bill viola - classic or dud?

(sorry)

casual art spectators: dud.

i say: classic dud. you know, like jasper johns.

what do you mean by it?

It's undeniable that Viola presented this extremely bad acting in a novel way. But bad acting slowed down by a factor of a thousand takes a thousand times longer to see, so is theoretically a thousand times worse for the audience than it was to begin with. I think Viola's exhibition bore this out.

The most charitable interpretation I can muster is that at times it reminded me of those "how to draw people" books, with their series of stereotyped facial expressions that you are meant to copy in your own work.

did you really think the emotions were that poorly acted?

All of "Viola's people"—the woman folding clothes, stretching, sitting at her desk; the figure diving into water; the faces in The Passions—exist in some airless, actionless world that I don't recognize and wouldn't ever want to visit.

(unless the cosmic scene yr talking abt includes stuff "beyond the material", in which the case the word is JUST spiritualism)

anyway the "larger world" bill is connecting to (based on the stuff at the tate) = The Boring

You seem to be asking for some kind of narrative justification of "angry" (say). I'm not sure that's the most fruitful question to be asking of BV.

Have you seen "Five Angels of the Millennium" which is currently in the Tate Modern? All the action there is in the water rather than the figures...

If "5 Angels of the Millenium" is the guy diving into the water (and back out of it, in reverse) I've seen it and I thought it was okay for awhile. It reminded me of the visuals at a rave. I think I might have really loved it if I was a kid. The Passions, on the other hand, would have spooked me out, in the same way many people speak of clowns.

Opposite experience to most of what I usually see at the Tate, which is, I look at the art and go "huh?" then read the placard and think "Oh, I get it!"

With Viola, I went in without reading the placard, and was completely moved by the whole experience. Darkness, mystery, womb-like sounds of something huge moving through water very close, an amazing environment, beautiful and mysterious images which got more interesting the longer you looked at them, I really enjoyed it. And then I went outside and read the little placard and thought "Dude, that is so lame!" A shame.

One of the few art pieces that HSA and I actually agreed on liking. But he is a sucker for anything loud which takes place in a darkened room. ;-)

i really like the perversity of putting it right beside the naumann room though...

I liked it better when it was shown at the D'Offay a couple of years back, partly because it was installed in a L-shaped room which made it impossible to see each of the bits from any given place, plus it was louder and darker.

Tim - the placard was going on about, oh, "the big events, birth, death, consciousness" and that sort of crap. If someone tells me "This is a huge and moving piece of contemplation on the Big Subjects" I just feel like blowing a raspberry and telling them to fuck off. I resent being told What To Think. But with some pieces, it's necessary in order to know what the heck they're on about. I suppose that makes it worse art. Or maybe it makes the placards the art, rather than the Piece.

I would have liked the Five Angels better if I were better able to see all of them at once, i.e. if it were a circular room.

i haven't read the painted word but the tv personalities lp is one of my favorites. does that count?

in some cases i think i appreciated the art pieces for reasons entirely different from those of the curators. or perhaps their initial response was similar to mine, but had to mask it with the appropriate focus on "themes" and subversions etc. that seem a requirement for much contemporary art to be taken seriously.

The Painted Word posited that In The Future, when they do retrospectives of 20th century art, there will be little tiny placard-sized reproductions of the actual artworks, and the criticism will be BLOWN UP LARGE IN 48 POINT TYPE AND HUNG ON THE WALL.

*Please note that I'm not trying to claim that my knowledge is anything other than miniscule.

the PROCESS of art interests me, the artists engagement with tradition and so on, and the use of artistic materials... so even the most conceptual of artworks can engage me, but on the level of form, of process. the korean hut in venice, for example, exhibited very little of that kind of interest i thought. it was minimalism at the vanishing point. and i suppose even those sorts of things--more gesture than artwork--have their purpose, but i think modern art has a surfeit of such gestures, not to mention as kate's book jokes that they are almost more interesting in the explication than in actually encountering them.

none of this has anything to do wth bill viola whose work i still am not familiar with.

I like reading placards for the title, and the medium. And maybe some background on the artist, when they lived and where, etc. But I resent being TOLD WHAT TO THINK. Unless it's by Matt Collings, but only cause he's funny.

those old paintings need explication because we're so far removed from the context in which they were created

to the extent that text running alongside contemporary art performs a similiar function--or perhaps simply expresses the intentions and thoughts of its creator--i have no problem. its when the text goes out of its way to perform an academic-like thematic explication of a piece of western contemporary art, as though its dimensions would be unfathomable otherwise, that bugs me. it ties into this conception (unspoken in some or most cases) of criticism as performance, which i think is mostly BS, its like the placard text is performing and searching more an audience along with the artwork, which i dont realy think is its function

blah blah blah blah blah blah

(x-post)

Well, yes, that's kinda what I was trying to say. It's an explanation of what was going on at the time. But for modern stuff, well, it's being told what to think.