Task 3

Bill Viola
Viola's art deals largely with human consciousness and experience - birth, death, love, emotion
and humanist spirituality. Throughout his career he has drawn meaning and inspiration from his
deep interest in mystical traditions. An ongoing theme that he constantly explores is dualism- the
idea that you can't understand what you're looking at unless you know its opposite. For
example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, stressed and calm,
loud and quiet, etc.
His work can be divided into three types of catagories- conceptual, visual, and a combination of
the two. Art critic, James Gardner, of the National Review, feels Viola's conceptual work is
forgettable just like most video art. But, others have a different opinion to this. Gardner does
geel that Viola's visual work such as "The Veiling", and his combination of both the conceptual
and visual such as "The Crossing" are impressive and memorable.
Viola's work often exhibits a painterly quality, his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the
viewer to sink into to the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. This
quality makes his work perhaps unusually accessible within a contemporary art context

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg19GwNCJU0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqf_cuDf9qI

Matt Mullican

Matt Mullicans art is in many different forms like drawings, sculptures, videos, paintings,
electronic media, and installations. Since the late 1970s he has used hypnosis in his work, and
the process both informs and helps explain his practice, which explores the different ways we
experience it through media. In Mullicans performances, which have been in resemblance to a
studio and a home, his trance state can last several hours and include a range of different
behaviour from the dull to the startling. Treating his psyche as a found object, he might pour
himself coffee, pace the floor, grunt, sing, chant phrases, and even draw or paint in black acrylic
ink on supports including large pieces of paper, bedsheets, and the wall itself.
Since the 70s, Matt Mullicans works have been exhibited in very prestigious museums in the
world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Haus der Kunst in Monaco, the
National Galerie in Berlin, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Museum of
Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. In the last years Matt Mullicans works have been exhibited in
many solo shows as The Meaning of Things at Spazio Culturale Antonio Ratti in Como (2013);
Vom Ordnen der Welt, Haus der Kunst, Munich (2011) and 12 by 2 at the Institut dArt
Contemporain in Villeurbanne, France.