Realm of the Senses

Bill Viola has been making unusually compelling video art for 25 years. To get an idea of what he’s up to in his work, consider this: The magnificent retrospective exhibition of his career that opened Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art features 15 different installations, but no identifying labels are anywhere in sight.

None.

No wall texts offer commentary, context or explanation. No timelines record recent social history. No placards even tell you titles, materials or dates when the installations were made.

Only when you’ve gone all the way through the show will you find anything remotely similar. The final gallery features a casually installed, thoroughly absorbing display of Viola’s working drawings and notebook entries for his video installations and single-channel tapes, as well as an interesting floor plan describing the layout of the show you’ve just seen. At the exit door you can finally pick up an informative brochure.

Conventional wisdom has it that poor befuddled museum visitors, alienated from art, need to be taken by the hand, suitably prepped and told what or how to think about the work they’re seeing. But conventional wisdom gets unceremoniously tossed out the window here.

Instead you’re plunged right in, ready or not. Unsurprisingly, a certain disorientation accompanies the encounter.

The first darkened room holds a big, spinning screen, which displays, absorbs and reflects a panoply of projected images. Next comes a room where you see the sight of your own slowly distending body, upside-down, viewed through a video-magnified drop of water (when the drop falls, a loud kerplunk! comes from an amplified drum). Then there’s a still-life tableau of a wooden chest, lamp, vase and portable TV, which shows the face of a contentedly sleeping person. Suddenly, the room goes dark and the walls are awash in the flapping white wings of an owl, the splash of a body falling into water or some other nightmarish image, accompanied by roaring sound.

And so on. The absence of anchoring text is a seemingly small matter, but here it feels quite the opposite: deftly calculated for precise effect.

Text has lately become a dominant presence as supporting information in museum exhibitions; furthermore, we’ve been through a lengthy period when text has been a dominant feature of new art itself. Harnessing the potency of paradox, the abrupt prominence of its omission here has a distinctly rhetorical power: It’s just you and the art and your own experience of it.

And it’s wonderful. The capacity of Viola’s art to convincingly unfold its own principal subject, which is the mysterious operation of human consciousness, is simply trusted. The initial ruffle of confusion turns out to be good, not bad, since you quickly realize you’ve been thrown back onto your own perceptual resources. In our typically infantilizing, lowest-common-denominator public culture, it’s oddly refreshing to be treated like an adult.

Of necessity you start to pay attention. Equally important, you start to be aware that you’re paying attention.

Viola’s best work concerns a consciousness of self, which inevitably incorporates a spiritual dimension. Metaphysical artistic inquiries in the 20th century have traditionally been the province of abstract painting--a thread running from Kandinsky and Mondrian to artists like Rothko. When Viola began to make video in 1970, Rothko already had committed suicide and the viability of abstract painting was under assault and in disarray. It’s as if Viola began to translate a traditional set of artistic concerns into the new, figurative, up-to-the-minute, vastly different electronic medium of television.

Video has its own peculiar properties, distinct from other forms. Viola is adept at playing with them and against them.

Water, for example, is among the most frequently encountered images in the show. It echoes and makes visible through metaphor the fluid flow of electrons in a cathode ray tube.

Sound, on the other hand, has always been a minor consideration in broadcast TV--witness the arrival of stereo TV only within the last decade--despite its descendancy from the aural medium of radio. But sound is crucial to much of Viola’s video work (at Syracuse University he studied music as well as art). So is attenuated slow motion, which bluntly reverses the requirement for rapid pace demanded by commercial television.

By underlining physical properties of video while simultaneously contradicting socially familiar applications of it, Viola’s work at once heightens our consciousness of what we’re seeing while distinguishing it from the run-of-the-mill.

Entering “Slowly Turning Narrative” (1992), the first installation in the show, is like stumbling into a chamber of the mind. The big, rotating screen in the center of the room is mirrored on one side. As it spins, images projected on it (including your own reflection) are bounced across the walls, where they slide by in an ever-disappearing array.

Throughout, a man’s looming face shown in black-and-white close-up chants observations on various states of being. The room is like an externalization of the interior process of turning over thoughts in your mind.

“The Veiling” (1995) requires slow and persistent observation, but this seductive work is perhaps the most beautiful in the show. Nine parallel veils of transparent cloth are suspended in a darkened room; video projections from either end show a man and a woman moving haltingly through nocturnal landscapes. Seeming to approach one another on successive veils, they dissolve into flickering patterns of light that pass through one another.

Sometimes Viola’s unusual formats can be clunky and the effect just misses. In “Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House” (1982), you sit in a straight-back chair wearing headphones, staring into the artist’s face on a television monitor opposite. Inside your head you hear him swallow, clear his throat and so on, when suddenly a shadowy figure appears behind him on the screen and--thwack!--hits him over the head. The assaultive crack reverberates in your own cranium, but the effect is more demonstrative than persuasive: You never really feel as if you’ve gotten inside the artist’s head, as it seems you’re meant to.

Some works extend time to an extreme. “Passage” (1987) incorporates a wall-size projection of a child’s birthday party, slowed to an excruciatingly languid pace: The tape runs a full seven hours in jumpy, sometimes painful slow motion, its thundering sounds of children playing transformed into a concert of bull-moose bellows.

It takes a while to figure out what you’re seeing in this hugely enlarged, visually compressed, audibly distorted installation, which turns a birthday--the ritualized marking of time--into a strange meditation on life’s passages. But you needn’t stay for the duration. Viola’s is a narrative art with no beginning and no end, only a perpetually unfolding present. The mysteries of birth and death are enfolded into the wondrous enigma of conscious experience that separates them.

Organized by New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art, where it travels next before heading to Europe, and accompanied by an excellent catalog, “Bill Viola” also includes a changing schedule of 22 single-channel videotapes, presented daily in LACMA’s Brown Auditorium. KCET-TV Channel 28 will broadcast two programs of Viola’s tapes, airing Fridays, Nov. 7 and Nov. 14, at 11 p.m. Finally, three more installations are being set up this week in public spaces downtown: in the basement of Grand Central Market at Broadway and Third Street, in the lobby of Arco Center at 333 S. Hope St. and in the Getty Trust Room at the Central Library, 630 W. 5th St.

* Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-6000, through Jan. 11. Closed Wednesdays.