Thursday, October 13, 2011
Spirit and Medium
This article is interesting because it comments on the challenges of visual art between and work and the viewer. Bill Viola uses video in such a new way in which the viewer has no choice but to watch the video in it's entirety almost connect to it physically. Video is a hard medium because when looking at a painting, the viewer will only use a few seconds of their time before moving on. When watching a video, the viewer must watch through it completely or they will not grasp the concept developed by the artist. Video uses human for and perception in a different way in which may cause the viewer to become uneasy. By doing so, Viola recreates moments in time so that the audience knows they are in a specific frame of time. The viewer is experiencing a real time connection between the images on the screen and themselves. Viola uses pain and suffering in his videos to step out of the norm that people usually like to see. The audience views images and thoughts they would rather forget about or not know at all. This power that he possesses is used to overwhelm the viewer but in a sense of indulgence. They indulge into the future and the world to come. Viola's video art is to show what awaits in the world and all it's mystery.
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I like how you talk about the work of bill viola in general but i wish you would have given us more specific examples, other than that i thought this post was highly informative. I agree with what you said about the difference between painting and video when you said that when viewing a painting one will only use a few seconds of their time before going on to the next painting but video requires substantially more time to view and interpret. I think that makes it a little harder for the artist when making video art knowing that he has to keep the attention of the viewer for a short period of time. This makes the field of video art a bit more interesting because video artist always come up with new and interesting things to keep viewers attention.
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