring Russian video artists. The description by Russian artists of Viola’s art as ‘American’ in nature prompts Geusa to meditate on where Viola’s art geographically and institutionally stands. By way of answer, Geusa quotes Viola’s statement read by his wife in St Petersburg in 1996 in which he affirmed that the work of art can only exist in the mind of the viewer who has seen it. And the implications of this for viewing and understanding Viola’s art? Perhaps that we must re-visit it and re-learn the ideas that it conveys to us, then silently like a satisfied Zen master, Viola will disappear and leave us to our meditations.… (mehr)