What You See, Unseen

Materiality
36
This view is illustrated in the installation work of
video artist Bill Viola. Because it is a temporal form,
video art, as with other forms of moving pictures,
emphasizes time as a setting. In Viola’s work the
viewer experiences an implied distance from the
object; the glowing image, be it projected or contained
within a monitor. The overarching religious
themes of surrender to life as an energetic form
in Viola’s video installations are enhanced by the
ephemeral nature of flickering light on a screen.
Viola’s work explores Buddhist and Christian religious
philosophy in work that, through his thirty-year
career, has become increasingly direct,
formally, while emphasizing the ephemeral quality
of video. The light image is the material aspect
of the work in this case. Projected light points to
the transitory nature of phenomena in general,
and to mind states, in particular. Relating human
emotion to elemental forces like water and fire,
Viola invokes symbols of transmutation such as
baptism and emoliation.
The quality of the image that results from use of
film or digital video, respectively, impacts both the
meaning of the work as do methods of installation
and scale. As a medium, film is a non-object that is
inherently empty; a representation of light touching
the surface of things. This material aspect
serves Viola’s intention well. Danto writes,
Perhaps films are like consciousness is, as described by Sartre, with two distinct, but
inseparable, dimensions: consciousness of something as its intentional object and a
kind of nonthetic consciousness of the consciousness itself—and it is with reference
to the latter that the intermittent reminders of the cinematic processes as such are
to be appreciated. 22
This high degree of self-awareness, described here
by Danto, has manifested since post-modern discourse
came to center around relative states of
truth and means by which self-referential forms
of art augmented the intellectually perceived
conceptual aesthesis. In the last decade, considerations
of art’s material qualities have become
germane to developments in photographic
art-making practices and the general acknowledgment
of equality between images developed
by traditional means, with the use of film and darkrooms,
and images that are digitally produced and
printed with the use of computers. There is a dif-