Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: New Writings, 1973-1994.

When seeds are buried in the dark earth, their inward secrets become the flourishing garden.

- Rumi

Bill Viola's video installation series "Buried Secrets" (1995) is so disturbing that its images and associations still float into my consciousness the way the disturbing parts of dreams resurface unbidden, reminding one of anxieties, unresolved conflicts, deep fears. Unable to attend the premier at the 1995 Venice Biennale, I visited the Arizona State University Art Museum this past spring, where the exhibition, organized by Marilyn Zeitler of Arizona State University, was being presented for the first time in the United States. I emerged from the exhibition's darkened rooms into the bright desert afternoon wondering whose nightmare I was experiencing.

This is not the first time I've felt this confusion, because Viola's installations often deliberately blur the boundaries between self and other. This is most evident in "Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House" (1982), where the spectator seems to merge with Viola as he gazes from a monitor into the viewer's eyes, their separate identities disintegrating as the spectator experiences through amplified sounds the trauma of sudden blows to Viola's head. The installation creates the jarring disorientation of seemingly shared consciousness, and it also demonstrates the controlled rage that has been a root of Viola's art. As I wrote in 1988:

The source of this rage is invariably the split between reason and unreason, between animal and intellectual consciousness, between nature and culture . . . Viola's beautiful images and perceptual paradoxes propose a trenchant philosophical critique of why modern society, and the individual in particular, experiences alienation. Viola simulates the rift between mind and matter - which has characterized modern consciousness since the dawn of the scientific age - and tries to heal that rift by creating restorative participatory experiences.(1)

Viola's installations have been precisely engineered rites of self-discovery leading to a restoration of lost psychic and spiritual balance. But after viewing "Buried Secrets" I felt neither whole nor balanced. If anything I felt more alienated on leaving them than I had on entering. What was happening?

For anyone familiar with Viola's work, there is nothing surprising on the surface about "Buried Secrets," comprised of five video and audio installations and organized at the Arizona State University Art Museum in the following order: "Hall of Whispers," "The Veiling," "Presence," "Interval" and "The Greeting." This is the first time that Viola has developed a series of interlinked installations. Although each work stands alone, viewing them together and in sequence affords a more complex meta-experience. All the airy, "new age" writing that has been occasioned by Viola's metaphysical explorations and spiritual associations withers in the face of this new opus. Only Carl Haenlein, in his general notes on Viola in the exhibition catalog, Bill Viola: Buried Secrets (1995), comments that trauma is the essence of Viola's art and its often disturbing power.(2) To grapple with this art one must confront the traumas that lie buried within one's self as well as the work.

"Hall of Whispers" consists of a series of 10 video projections, five each on the long facing walls of a dark corridor. This black and white gauntlet consists of the life-size heads of men and women who have been bound and gagged. Eyes shut, they struggle against tightly-wrapped cloth bandages but their efforts to speak prove futile; only muffled sounds escape into the room. Because their faces appear to float disembodied in space, they remind me of Gary Hill's haunting 1992 video installation, "Tall Ships." But this is Viola territory where language is never written and rarely spoken.(3)

"Hall of Whispers" announces the underlying concerns of "Buried Secrets": the difficulty, if not impossibility, of communication and the importance of protecting secrets. This can be read on a political level since the figures so clearly conjure images of tortured prisoners in a police state. But so literal an interpretation misses their ambiguity and the wider possibilities of meaning. The people are quite ordinary individuals. Their brows are furrowed in concentration as they struggle against the bonds that hold them back. What is each one trying to say? Who or what is preventing them from speaking? To whom are they trying to communicate? And why are their eyes shut tight?

I walked through the installation rather quickly thinking I'd "gotten it," like the punch-line of a joke, only to realize later that I had felt far too uncomfortable to linger, as if I too had shut my eyes to something I hadn't wanted to know. This discomfort only deepened in "The Veiling." In a long rectangular room, an array of diaphanous metallic scrims hang from the ceiling. Video projectors mounted on the opposing shorter walls project onto the veils two tapes - one of a man, the other of a woman, each picking their way through a nighttime landscape of dense foliage. Their images, multiplied on each veil, pass each other in the space but they never reach or connect. The bright beams of light seem to mock them and their search, the light at the end of the tunnel seeming as unreachable as union. The spectator enters along one long wall and finds through experimenting that there is no ideal vantage to view the installation, all points in the room proving equally unsatisfying. There seems to be no place to grasp what is happening or why. Moving through the veils or alongside them, the viewer discovers that the images dissipate into light.

It is appropriate to associate the title of this work with Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi mystic whose poetry has been a constant inspiration to Viola. Rumi wrote in the Mathnawi: "The Beloved is everything, the lover is only a veil . . ." According to the tradition of the Prophet, Allah has 10,000 veils of light and darkness, and if He were to take them away, the splendor of His face would consume the one who would see Him. Although Viola is influenced by these more esoteric interpretations of "the veil," as his notebooks attest, the feeling of the work resides with the lone figures stumbling about in the darkness so maddeningly beyond each other's reach.

"The Presence" affords a physical transition and a reiteration of the theme of "Buried Secrets." The audio installation consists of two opposing sound elements: the first includes the anonymous, intimate, universal sounds of a beating heart and of breathing; the second are the voices of numerous individuals who speak of guilty secrets. When Viola originally presented this piece in Venice, a focused beam of sound accentuated by a spotlight in the center of the dome of the U.S. Pavilion conveyed body sounds while around the periphery of the dome muffled voices buzzed simultaneously. At Arizona State the architecture dictated a new placement and allowed for a different strategy. On the stairway landing the beam of physical sounds is centrally focused while along the stairs and on the ground floor landing speakers broadcast individual secrets told in hushed but audible tones. Anyone using the elevator hears the same aural juxtaposition, so there is no way to leave the exhibition without still being in it.

A photograph of this installation in Venice, included in the catalog, is marvelously arresting - the beam of light reminds one of the Medieval or Renaissance artist's use of a shaft of light to embody divine grace or inspiration. Without it in Tempe, I missed the breathing and beating heart on the landing, thinking the detailed stories of individual speakers to be the essence of the installation. Viewed again in Boston under different architectural circumstances, "The Presence" appears for technical reasons to be the weakest piece in the exhibition. As with the previous installations, I passed through quickly, struck by how much like Saturday afternoon confessions these painful admissions of wrongdoing seemed to be. There was no absolution here, no forgiveness. What was I running up the stairs and away from?

There was no escaping whatever was pursuing me in "Interval." Again, opposing walls featured larger-than-life tape projections. On the right, a man enters a tiled institutional bathroom, slowly undresses, and carefully bathes, using a washcloth and bucket of water to methodically cleanse himself. On the left are close-up images of fire, flood and a body being prodded by the camera lens; these violent and restless scenes are accompanied by the roaring tumult of fire, wind and water. The images alternate on the walls in ever diminishing intervals until finally, at its climax, the two images appear for only one second each, creating the illusion that they are simultaneous, and then there is nothing. To view it in Tempe, one stands in either doorway; to step inside the room or walk through it, especially during the rapidly escalating flutter of images, feels dangerous. Viewing is enough of an ordeal.

This installation is vaguely reminiscent of the opposition Viola created between the howling terror of a rain-lashed, windswept mountaintop and a tranquil cell of contemplation in the installation "Room for St. John of the Cross" (1983), but here the tension seems sexual more than spiritual, climaxing with the simultaneity of control and release, achieving not union but some vaguely menacing masturbatory transcendence.

Finally one arrives at the last installation, the culmination of the series and its key - "The Greeting." This installation has been popular with the press and its resplendent color stills have been widely reproduced in magazines like Newsweek, which praised the work for" elevat[ing] a merely pretty event into something truly beautiful."(4) But "The Greeting" is more than a beautiful "slo-mo ode" to the Mannerist painter Jacopo Pontormo, whose fresco The Visitation (1514-16) inspired Viola's visual composition.

Although little of consequence seems to occur in "The Greeting," it was ultimately the most unnerving installation in the exhibition. Displayed like a Renaissance fresco or painting in a room all its own, this tableaux vivant consists of two women talking in the courtyard of an industrial landscape. They are unexpectedly joined by a third woman who is clearly pregnant. One of them knows the Madonna, the other does not. Embracing her friend, the Madonna whispers into her ear something barely audible, then steps back to acknowledge the other woman who stands forgotten in the background. A triangle has been constructed: the woman in the background suffers, as another person breaches the exclusivity of her communion with her friend. Lost, expectant, angry, fearful and amiable by turns, she registers a range of responses to her displacement as the other women grapple with the intruder's unexpected request. "Can you help me?" the Madonna asks, her slowed words barely discernible. "I need to speak to you right now," she implores. Delight, wonder, alarm, fear and excitement play across the friend's face. Each woman exists at the center of her own drama, but as they come together and intersect, their roles shift and each modifies the other, altering their relationships in ways they barely understand.

This mystery play is enhanced by sudden shifts in light, which defy any categorization of day or night, by the attenuation of time - an event that took only 45 seconds in real time is slowed down to 15 minutes - and by the presence of two cryptic male figures (borrowed from the enigmatic Pontormo composition) who are barely hidden in the background. Absorbed by the rich, warm light of the foreground and the larger-than-life drama being played out there, a casual viewer might even miss them. But once noticed, the tiny men in the traditionally "sinister" lower left-hand corner of the screen become mesmerizing. At first a shadowy silhouette, the first man is joined by a taller one who strikes a light. Is it Diogenes? What is happening here? Is a cigarette being exchanged or drugs or sex or enlightenment? The second figure vanishes only to return carrying another reflective light, prompting the first man to bend over or bow down, who knows. Their drama is further obscured by the arrival of the Madonna whose body blocks our vision of the men.

Borrowing upon Pontormo's spellbinding meditation on inner-outer states of being, Viola adapts the Renaissance convention of using a Biblical story - in this case, Mary's visit to Elizabeth - to reveal his own mastery and psychological depth to resolve the series of five works. When the Word became flesh, God became man: this is the story behind "The Greeting." The dark night of the soul retreats at the advance of the sunlit world of family (or social) life with its difficult balancing of the needs of three (or more). The opposing dualities that pervade "Buried Secrets," which are here starkly present in the juxtaposition of the figures in the foreground and background, are resolved by introduction of a third, (de)stabilizing element.

Given the frankly autobiographical ground of much of Viola's art, it is tempting to read these works as such, especially since the actors so often resemble Viola and his family. Having processed the death of his mother and the birth of his two sons, Viola has entered a new stage of life and work in which the negotiation of the social sphere of family and career seem to overshadow the more solitary path to spiritual transcendence that has dominated his work. But it would be a mistake to reduce the complexity of his work to mere autobiography.

The rage that fuels this series is, in part, induced by an age that fears what is hidden, private, intimate and individual and a society that demands all secrets be exposed. Bored by the peccadillos of politicians and the sex lives of starlets, we crave more and baser intimate revelations, authorizing the mass media to invade the privacy of both famous and ordinary people in a spurious quest for truth. In opposition, Viola's work upholds the sacred nature of secrets, no matter whether they are deemed as dark and menacing sins or the hidden fruits of the inner Self. The viewer's interpretation of "Buried Secrets" is itself a private matter that is subject to one's willingness to explore one's own responses to Viola's risky probing.

Figuring out why I found this exhibition so painful led me to confront my own secret fears, angers and feelings of failure. Bound by fear, lost in a forest of choices, guilt-ridden, trapped inside myself and explosively alone, I know the confusion of the abandoned friend in "The Greeting": it all cuts much too close to the bone, as Viola's work so often does. Years ago I wrote that Viola's art is not art for the timid. Some things don't change.

When I went in search of a photo of Pontormo's The Visitation, I was reminded, leafing through the large-format art books in the library, how as a child I would pour over the pages of my mother's beloved history of art for hours, devouring all the photos while ignoring the text. Most of those images were photo reproductions in black and white, familiar ground for a member of the first television generation accustomed to hours of entranced contemplation of small-screen, low-resolution, black and white TV images. Unencumbered by the expert's valuations in fine print, I felt free to construct my own meanings for art and its place in my life.

Today, when I pick up a new book on art, an exhibition catalog or a critical essay, I often find myself guiltily thinking of the Gary Larson cartoon of what dogs hear when we talk to them. The split-image shows master on the left telling Rover:" Now, roll over, Rover! Good dog!" And the balloon on the right shows what Rover hears: "Blah, blah-blah, Rover! Blah blah? I can't help thinking that much of what passes for serious critical writing about art today is composed of similar passages of blah-blah with isolated moments of insight and lucidity all but buried within. I wonder which is worse: the glib arrogance and paternalism of yesteryear or the obscurantism, theoretical didacticism, and fear of offending the canons of political correctness that mark the present. Under the weight of "pomo" rhetoric and cant, the history of art has become virtually inaccessible and the present age barely comprehensible; buried deepest are the things that are most important, words spoken from the heart.

Here is an example of such words:

The rules for the artist ultimately do not come from art history or from current trends, ideas, and fashions or even from the materials themselves, These are merely resources to draw on. The real rules come from the Self. The only method is Self-knowledge, and its only parameters are that of the Gift, of receiving and in turn passing iron (p. 212).

This note is drawn from Viola's stunning collection of writings, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House: Writings 1973-1994 - which includes formal essays, lectures, drawings for installations, comments on tapes and journal entries made over the last 20 years. It is the only book my students have ever begged me to assign them; the only one everyone has read in time for class. Asked to explain its significance, one woman told me it was a unique opportunity to get inside a creative mind and share the process.

Viola explains the way he has used writing as an integral part of his creative process in an interview with Otto Neumaier and Alexander Puhringer:

. . . when I was quite young I always kept very active notebooks. Not notebooks like sketchbooks, which I have never kept, but notebooks like a journal or kind of travelogue, mapping a personal course through various readings, quotations, associations, observations, experiments, and ideas for pieces, all jumbled into one. . . . Everything I have ever published or created as an artist has come from these books. . . . It's an interesting thing, all the words and so few pictures. It was like I've been trying to arrive at the visual by skirting around it. I guess I do have a mistrust of only working something out in pictures, a fear that it's possible to make something that looks good (that is, is successful) but doesn't think well (that is, have depth). For me, the visual has always been the end, the last step, so that the final point of making a work is to plunge, to dive right into the image, totally, suddenly, from all the work before (pp. 267-68).

The breadth of Viola's reading in philosophy, psychology, the natural sciences, history, religion and poetry suggests some of the sources of his work. There are quotes by William Blake, Sufi mystics Rumi and Ibn Arabi, Rainer Maria Rilke and St. John of the Cross - along with stories of an Australian Aboriginal medicine man, a Hopi elder, a Solomon islander and Kung Bushman as well as far-flung references to Socrates, Mircea Eliade, A. K. Coomaraswamy, Joseph Campbell, Thomas Merton, Hollis Frampton, Aldous Huxley, Nam June Paik and A. R. Luria, among others. My only wish is that this text contained more excerpts from the notebooks. I crave more glimpses of the "ah-ha" experiences he so clearly captures in them. Consider "Note, Florence, Italy, 1975":

Late one night, I was working with a magnifying glass and a single spotlight in my studio. I noticed that I could make some interesting figures by focusing the light onto the wall with the lens. Suddenly, for no particular reason, I decided to put my head in place of the wall and focus those light patterns into my eye. At first I was disappointed. "Nothing" happened. Expecting some kind of dazzling display, all I saw was the room with the spotlight in it, undergoing slight degrees of distortion as I moved the lens. Then, like a shock wave, I realized that the image I saw of the room was the same as these light patterns I saw on the wall. In the latter case, the surface of my retina had been substituted for the surface of the wall, and those luminous forms had been interpreted by the organizing matrix of rods and cones in my eye, and then by my brain, as "the room with the spotlight in it." The light was the same in both cases, it just was decoded differently. I realized then that the visual world exists in all places in all directions at once; where we intercept this array of reflected light determines our "own point of view." There is literally a world within every grain of sand, within every reflection on every object (p. 32).

Part of the singular appeal of the book is its design, developed for visual rhythm as well as flow of ideas. The text moves more or less chronologically, interspersing lines of poetry with stills from tapes with published articles with facsimile pages of drawings for installations from the journals. It invites the reader to dip in at any point, as well as to read from cover to cover. Planned with the same attention to detail as any Viola work, the book has an elegant typeface, plenty of white space and a heavy non-glare paper stock that allows clean, sharp, dense black and white reproductions of all photos and drawings. It is a lush and satisfying art book.

Long ago I observed Viola's unique way of writing: his paragraphs are self-enclosed entities without any connecting elements to link them together. As a result a reader has a feeling of suspense throughout, unsure how his apparently wild tangents will fit together to make a whole. Invariably, the conclusions to his essays, which are often self-contained personal anecdotes, manage to link all the strands together. Reading through Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, I am struck by how much his lyrical writing style mirrors the way he visually constructs a tape. Viola's prose is a verbal equivalent of his video editing. This flow between the visual and verbal sides of Viola's expression, along with his sense of humor, are readily apparent in such essays as: "The Porcupine and the Car," "Will There be Condominiums in Data Space?," "History, 10 Years, and the Dreamtime," and "Video Black - The Mortality of the Image."

The title of the book may prove confusing, since Viola has used the enigmatic phrase twice before for the titles of both a videotape (1983) and a separate video installation (1982). But if, after reading this book, one feels oddly optimistic and inspired, one might even be tempted to believe, as William Blake did and Viola obviously does, that "All men are capable of having dreams and seeing visions." And that is yet another reason for knocking at an empty house.

NOTES

1. Deirdre Boyle, "Bill Viola: Womb with a View," ART news (January 1988), p. 160.

2. Carl Haenlein, "The Lucid Image - The Transparency of the Imagination," Bill Viola: Buried Secrets, (Tempe: Arizona State Art Museum/Hannover, Germany: Kestner-Gesellschaft, 1995), p. 11.

3. Viola's 1992 installation, "Slowly Turning Narrative," has a long narration spoken by the artist in which he recites a litany of nearly 550 appellations: ". . . the one who breaks down, the one who weeps, the one who murmurs, the one who manipulates. . . the one who rages, the one who rapes, the one who masturbates, the one who bunts, the one who weakens. . . the one who is." In previous works Viola has made use of spoken language but more as a background buzz of barely discernible words. Language, which seems to signify a new engagement with the social world for Viola, occurs more and more in his video work.

4. Peter Plagens, "The Video Vibes of Venice," Newsweek (July 17, 1995), p. 59.

DEIRDRE BOYLE is a New York video critic, curator and teacher, and author of Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited (1996).