Image after image: the video art of Bill Viola

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Figure 1.

Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), 1979. Videotape, color, stereo, sound, 28 minutes. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Figure 2.

Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, 1982. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago.

Figure 3.

I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like, 1986. Videotape, color, stereo sound, 89 minutes. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Figure 4.

Passage, 1987. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Figure 5.

The Sleep of Reason, 1988. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh.

Figure 6.

The Stopping Mind, 1991. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt.

Figure 7.

The Crossing, 1996. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Figure 8.

The Crossing, 1996. Video/sound installation. Photo: Kira Perov, Courtesy Whitney Museum of American Art.

Banal: the catalogue confirms my initial response to Bill Viola, the mid-career retrospective of the video artist currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. There, Viola describes Science of the Heart as follows:

The common image of the bed contains deeper psychological references, simultaneously recalling birth, sex, sleep and dreaming, illness and death. The heart is an image of the rhythm of life—the human pulse, clock, and generator of the life force. Stillness can simultaneously be pre-birth and death. . . . The moment of peak intensity [in the heartbeat] becomes the climax, the peak of life’s actions or, as extreme physical exertion, the orgasm. ¹

This 1983 video/sound installation consists of an internal dialogue, an opposition—between a neatly made bed bathed in a red glow and an image/recording of a beating heart—from which a certain theme emerges. And this theme indeed grounds itself on the “common”; Viola draws its signifiers from an established repertoire (here, a domestic love scene or scene of birth/death, but elsewhere, too, in the juxtaposition of fire and water, of Saharan mirages and northern American blizzards). There’s not much demanded from the beholder; you get it and go, the work safely tucked into your backpocket like a picture-postcard. Even the visually slick surfaces and the sound-filled environment only seem to fetishize the work, at once aestheticizing technology in a passage toward commodity (à la Marx) and bestowing upon its “perfect closure effected by signs” an independent life, transforming it into a kind of momento mori (à la Freud). In this scenario, Science of the Heart is a souvenir-postcard writ large, the caption of which reduces its elements to mere notations while at once veiling and naturalizing the process by means of unequivocal language. Heart is, stillness can be, moment becomes: Interpretation is easy, a simple equation of this and that, effortlessly ratified by the verb “to be.”

In this regard, Viola exemplifies what Barthes termed “myth” in 1957. In his account, myth is a type of speech, a method of communication rather than an object or idea. Drawing from the signifier-signified-sign triad, in which the first two constitute the third, Barthes postulated that myth “is constructed from a semiological chain which existed before it: it is a second-order semiological system.” ² He continues: “That which is a sign . . . in the first system, becomes a mere signifier in the second.” Thus myth appropriates material already transformed into a linguistic system; it is a kind of metalanguage, “empty of reality.” Barthes offers the example of a Paris-Match cover, on which

a young Negro in a French uniform is saluting, with his eyes uplifted, probably fixed on a fold of the tricolor. All...