From Publishers Weekly
It's not easy to encapsulate the work of a video artist in an exhibit catalogue, but Viola's art lends itself to stills and those stills to long scrutiny. His 20 recent videos called The Passions feature close-ups of faces on a black background distraught, happy or fearful frame-by-frame. Setting the work in a post- September-11th context, curator and former Getty Museum director Walsh finds that by displaying other human beings and thus ourselves in extremis, Viola bypasses the rational intellect and causes disturbances against which we are normally well defended. Disturbed, we are no longer mere spectators. Some of the work consists of a single performer moving through an arc of intensity, as in Dolorosa, but Going Forth by Day involved elaborate sets, stunt performers and hundreds of extras. As an exhibition catalogue (for a show currently at the Getty in Los Angeles) with a chronology, bibliography and essays by Walsh and theater director Peter Sellars, a multifaceted account of Viola's career and creative methods compete for attention with the work. Also included is a conversation between Viola and Hans Belting, a professor at the School For New Media, and an enticing reproduction of the artist's handwritten production notebook/journal How to take the intellect, clever, deceiving, insightful, and, through sheer force of will, forge it into the emotional? he asks himself in his nondescript print. Juxtaposed with the notebook entries are works by other artists from other ages mostly masters from the European Renaissance, as well as Indian and Arab masterworks. When one turns back to the emotive heads in Viola's still frames, human feeling crosses centuries. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

In his opening essay, John Walsh traces Viola's development as a video artist and the intellectual and spiritual concerns that have preoccupied him over the years. And in "The Artist in His Studio," Walsh offers a rare first-person account of the making of Emergence, a new work commissioned by the Getty for the exhibition. A transcription of a recent conversation between Bill Viola and Hans Belting reveals the roots of Viola's involvement with image making and the role that older works of art have played in his development. Peter Sellars explores the spiritual foundations and meaning of Viola's work in a remarkable essay that is as much meditation as study, while Viola himself selects some fifteen works of art, which, along with pages from his personal notebooks, represent the sources that have inspired the Passions series. Finally, Kira Perov has selected and organized frame sequences from each of the twenty Passions pieces, accompanied by the artist's descriptions. Altogether, Bill Viola: The Passions is a thorough and richly illustrated study of a new and compelling group of works by this seminal contemporary artist.

FROM THE CRITICS

Library Journal