1. Begin with a drop of water forming, filling fat enough to have a surface on which, in reverse, the viewer's image can queasily swim. The drop is a mechanical tear shed by a weeping spigot-a copper waterworks, precisely plumbed. When weight and gravity tear tear from valve, it thunders on an amplified drum. Then a new drop forms, falls, thunders. But this isn't all: a video camera observes the viewer's wonder at the fraught physics of it all. It registers each search for the self in the droplet, watches the viewer jump helplessly on each splashing, booming cue. The piece, He Weeps for You, is by Bill Viola. It was made more than twenty years ago, in 1976, though thinking about its main characteristics-or at least some of them-I'm not sure if a viewer's first instinct would put it so far in the past. So much of what makes Viola's work seem current-what made the media take such enthusiastic notice of his recent retrospective-is contained there, even though the artist himself nowadays dismisses the" primitive" technology that then gave them form. But primitive or not, many of his key ideas and their attendant sensations are already present in this dripping waterworks. There is, for example, the effect of high dramatics offered in or as serial repetition, and the concurrent shock or stress repeatedly dealt to the viewer's nerves. There is Viola's wonder at the world's minutiae, as focused in the image of the oceanic self afloat in the water drop: the artist is asking us to mobilize Pascal's realization of the divine unity linking the infinitude of large and small, and to rewrite it as sensory spectacle-the Hollywood of the soul. 1 Last-and most obvious-there is the quasi-