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A large image is projected on a screen mounted onto a black wall. The image sequence begins with a small, luminous, abstract form shimmering and undulating against a deep blue-black void. Gradually the luminous shape begins to get larger and less distorted, and it soon becomes apparent that we are seeing a human form, illuminated, rising towards us from under the surface of a body of water. The water becomes more still and transparent and the figure more clear on its journey upwards towards us. We identify the figure as a man, pale blue, lying on his back rising up slowly. After some time, the figure breaks the surface, an act at once startling, relieving and desperate. His pale form emerges into the warm hues of a bright light, the water glistening on his body. His eyes immediately open and he releases a long held breath from the depths, shattering the silence of the image. This forceful primal sound of life resonates momentarily in the space. After a few moments, he inhales deeply, and with his eyes shut and his mouth closed, he sinks into the depths of the blue-black void to become a shimmering moving point of light once more. The image then returns to its original state and the cycle begins anew.1
- Bill Viola
Despite the insights of modern science, the four original elements of the ancients–earth, water, air, and fire–maintain their central role in human experience and imagination. As every beast knows innately, these distinct categories provide us with the indispensable, sustaining factors of existence. Born of their interaction, life forms are nourished by the elements to which all are eventually returned in death.
But earth, water, air, and fire amount to more than a dependable, docile matrix for growth and sustenance. Each one is responsible for its own devastating calamities, extraordinary events shared by natural and human history alike. From our oldest documents to the most recent news reports, the elements provide us with the great chastening dramas that religion and science attempt to explain, to somehow justify. Whole cultures have been shaken to extinction by earthquakes or washed away by floods, whole regions are regularly blasted asunder by hurricanes or wasted by wildfires. And the progress of civilization is unlikely ever to change any of the conditions imposed by earth, water, air and fire that make life so sweet and so terrible.
Bill Viola’s work reminds us that our relationship to the elements–like our relationship to love, birth, death, and loss, the great events of our lives–is so primal that mere language is left inadequate to express it. Viola uses video to show how art can directly address the ineffable in universal human experience, how it can reveal what language must leave virtually unspoken, aside from a handful of breathless superlatives.
Despite his increasingly simple, unambiguous, and wordless subject matter, Viola achieves a rich interpretive ambivalence. In The Messenger, after watching the distressingly slow spectacle of a man’s emergence from deep water, his unaccountable retreat to the airless depths, and miraculous reemergence, there is, paradoxically, much to talk about. For one thing, why is he a messenger? What is the message? We are as surprised as his is by the life-saving breath that he tears from the still air, his eyes large and blank from straining for it. And this breath is violently loud, like the roar of primal terror. If the breath is the message, we must note that the messenger did not emerge with it completely intact from deep water. We saw much of it dissipate into a swarm of surface-seeking bubbles that covered his naked form. Moreover, as a message it is only available to the surface air from whence it was drawn and has no substance or significance underwater. In short, this message is undeliverable.
Or is it? The Messenger was commissioned for Durham Cathedral by the Chaplaincy to the Arts and Recreation in North East England as its contribution to the United Kingdom’s 1996 Year of the Visual Arts. It is indeed understood as having a deliverable spiritual message by church leaders who admired the artist’s previous work, video installations like The Greeting, based on a scene in the Bible from the life of the Virgin, and Room for St. John of the Cross, an installation that is meant both as a metaphor and as an actual reconstruction of a key episode in the life of the sixteenth-century mystic poet. For Canon Bill Hall of the Chaplaincy, "In [Viola’s] work we glimpse mystery through the ordinary and everyday, the transcendent through the imminent… We knew that his acceptance of the commission would provide a guarantee that the work would be both intensely spiritual and on a scale appropriate to its immense setting–a profound meditation on life and being itself."2 For David Jasper, a priest of the Scottish Episcopal Church, Viola’s "central concerns provoke the possibility of theological reflection and inhabit the extremes of human experience which theology seeks to articulate."3
The Christian symbolism of baptism, of rebirth in the faith, is clearly available in The Messenger, but so are the five ritual ablutions that precede the daily schedule of Muslim prayer and the ritual bathing of so many other religions as well. Like Adam and the desert saints of the early church, the floating figure is naked and vulnerable as he submits to the water’s purification. But he seems in dead in the water, blue and motionless, without a will, and released to fate. He does not bring himself to the surface for breath, where he seems surprised to be alive after all, but is mysteriously brought there by some unseen force. Or, maybe it is simply the imperative of the air itself, kept in his lungs as a long-held breath that brings him back to the surface where it is released and replaced by another. But how, then, do we account for his next deep submergence with his lungs full of air? Although it shows a single, repeated event, The Messenger is hardly simple or clear-cut.
Viola's interest in sacred texts, in the spiritual experiences of others, or in the "extremes of human experience" do not, for all that, make him a religious artist. For one thing, the works themselves are never explicit or implicitly doctrinal. Instead, his subjects–however suggestive–remain neutral and open to various readings; indeed, they require none. For those who would try to fathom the intentions in his work, beyond embracing it for its immediate beauty, Viola is always careful to leave the escape route from theological interpretation as well indicated as the inviting path towards it.
Eventually, it is the important and distinct role of the visual artist that we take away from such reflection. More than an intellectual diplomacy, Viola shows this role as enjoying real power: a freedom to use any form of information whatsoever to produce its own autonomous knowledge, knowledge that others are free to adapt and absorb. But as information, pictures–even those that sound and move in time–have a tendency to wear words out.
The Messenger, like great works of art generally, attracts disparate message to itself like moths to fire. Always tautological, the first object of pictures is to resemble something well–a thing, an event, an idea, or simply itself. It is this dense, speech-exhausting surface of art that at once lures the messages from us while repelling them. Beyond the surface of the water that cannot accept his message, might the work's message ultimately concern the survival of the messenger?
- Marc Meyer, Curator
NOTES:
Cover | Curator's Essay | Visuals | Bibliography | Exhibition History | Credits