MOVING FRESCOES

HUONG NGUYEN

ART 362
PROFESSOR ELLEN HOOBLER
OCTOBER 20, 2014

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Bill Viola may have been born to video as a medium, but he lives and breathes in the
spaces of Early Renaissance art. Citing his various influences, Viola is more likely to talk about
Giotto and the Assisi frescoes than Nam June Paikin Violas own words, video arts original
master1and of the contemporary Abstract Expressionists and Conceptual artists, he mentions
them not at all. Many of Violas videos were in fact either directly or indirectly influenced by
frescoes from the Trecento and the Quattrocento, drawing upon their themes, their symbolism,
and most curiously of all, their techniques. Ascension (2000), Voyage (2002), and Catherines
Room (2001) are what I tentatively term his Moving Frescoes; all three recall the spiritual space
of the church, all return to the timelessness and universality of birth and death, and all remain
intrinsically indebted to the narrative techniques of fresco painters. In the Moving Frescoes,
instead of exploring video as a cinematic medium, Viola treats the video as moving pictures
and treats the video series as Renaissance artists would the fresco cycle: like canvas for the epic
themes of life, death, birth, and rebirth.
In the [early Renaissance] world, Viola writes, [i]mages become frozen moments.
They become artifacts of the past. In securing their place on earth, they have accepted their own
mortality. The invention of the moving pictures, which far predates the invention of the
video, [liberated the image] from its prison frozen in time.2 The extreme slow-motion of many
of Violas videos dramatizes this liberation. In Ascension (fig. 1), a man slowly plunges into

Martin Gayford, "The Ultimate Invisible World," Modern Painters 16, no. 3 (2003): 25,
http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
2

Bill Viola, Video Black The Mortality of Image, in Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz,
(California: University of California Press, 1996), 481,
http://wiki.dxarts.washington.edu/sandbox/groups/general/wiki/b94dd/attachments/6bbf8/viola_
VideoBlack.pdf (accessed October 20, 2014).

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water feet first, his arms outstretched in mock of the Crucifixion.3 The Crucifixion is, of course,
one of most predominant themes of Early Renaissance artists, and in effect, Viola had used the
additional dimension of time that video has afforded him to paradoxically depict a single,
meditative moment of profundity. Writing of another slow-motion Bill Viola video, Grace
Glueck observes that the technique [suggests] the stasis of looking at paintings. 4 Indeed, many
of Violas Renaissance-inspired works create within the dark viewing rooms of art museums a
place of silent worship,5 much like the frescoes had done for their church. The audience is
captivated by the shafts of light in lieu of the halo, piercing the luminously blue water and
languishing on the contours of the mans body. The sound design is entirely solemn and diegetic,
a steady rumble of the water punctuated by the crash and by the bell-like tinkle of bubbles
breaking. The frame refuses to move. This is not cinema. This is painting.
Yet the moving picture, though no longer frozen, is nonetheless mortal. Once there was
a train of images sequentially unfolding in time, Viola muses, there was a moving image, and
with it, by necessity, a beginning and an end; mortal images, with the camera as death. 6 As we
watch Ascension, we watch an image practically die. The iconography of Ascension echoes it;
lest we forget, the Crucifixion is about the death of Jesus Christ, and the man in the video
likewise drops incrementally out of frame then, essentially, slowly drowns to death. But even his

Bill Viola ASCENSION, Des Moines Art Center, accessed October 20, 2014,
http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/pages/Bill-Viola-ASCENSION.aspx.
4

Grace Glueck, "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely," New York Times 152, no. 52254
(2002): E30, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
5

David Packwood, "Saving Postmodernism's Soul: Bill Viola's The Passions," Art Book
11, no. 4 (2004): 8, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
6

Viola, Video Black The Mortality of Image, 481.

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death does not return the image to its initial stateonly until the shafts of light finally die out,
bringing the water back to its dark mystery, does the video end, and then, loop back to itself.
Artists in the Medieval and the Renaissance were not merely depicting single moments,
however. What they were interested in were storiesBiblical stories, Creationist stories, and in
attempt to tell complete narratives, they collapsed moments together in one single painting.
Rogier van der Weydens The Dream of Pope Sergius (1430s), for instance, is composed of
several events and reads from left to right. To the left of the painting, an angel appears to Pope
Sergius in his bedroom, and to the right, the Pope meets various subjects in the courtyard; and
yet even farther right and further back, the Pope appoints Saint Hubert as the new bishop.7 It is
from this painting that Viola would borrow not the myth, but the techniques themselves.8
Voyage (fig. 2), Violas fourth video in his Going Forth by Day exhibition, pays blatant
homage to The Dream of Pope Sergius. To the left of the frame, an old man is dying alone in his
bedroom. His son and his daughter-in-law arrive at the door, struggling with the lock and unable
to enter until it is too late. To the right of the frame, the same man, his wife, and their worldly
possessions depart on a boat, traveling to the afterlife on a river that must reference the Styx.9
This is the very same conflation of moments favored by Renaissance artists. Moreover, the
composition and the color palette of the video deliberately recall Weydens painting; Voyage is
vibrant and crisp with red roofs and blue expanses of vast sky, echoing the schemes of the
7

The Dream of Pope Sergius, The J. Paul Getty Museum, accessed October 20, 2014,
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=696.
8

Bill Viola, Mark Kidel, and Fiona Mackenzie, Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart, DVD,
(Bristol: Calliope Media, 2003).
9

Milly Heyd and David Heyd, "Perception as Missing: On Bill Viola's Going Forth by
Da," Notes in the History of Art 22, no. 4 (2003): 33-34, http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed
October 20, 2014).

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Quattrocento painting; in both works, the walls of the bedrooms on the left are also peeled
backimpossiblyto reveal the intimacies within. This open-wall technique, explains Viola, as
well as the act of playing with sense-of-space in order to manipulate simultaneity and
sequentiality, is a lost art.10 Viola rediscovers and employs such arts here, albeit not precisely per
the prescription of the Early Renaissance painters. The conflated moments in Weydens painting
are ostensibly simultaneous but read as sequential. Events in Violas video, on the other hand,
really are and really read as simultaneous. The remarkable thing here is that Viola chooses to
use a medieval technique instead of more conventional and more modern devices to depict
simultaneous events, such as cuts, and such as actually moving the camera and thereby moving
the frame. The greatest audacity of Bill Violas videos is that he works from the bleeding edge of
technology but reaches back in time for everything external to it, grasping at something close to,
perhaps, timelessness.
To that end, Violas themes are unfailingly universal and timeless. Christians, insists
Viola, do not own the Crucifixion or any other spiritual symbolism.11 Viola himself mediates
between Christianity, Zen Buddhism, and Sufism,12 and is transcendent, Murray writes, for his
artistic return to the sameness of spiritualism. Viola [relies] on stripped down mythical and
universal formulas of transcendence, rebirth, struggle, and love to drive his intermixed spectacles

10

Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

11

Packwood, Saving Postmodernisms Soul, 8.

12

Ziad Elmarsafy and , Adapting Sufism to Video Art: Bill Viola and the
Sacred / : , Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 28
(2008): 127, http://www.jstor.org (accessed October 20, 2014).

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of videomatic movement and virtual reality. 13 With this common symbolic language at its
disposal, Violas artwork proceeds to ask us to find a place of silent contemplation or prayer, or
the possibility of seeing unto ourselves, and focus our minds on what the Buddhists call the
silent life.14 The act of introspective meditation transcends culture and time, argues Viola, and
it is art that can bring the internal product of meditation out to the external. Through art, we are
able to connect to other people and cast ourselves out to the world.
Viola, through the Moving Frescoes, is attempting to connect with the Old Masters. As it
were, the Old Masters is as much a misnomer as a signifier of retrospective respect; the artists
must have been young onceand in the time of the Proto-Renaissance, they were young men
themselves, experimenting with techniques and aesthetics and radically changing the face of
art.15 Technology has marched on since the time of Giotto and Brunelleschi, but Viola feels that
artists continue to reach for the same ideas.16 Faced with questions about the artificiality of
Hollywood filmmaking methods, Viola refers back to Giotto: Painting in the period before
Brunelleschis discovery of one-point-perspective, Giottos landscapes and building inevitably
look phony, like theater sets. But, pointing emphatically to his chest, Viola says, I realized
that what [Giotto] was going after was not about rocks and trees and how real they lookits
whats going on in here, thats the fidelity he was going for. About the Old Masters in general,

13

Timothy Murray, "Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality,"

Substance: A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 31, no. 2/3 (2002): 270,
http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
14

Packwood, Saving Postmodernisms Soul, 10.

15

Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

16

Bill Viola and Bonnie Clearwater, Bill Viola: Liber Insularum (2012), from MCH
Swiss Exhibition, http://vimeo.com/55512273 (accessed October 20, 2014).

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and about the pensive figures in centuries-old paintings, Viola professes, Its about the depth
thats within people, and when youre seeing those people, youre having a moment
withanother person from [the ages] no longer with us. 17
Going back to Voyage, that it belongs in a five-part video series installation piece is
another reference to Early Renaissance frescoesthat, of the fresco cycles.18 Talking about
Giottos frescoes in the Mother Church of the Franciscan Order in Assisi, Viola gushes, You get
absorbed in each of these panels, but in reality the piece is the entire space in which you are
surrounded by images.19 The Going Forth by Day exhibition taken as a whole evokes the
spiritual space of chapels and churches, which normally featured fresco cycles about the lives of
either Biblical figures or various Saints.20 In the Trecento, Giotto illustrated the life of Saint
Francis in frescoes running from left to right, along the walls of the church, and in the twentyfirst century, Viola tells the story of a single human life set against the backdrop of the life cycle
of nature, propelled by the Christian myths of Creation and Last Judgment. Composed of five
videos arranged from outside in and from left to right in the viewing room, the exhibition tells
five different, linear stories, but the experience, Milly and David Heyd write, is cyclical.
The first video, Fire Birth, evokes the beginning of life, both human and primordial, and the last
video, First Light, signifies ascension. The Heyds assert: [T]he topic of the work is the cycle of
nature (the four seasons) and the cycle of human life (birth-life-death-rebirth). 21 The theme of
17

Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

18

Which is to say, I can still legitimately title the collection Moving Frescoes, even
though The Dream of Pope Sergius remains, defiantly, oil on panel.
19

Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

20

Heyd, Perception as Missing, 30.

21

Ibid.

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life and death indeed permeates most of Violas oeuvrehe has been obsessed with it ever since
his mothers succumbed to cancer.22
Catherines Room (fig. 3) hails from the same sort of thematic playground. The
installation is composed of five video projections, arranged end-to-end, and records the
progression of a single day of a woman inside a sparsely furnished room. The trees branching
across the windows of the rooms though, as they sprout flowers and shed leaves from panel to
panel, hint at a bigger time scale. In the first panel, the woman gets up; it is early morning in the
spring. In the second panel, it is simultaneously afternoon and summer, the third, sunset and
autumn; the fourth, cold night and winter. The fifth panel is pervaded by the darkness and the
quiet of death and void. 23 Bill Viola says that the installation is the linking of a life to the
larger cycle of nature, which are eternal because they are cyclical. 24 The intensely private and
intimate life of a woman becomes, suddenly, cosmic.
Catherines Rooms technique is borrowed this time from 15th-century Italian
Renaissance predella panels, sequences of small narrative paintings in Christian art that were
used to depict the life of the saints.25 The individual video panels are not so slowed down as
Ascension but they might as well be. They tell no story on their owneach is more of a snapshot
in the life of the woman named Catherine than anything else, but the narrative, as with the

22

Viola, The Eye of the Heart.

23

Ibid.

24

Ibid.

25

Camille Hong Xin and Bill Viola, Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill
Viola, Art in America, February 15, 2013, http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/interviews/bill-viola-moca-north-miami/ (accessed October 20, 2014).

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predella, can be found in the spaces in between. We really exist in between the empty spaces in
reality," Viola says, "the space between physical objects. Mark Hansen writes:
The timeimage involves an opening of the image to something not only outside the
frame but outside the whole set of images that can potentially be framed. That is why the
timeimage must be situated between images; only by opening an outside, an interstice,
between two images can cinema present a direct image of time.26
And, of the Quintet of the Astonished (2000), one of Violas slow-motion works, Hansen argues,
Violas intention here, as in the Passions project as a whole, is to capture the transitions
between emotional states, what his inspiration, the Old Masters, didnt paint, those steps in
between. 27 Catherines Room, in the service of the narrative, eschews this transitional state.
Some critics are unconvinced. Grace Gluecks review for the New York Times reads:
But for all [Going Forth by Day]s scale and ambition, its ingenuity and technical
accomplishment, it poses several problems. For one, making the video medium into a homage to
paintingeven as brilliantly as it has been done hereseems to violate the spirit of both. 28
Daniel Kunitz, writing for New Criterion, suggests that Viola is not a film artist, and that he's
essentially a painterly and sculptural artist. 29 Does my naming this collection Moving
Frescoes betray this? But that, I think, is an exercise in reductionism. Examining Violas videos

26

Mark Hanses, "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life," Critical Inquiry 30,
no. 3 (2004), http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?AccessToken
=9I5QIIX8XDXX9E55QQUD45ZK14D58QIXI1&Show=Object (accessed October 20, 2014).
27

Ibid.

28

Glueck, "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely," E30.

29

Daniel Kunitz, "Compressed narratives, minute actions." New Criterion 20, no. 6
(2002), http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).

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in any sort of detail is necessarily a philosophical exercise, engaging in the way Viola portrays
time, through time. When were talking about space were really talking about time, Viola
suggests in a 2012 interview, 30 bringing Einsteins space-time continuum theories into a
discussion of art. There is something very science-fiction-y indeed in the way Viola uses space to
collapse time, and uses time as an extension of space, come to think of it. Nonetheless,
Ascension, Voyage, and Catherines Room all suggest that as the artists canvas becomes digital,
it also turn porous and malleable, and Viola has melded into them, in the end, an acute sense of
history and place, delicate and fluctuant though that place is in the unending cycles of death and
rebirth.

30

Viola, Bill Viola: Liber Insularum.

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WORKS CITED
Bill Viola ASCENSION. http://www.desmoinesartcenter.org/pages/Bill-ViolaASCENSION.aspx (accessed October 20, 2014).
Elmarsafy, Ziad and . 2008. Adapting Sufism to Video Art: Bill Viola and the Sacred
/ : . Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, no. 28:
127-149. http://www.jstor.org (accessed October 20, 2014).
Gayford, Martin. 2003. "The Ultimate Invisible World." Modern Painters 16, no. 3: 22-25.
http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
Glueck, Grace. 2002. "Timeless Themes, Suddenly Timely." New York Times 152, no. 52254:
E30. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
Hansen, Mark. 2004. "The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life." Critical Inquiry 30, no.
3: 584-626. http://ejournals.ebsco.com/Direct.asp?AccessToken=
9I5QIIX8XDXX9E55QQUD45ZK14D58QIXI1&Show=Object (accessed October 20,
2014).
Heyd, Milly and David Heyd. 2003. "Perception as Missing: On Bill Viola's Going Forth by
Day." Notes in the History of Art 22, no. 4: 30-38. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed
October 20, 2014).
Kunitz, Daniel. 2002. "Compressed narratives, minute actions." New Criterion 20, no. 6: 4749. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
Murray, Timothy. 2002. "Digital Baroque: Via Viola or the Passage of Theatricality." Substance:
A Review of Theory & Literary Criticism 31, no. 2/3: 265-279. http://www.ebscohost.com
(accessed October 20, 2014).

12
Packwood, David. 2004. "Saving Postmodernism's Soul: Bill Viola's The Passions." Art Book
11, no. 4: 8-10. http://www.ebscohost.com (accessed October 20, 2014).
The Dream of Pope Sergius. The J. Paul Getty Museum. accessed October 20, 2014,
http://www.getty.edu/art/gettyguide/artObjectDetails?artobj=696.
Viola, Bill. Video Black The Mortality of Image. In Theories and Documents of
Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists' Writings, edited by Kristine Stiles and Peter
Selz, 476-486. California: University of California Press, 1996.
http://wiki.dxarts.washington.edu/sandbox/groups/general/wiki/b94dd/attachments/6bbf8
/viola_VideoBlack.pdf (accessed October 20, 2014).
Viola, Bill, Mark Kidel, and Fiona Mackenzie. 2003. Bill Viola: The Eye of the Heart. Bristol,
England: Calliope Media.
Viola, Bill and Bonnie Clearwater. Bill Viola: Liber Insularum (2012). From MCH Swiss
Exhibition, http://vimeo.com/55512273 (accessed October 20, 2014).
Xin, Camille Hong and Bill Viola. Transcendence and Transformation: Q+A with Bill Viola.
Art in America, February 15, 2013. http://www.artinamericamagazine.com/newsfeatures/interviews/bill-viola-moca-north-miami/ (accessed October 20, 2014).

13

Figure 1. Bill Viola, still from Ascension, 2000.

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Figure 2. Bill Viola, still from Voyage, 2002.

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Figure 3. Bill Viola, still from Catherines Room, 2001.