Artist Bill Viola has a show of work from two decades titled Bodies of Light, at James Cohan Gallery, through Dec 19. He sat down to talk about his work last week.
You had a residency at WNET a long time ago?
The first time I did something at WNET was in 1976; I did a piece called Four Songs that had to do with the passage of time, death, resurrection, but in a slightly different way than I deal with those topics now. It was broadcast on television. The first time my work was seen by large numbers of people, it was not in a museum, it was on NET, then it got syndicated and went to other public TV stations. I was involved with the TV Lab from around ‘75 thru maybe ‘81. That’s how I learned how to edit with high end professional equipment.
So many people have large format HD screens at home now… it’s a readymade format for your work.
I totally agree. The advent of flat screens have reconnected video to the art forms that since the beginning of video I’ve felt it was connected to. The flat screen confirmed all that, and the connection between the moving image and painting. That’s what plasma screens have allowed. And people like Jim and Jane Cohan (of James Cohan Gallery) get artists’ work on a wall in a portable format, which is what the original notion of painting was—frescoes, or cave paintings. People in the late middle ages were able to travel much farther than ever before, and they wanted to take their little icons with them. So artists painted icons, and the paintings started to grow, and eventually it eclipsed fresco. read more
It’s hard enough for anyone to make sense of historical events as they unfold, but imagine trying to create art out of them. That is, of course, what political artists try to do, though not without the danger of succumbing to tendentiousness. For the past three decades, however, Jenny Holzer has managed to avoid this pitfall precisely because she’s generally avoided references to current affairs. Instead, she’s focused on the broader issue of how language itself is used a political tool. Thus, her signature “truisms”— “strong sense of duty imprisons you,” “an elite is inevitable”—deconstruct the dynamics of authority by aping its voice; yet they don’t really say anything. That is the genius of her approach.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of “Protect Protect,” the 15-year survey of Holzer’s work now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 31, is that much of it departs significantly from her usual reliance on ambiguity. While the show features plenty of the L.E.D (Light Emitting Diode) installations for which the artist is rightly famous, it also includes oil on linen paintings based upon redacted government documents that pertain to our invasion of Iraq and the war on terror. There are, for example, field reports of civilian killings, as well as a letter from a father pleading for leniency for his soldier son about to be court-martialed. There are fingerprints and handprints of suspected terrorists and enemy combatants. Though heavily censored, the meaning of these papers are abundantly clear. I contacted Holzer, and she was kind enough to answer a few questions about this material via email. read more
So here’s a press release that jumped out at me recently about a work to be performed on June 7 by “8 synchronized Yamaha Disklavier player pianos plus an automated ensemble of 2 xylophones, 4 bass drums, tamtam, siren, 7 bells and 3 airplane propellers.”
Think you know what it is? If you’re thinking this is a composition perhaps written last week or earlier this year, you’re in the wrong century entirely. It’s Ballet Mécanique, George Antheil’s most famous work, a film-with-music written in 1924. For this weekend’s performance at the 3LD Art & Technology Center on Greenwich Street in Manhattan, an automated orchestra created by the Brooklyn-based League of Electronic Musical Urban Robots (LEMUR) will perform the score, to a screening of the restored Fernand Léger film. Somewhere along the way—perhaps when a strip of leather from one of the airplane propellers reportedly flew into the audience at the 1926 performance in Paris—Antheil became known as the “bad boy of music,” which is how he is invariably described and is the title of his famous 1945 autobiography. read more
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