The Crossing: A Video Installation by Bill Viola
October 5-December 12, 1999
If your idea of a video is something you pick up at your local movie store on a slow night and watch on your twenty-four inch TV, this exhibition will be an eye-opener. "The Crossing," is a work by the acknowledged master of video art, Bill Viola. Viola has an international reputation and is the subject of a current retrospective organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Palmer Museum is fortunate to be one of the few museums to present an exhibition of his most recent installation, a work critics have called his masterpiece.
Viola began working with video in 1971 as a student at Syracuse University. His innovative and creative use of the medium soon brought him international recognition. In addition to Guggenheim and National Endowment fellowships, Viola has received several recent honors. In 1989 he received a MacArthur Foundation grant. Euphemistically called a "genius grant," this award provides five years of financial support for this country's most outstanding individuals in the arts. In 1995, he was the first video artist to represent the United States at the prestigious Venice Biennale. Last year he was one of fifteen people invited to be a resident scholar at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. At the present time, his work is currently the subject of a major retrospective and is featured at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It will close its international run at the Art Institute of Chicago where it opens on October 16, 1999.
"The Crossing," completed in 1996 and exhibited only twice outside Viola's current retrospective exhibition, is a powerful artistic statement that extends our understanding of both video and what it means to make art in today's society. Using the new medium to articulate the human condition at the end of the millennium, Viola's work moves beyond our simplistic notions of video to create a light and sound environment in which to explore the human spirit.
"The Crossing" undermines our notion of video as fast-paced, easily understood, and narrative. To describe the video is not just to spoil the "plot"—it really has none—but, more importantly, to trivialize the experience. Suffice it to say that Viola uses slow motion and sound to confront and challenge viewers to reconsider instances of metaphysical transformation. In short, Viola employs this new age medium of figuration and sound to investigate the question of human mortality and resilience—issues that have preoccupied artists through the ages.
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