Thinking about art after the Whitechapel
My conclusion, in a nut shell, from visiting the Gillian Wearing at the Whitechapel was that video art in general just doesn't do it for me. I can see that she is dealing with important and thought-provoking messages, but I don't see that her medium is adding anything to these. They give me no aesthetic oomph.
So, I am pleased to say that my faith in video art has been restored by a trip to the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at UEA - always one of my favourites - which has part of an exhibition of works by the American artist Bill Viola, for the Norfolk and Norwich Festival. The other parts of Submerged-Spaces are on display in underground venues in the centre of Norwich: the crypt of City Hall and the undercroft of Carnary Chapel. These spaces are part of Viola's dedication to the viewer's experience of his work, as the pieces act in dialogue with the architecture. Thus, the act of viewing becomes an intense, emotional experience rather than a physically uncomfortable one.
Viola's works also deal with human emotion, like Wearing's, but use the emotion raw, focusing on faces, hands, and bodies against dark backgrounds, passing through water and evoked by subtle digital manipulation - slowing down movement, deepening colours. In Ascension, for instance, a man plunges into water, the surface of which is at the top of our screen, slowly descends in a cruciform posture, and leaves a space filled with moving bubbles and beams of light. In Surrender, two figures dressed in bold red or blue, seen from the waste in black water and against a black background, one shown upside down beneath the other, slowly dip their faces into the water. It is only then, through the mesmerising movement of their colours in the water surface, that we realise that the main image we are viewing is the reflection.
What I love about Viola's work is the rich colour quality and sculptural lighting which he brings to his figures, as well as the intense emotional journeys presented in their slowed-down gestures and facial expressions. He draws clear lineages into religious art of the past with his use of colours, objects and compositions. Catherine's Room is a particular example in this show, which presents a woman existing in the same simple stone room in 5 settings: exercising, sewing, studying, praying and sleeping. Each room creates relationships between the woman and the few objects around her, as the square of sky through the one small window shows the passing of time and the seasons. Each room evokes a Renaissance image and seems to animate them, but for a secular audience.
It is, precisely, the video medium in Viola's works which gives them power, and leaves me with ample space in which, and questions about which, to think. I am only sorry that I didn't have time to make it to the other two venues.