ART REVIEW : Bill Viola, Poet King of ‘California Video’

Video art has its loopy pranksters, its didactic ranters, its slice-of-life chroniclers and its academics. But none of its practitioners are as consistently revelatory as the poets . By poets , I mean those artists who use imagery and sound--as well as the intimacy of the TV format--in allusive ways that allow each viewer to come to a private understanding of what is seen and heard.

In “New California Video 1994-95,” a group show at the Long Beach Museum of Art, the poet king is Bill Viola. A 1989 MacArthur Foundation (“genius”) grant recipient, he is represented in the Newport Harbor Art Museum’s permanent collection and had a well-received exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego two years ago.

In Long Beach, Viola is represented by three videos in different styles, linked by his continuing explorations of mortality and the passage of time. (Viewers may view any tape in the show by request.)

Originally made to be shown on network TV several times a day as unannounced one-minute segments, “Reverse Television--Portraits of Viewers,” consists of images of Boston-area men and women aged 18 to 93. They each sit silently in their own living rooms and staring at the viewer. (In the tape, the segments have been shortened to 15 seconds.)

In a sense, the 1983 piece allows TV viewers--all engaged in the same activity, but isolated from one another--to see mirror images of themselves. How do we watch, and where do we watch, and what do we look like as watchers?

Yet the people in the video presumably are not really watching anything; they’re looking into Viola’s camera. And most of them sit bolt upright on a chair or in the center of a couch; only a few seem to be imitating the classic TV-watcher’s slouch.

Actually, these living-room views--with their display of various tastes in upholstery and knickknacks--bear about the same relation to reality as do 19th-Century paintings of people in domestic settings, in which each pose and object was selected to reveal the artist’s understanding of the sitter’s psychology or social class.

More crucially, there is something unreal and slightly unnerving about watching people stare for extended periods of time into the lens of a camera. Unlike the information-packed “perfect moment” of the classic ideal of still photography, these lingering images seem to contain less and less content the more we watch them. Neither entirely private nor public images, these portraits explore a curious void at the heart of the viewing experience.

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Viola uses fragmentary imagery to very different effect in his otherworldly “Angel’s Gate,” from 1989. Compressed within four minutes are scenes, punctuated by blackness, that carve away the lumbering mass of daily life to reveal a sharply double-sided awareness of life and death.

A dynamited building collapses; a piece of fruit plops off a tree; a boy’s face becomes distorted when he holds it underwater; a technician observes an eviscerated animal; a baby is born; a tunnel leads to a metal gate that seems to bend slightly, admitting us to the misty Beyond. Such elemental imagery borders at times on banality, yet Viola’s purity of vision redeems it as the stuff of art.

“The Passing,” an unhurried, non-linear 56-minute video from 1991, is far more ambitious, knitting together brief dreamscapes, memories and slow pans of desert landscapes.

Using slow motion and rhythmic repetitions of imagery with a limited palette of sounds (labored breathing, running water), Viola creates a visual realm that parallels the mind’s obsessive jumble of memories and fears.

The meditatively autobiographical piece--which includes images of Viola and his small son--is dedicated to his mother, seen in vivacious old age (in snippets from family videos), lying hollow-eyed on a hospital bed, and in her open coffin.

Woven around her death are a multitude of evocative images: a child’s primitive wonder at the lighting of a candle; a man’s sensations of floating underwater and covering a landscape with his long shadow; streaks of light shooting through the darkness as a lone car travels through the desert; a table poignantly set for one that comes to rest, like a species of plankton, at the bottom of the sea.

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The many California desert scenes, ranging from Anza Borrego to the Salton Sea, evoke states of solitude and slow decay as well as an eerie beauty--the unknown territories of the dreaming mind. They merge with images of Viola dream-driving (with eyes shut) at night down empty city streets and broodingly awake in the 2 a.m. hush of his wallpapered bedroom. Viola offers no tidy conclusion to this meditation on life and loss; it is a piece about a kind of interior journey that has no end.

All three videos have been acquired by the museum with funding from the Art Collectors Circle and a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other recently purchased works, Susan Mogul’s “Everyday Echo Street: A Summer Diary” stands out as a warmly personal portrait of a neighborhood.

The other batch of videos in the exhibition were made under the auspices of two museum programs: Open Channels and Video Access. Doug Henry’s “Only Thirteen Minutes Left” is by far the most self-consciously polished of this group, but it is slick for all the right satirical reasons.

With his team of youthful, attractive actors and a repertoire of poses, phrases and editing techniques borrowed from commercials, Henry evokes a perky, prosperous world in which self-interest is just another way to say you care.

* “New California Video 1994-95,” through Aug. 20 at the Long Beach Museum of Art, 2300 E. Ocean Blvd., Long Beach. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday and Sunday; 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Friday. $2 adults; $1 students and seniors; free from 5-8 p.m. Fridays. (310) 439-2119.