Bill Viola: How can images manage to tell of the unspoken and unsayable?

How do Bill Viola’s video images manage to make you feel like you’ve understood the ‘unspoken and unsayable’?  You come away feeling as if you’ve understood something hard to put into words.  It is like the 14th century anonymous writer said, in ‘The Cloud of Unknowing’ where he is pointing out what Dionysius said 

“the most godlike knowledge of god is that which is known by unknowing”

Jesus, before ascension, was trapped by time and space.  After his ascension, he slipped through a sliver of time to find the timeless.  There are those who believe ascension is not possible before death. 

However there are those who believe that the wholeness of love, when used to fill the separated inner self, where wounded past muffles and blears perception, ascension can be achieved in life and that, beyond ego and bound time, love and boundlessness can be attained by contemplation.

Blake was one of those to believe this:

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite”

Viola uses Blake’s quote in his current exhibition in the Grande Palais in Paris.

He describes his video works as sculptures travelling through time.  His work forces the viewer to contemplate, for it is through contemplation that those ‘sullied doors of perception can be cleansed’.  How does he manage to force contemplation on his viewers?

For one, it is his meticulous appreciation of life’s senses.  His films are alert to every sound, movement, sight, whilst moving through space, as Ibn Arabi (1165 – 1240) said

“If you engage in travel, you will arrive”

He captures the flecks of sunlight on water, radiating dilations, the sharp contours of a shadow, the gentle sputter of a raindrop.  At first these details mesmerise a viewer.

Then comes his expert narrative and story telling, which keeps crowds compelled to watch.  Though the films are slow motion and tell little more of a story then a person’s dreaming or a person’s jumping into a pool of water or people walking or staring, there is a transfixing quality, keeping the viewer fixed to the spot for the whole sequence.

Viola said that the camera helps us to “re-learn how to look at things beyond appearances” and his regular image of plunging into water is often a metaphor for this plunging of the mind into something deeper and a cleansing for deeper clarity.

These recurring images of water, fire, air and earth are the landscape, which Viola says unites the internal mind with the external mind.

The experience of going to this exhibition is like going into the black depths of a cinema but instead of coming away with a story, you come away with absence of story, a story about storylessness.  It’s a very powerful exhibition.