ART : Face to Face With Art, Life and TV : Video visionary Bill Viola explores spiritual and emotional realms, using the landscape to portray human consciousness

“It’s sort of a cross between making a movie and a sculpture,” Bill Viola said of his innovative video work that fills entire galleries with sound and light. Combining the static forms of video hardware with fleeting images that he captures on tape, he is known for a body of work that evokes spiritual and emotional realms of experience. Birth, death and states of awareness are among the subjects that intrigue him.

Viola, a New York transplant who has lived in Long Beach for 10 years, has won the approval of art critics and the hearts of the MTV generation--as well as the notice of the MacArthur Foundation, which in 1989 granted him one of its coveted “genius” awards. He also has compiled an international exhibition record, but he hasn’t had a major show in Southern California since 1985, when Los Angeles’ Museum of Contemporary Art presented his videotapes and two installations.

The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, intends to fill the local gap in Viola’s resume with an exhibition of two recent works. “Bill Viola: Slowly Turning Narrative” is scheduled to open on Saturday and continue through Oct. 20 at the museum’s new facility in downtown San Diego.

The title piece of the show, “Slowly Turning Narrative,” involves “the idea of the center,” Viola said during an interview at his studio, in an industrial zone of Signal Hill. In the installation, a 9-by-12-foot double-faced screen--with a mirror on one side and a white surface on the other--rotates slowly in the middle of a large dark room. Two projectors face the screen from opposite sides of the room. One projector shows a black-and-white image of a man’s face, while the other runs through a series of color images, including footage of children playing, a burning house and a carnival. As it rotates, the plain screen distorts the images, while the mirror reflects projections and moves them around the room, he said.

“This piece is almost like a lawn sprinkler. Images are thrown all around the room,” he said. “You become projected on, you become reflected on the mirror when it turns around, and the images are moving around the walls. It creates a decentralized cloud of an image that is always in movement and always changing.

“The image isn’t always easy to see or read because it has a very fixed, strong, firm center--which is this floor-to-ceiling shaft--while the screen turns around. It’s very different from some of my other works where the center was you and when you reached a certain point in the room, you were literally in the center of the work and you could see images on either side of you and around you. In this one you can’t get to that place.”

“Slowly Turning Narrative” came out of a difficult period in his life, when his mother passed away, in 1991, Viola said. “But the other work, ‘Heaven and Earth,’ is more directly related to my mother’s passing,” he said. “It’s a floor-to-ceiling column that’s broken in the middle. Two screens face each other across the gap. There’s a death face of an old woman--my mother just before she died, in a coma--on the upper screen. And on the lower screen is this baby, my second son Andre, just a few days after he was born. The two portraits face each other across this gap and because the screens are glass, they reflect each other. The birth face reflects the death face.”

These inquiries into the depths of human consciousness seem far removed from the first item on Viola’s resume: 1960--Captain of the TV Squad, 5th Grade, P.S. 20, Queens, N.Y. That job merely required him to deliver television sets to classrooms for educational programs, the 42-year-old artist said. But the early connection to electronic media is symbolic of the milieu that led to a career in video art.

“In the mid- to late ‘60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made,” he said. “Anything that was new I was interested in; anything that was old, i.e., painting and sculpture, I was not as interested in. I remember reading Gene Youngblood’s ‘Expanded Cinema,’ which came out in 1969 and described some of the techniques being used to manipulate and work with images in an electronic domain.

“That--plus the whole ‘60s milieu of radical thinking and having a seven-channel childhood in New York and being on the TV Squad--made it very natural to work with video. It wasn’t exotic, it wasn’t futuristic. It was very relevant and very contemporary and very normal,” he said. “Thinking about making art with that material was the least mind-bending I had to do. The mind-stretching took place in understanding this new system and technology, and in understanding it in terms of being able to use it.”

As something of a video visionary, Viola saw the medium’s possibilities early on, but key experiences and far-flung travels have helped shape his work. Working from 1973-80 with composer David Tudor and the new music group Rainforest (later called Composers Inside Electronics) influenced his video soundtracks, while his first trip to Death Valley, in 1973, was “an intense education in perception and vision and consciousness,” he said.

Cultivating a global view of culture that far surpassed the Eurocentric approach to art history taught in his student days at Syracuse University, Viola has made tapes of mirages in the Sahara Desert, studied Japanese culture and video technology while living in Japan, observed religious art and ritual in Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and documented an Indian fire-walking ceremony in Fiji.

These journeys have produced arresting imagery, but that is not the point for Viola. “The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities,” he said. “For me the essential basis of video is the movement--something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment. It has a kind of a life, and therefore it’s parallel to thoughts that just are welling up and subsiding, receding and advancing in your mind. For me it’s closer to thought than it is to seeing.”

Viola often uses images of his family and features himself as a kind of Everyman. Another major component is landscape, which runs through his work like a river of continuity--connecting one artwork to another and putting viewers in touch with their surroundings. Landscape as “a substructure of human consciousness” is what interests Viola. “If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights,” he said.

Having discovered the primordial presence of landscape in Death Valley, he subsequently explored what he calls “the Eastern sense of landscape” in Asian art. “I realized that what the landscape painters in China and Japan were painting was really an interior. It wasn’t an exterior. It really dealt as much with the individual in the context of that landscape as with what you see when you look at the picture,” he said.

“I realized that landscape could be more than I learned in art history class. You get some of those ideas in romanticism, but it was developed to a very refined and high level in the Far East. That gave me an intellectual thread and also the awareness that someone had been exploring this long before me.”

But more than the people and places that appear in his work, Viola’s work is about states of emotional and spiritual being. “Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human,” he said. “I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.

“If you don’t have an emotional connection with something, there can be no genuine moral power in what you are doing. The ties people feel to their family, to the people they love, really drive the whole culture,” he said. “When I look at great works of art, no matter how much I know about them from art history and reading, all that knowledge just drops away and there’s a deeper connection. It’s not intellectual, it’s not verbal, it’s not--you can’t describe it. It’s a dialogue of being, the being of the work and your being . . . You don’t see with your eyes, you see with your heart.”

Seated in the sparsely furnished anteroom of his studio, Viola reflects on these matters while two assistants answer the phone and help to prepare a new piece, “Tiny Deaths,” which portrays the human figure being overwhelmed by light. This latest addition to Viola’s oeuvre will be shown at the Contemporary Art Biennale in Lyon, France, Sept. 3 through Oct. 13.

Squeezing an interview into a tight production schedule is part of the price of success. So is talking about his evolution as an artist. “I have a hard time with self-observation,” Viola said. “When you get recognition, you find that a lot of your time is spent dealing with yourself in these previous lives and it’s kind of weird. It’s like you’re eating your tail.”

But recognition has significant advantages, he said. One is being able to afford space and equipment to build large installations in his studio instead of dreaming them up in a small room behind his garage and getting his first look at the real thing at a museum or gallery.

Another big plus is having an opportunity to send his ideas out into the world, in exhibitions, the rental and sale of tapes, on television and in interviews. “It’s a real privilege to be able to say something and realize that a lot of people are listening,” he said. “These ideas that have been influential and inspiring for me, I want to get out. It’s like the organs of the body. If an organ of the body isn’t used, it atrophies. The whole idea isn’t to possess these things but to keep them going. It’s the momentum through time.”

Viola creates art that he means to be “used,” however his audience chooses. “I like to think that people can take the parts of the work that they need to deal with something in their lives, even if it isn’t what I thought the work was about,” he said.

“I’m not dealing with the next step in the progression of art. I’m more interested in basic human issues, so my audience is broad,” he said. “But it has been interesting that the museums that have shown my work report that a tremendous number of young people have come to see it and returned with their friends,” he said. “My work is very different from television and MTV, but it’s a language that young people can understand or accept without any discomfort question.”

That isn’t always the case in the art world. Viola’s favorite anecdote about his audience concerns Hilton Kramer, editor of the New Criterion and former New York Times art critic. “I was setting up one of my pieces at the Whitney in New York, when Hilton Kramer walks in,” Viola said. “The lights go out and these big images come on the wall and he jumps . . . but as soon as the lights go on, he regains his composure, scoffs and walks out. Two minutes later, 20 black kids come in with their teacher. Same thing, the lights go out and the kids go, ‘Whoa!’ Half of them run out the door, and the other ones are jumping around the room. It was so intense. That for me said it all.”