Floating to Earth: The Multifaceted Art of Carolyn Shadid-Lewis

Art exists to put into visual form something that words alone cannot express. Sometimes it is actually a combination of elements that come together to create this expression, but when the various pieces are amassed, something much larger is uncovered. It is a privilege to see those elements coming together. Few have the benefit of observing this somewhat private practice. I had the opportunity to view the various stages of production of a recent work by Carolyn Shadid-Lewis. The following is a glimpse of her creative process.

Shadid-Lewis is an interdisciplinary artist. Her background as a child growing up in a military family weighs heavily on her art production. Particularly during a time of war, this insider’s view provides a tenderness that is often overshadowed by artists who are prone only to protestations of military action. While the work may expose the devastating toll that war takes on individuals, it does not dismiss the magnitude of the honorable service provided by those same persons.

A prelude to the recent piece was a site-specific installation Shadid-Lewis created at the National Cemetery at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. In this work the artist gleaned from her background in music, as well as from her religious heritage. Extended on a Cursed Tree (2006)—the title of the piece—is an excerpt from a hymn. The artist hung various texts, outtakes from hymns that were stamped into dog tags, on the branches of a tree in the cemetery. The text-based work is reminiscent of works by artist Jenny Holzer. Both artists take snippets of longer texts out of their original contexts and require the viewer to rethink their meanings in light of a new context. In the distance of Shadid-Lewis’s piece are the endless rows of white grave markers. They are similar to the rows of white crosses one conjures up when thinking of the National Cemetery in Arlington.

In the video footage of this piece, dog tags sway gently in the breeze as rows of graves assume the role of an audience in the background. Each grave is a symbol of sacrifice. Like Christ, these service men and women were willing to be placed in harm’s way—willing to be sacrificed for the good of countless others. Christ and those represented by the grave markers are the appeasement that purchases the freedom of others.

It is in From Twilight Til Dawn (2009) that Shadid-Lewis is able to show the fullness of her interdisciplinary talents. The installation is one part drawing, one part music, one part documentary, and a whole lot of ephemerality. The work was created while the artist was working on her MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. I visited her studio as the piece was in progress. Small portions of the project were in various states of completion about the room, but the room itself was a determining factor in how the piece was eventually resolved. The room was draped in ripstop—the fabric from which parachutes are constructed.

Even at this stage of production a video was a major part of the concept. The artist wondered whether or not projecting onto the fabric was the way to go. I assured her that it was an important consideration. The wispiness of the fabric was an indicator of the ephemeral nature of our existence. The billowing of the fabric, produced at the slightest movement of air currents, was like the pulsating of blood through the body.

At the core of the video is an interview with a WWII era paratrooper. His stories are interspersed with interviews with the artist’s father and vintage footage of hundreds of paratroopers wafting toward the ground. There is a stillness and serenity that comes from observing the earthward journey of the jumpers. But there is also a tension. The viewer recognizes that this is a time of calm before the storm. Once on the ground that serenity will be rudely interrupted.

In the final state this video is projected onto a plastic screen adjoining the ripstop fabric. Again, the peaceful though fragile state of human existence is mimicked through a room draped in parachute fabric. The fragility is enhanced through the blackboard style drawings that are interspersed with the shots of paratroopers and interview footage. The animated stop-action drawings bring to mind the work of William Kentridge. Shadid-Lewis relies on the ephemeral quality of these drawings to bolster the message running throughout the work. A particularly poignant segment comes near the end when the retired paratrooper fades from the screen. After emotionally stating his perennial question, "Why me? Why did I survive instead of others?," he fades from view. The chair where he was sitting comes into focus as a chalk drawing and that drawing is slowly erased to nothing. Though he is an elderly man, the viewer realizes that life is a fleeting thing, no matter how long we live.

The rewind effect that takes place in this segment, and in others near the end of the piece, is highly effective. We rewind scenes from our lives over and over in our minds. They are always with us, yet they are also fleeting moments in a timeline spanning much more than our solitary lives. The time-based nature of the installation, coupled with the presence of the flowing fabric, produces a more physical reaction to the work. Shadid-Lewis is able to utilize the inherent qualities of several media into one overwhelming and powerful message. One message that would be muted without the support of various elements together.

Playing a Serious Game—The Art of Amy Day

Just how is it that art "works" on us? There may be a commonly held belief that art should possess aspects of beauty. Even a narrow definition that excludes aesthetic sensibilities like the sublime recognizes that art possesses something more than merely technical skill—mimesis of nature’s beauty. There is something transcendent in art that takes us out of ourselves and causes us to look at the world through a different lens.

Sometimes it takes the unsettling to make us take a new look at an old concept. Performance art has had an unsettling quality from its genesis. It wasn’t visual art in the traditional sense and it wasn’t even theatre. This hybrid nature caused questions to naturally arise in viewers and this has often been used to the advantage of artists who employ performance as a medium.

Amy Day utilizes her body in her performance works. Her body is her primary medium. The actions of her body, combined with other symbolically laden objects, reference attitudes and beliefs common in society. Day, however, turns viewer assumptions on their heads. By re-presenting beliefs and assumptions in a new context, Day causes the viewer to consider the cultural qualifiers that may color basic beliefs.

Day’s series of videos entitled Bible Bath (all hyperlinked titles can be viewed on YouTube) consists of various "episodes" in which she plays the hostess of a video story-time. Amid floating bunches of plastic grapes, she relays various biblical tales that are both loosely self interpreted and drawn from versions found in children’s coloring books . Her Eucharistic fantasy is enlivened with occasional sips from the wine glass constantly cradled in her hand, no doubt adding to some non-traditional interpretations of Noah and the Ark, and David and Goliath. All the while she lounges, self-baptized in a water filled bathtub.

Part of the artist’s intention for this work was to relay what her faith would resemble at the age of thirty if it had never changed from the condition it was in when she was a child. In the gospels Jesus admonishes Christians to possess a childlike faith, but that doesn’t mean a childish faith. Day presents a problem to fundamentalist and evangelical Christians. Are they more concerned with the conversion of the unsaved masses than in the maturation of those same newly converted "baby" Christians? Is American Christianity based disproportionately in the Just As I Am altar call of a Billy Graham Crusade? If this is true then the recent predictions of blogger Michael Spencer, concerning the imminent demise of evangelicalism, may be true.

Bible Bath appears as both amusing and disconcerting. It is imbued with an honesty that makes it unnerving, while still fostering an appeal to both those in Christian circles and in the art world. The use of the artist’s body in other works is more immediate, dramatic, and potentially offensive. Day does not shrink away from the traditional symbolism connected to the physical bodies of female performance artists. The woman’s body is the battleground for feminist concerns and ideologies. By stripping down their bodies, Day and other female performance artists regain the control taken from women by a patriarchal society.

This is most evident in Eve. Once, again, connecting to religious tales, Day presents herself as a sinless figure of the mother of humanity. Her naked body is covered in flour to reveal its Edenic purity. As in much of Day’s work, the performance is then inhabited by the accoutrements of childhood. This time it is in the form of the childhood game of bobbing for apples. One by one, Day grasps these blood red, candy coated apples with her mouth, drops them down her torso, and into her lap. Images of sin, death, loss of innocence, and sexuality merge into one powerful scene.

Eve is far from subtle. It tackles Christian beliefs head on, but it communicates in the language of contemporary art. Physical vocabulary is important to Day. Even when she is not using her own physical body the works enlist a materiality that calls attention to the truth of the circumstances presented. A comparison between Ritual Obstacle Course and Closer to the Light is a case in point.

In Ritual Obstacle Course Day navigates the mythic tasks of some self-imposed bodily challenge. She interacts with structures she has previously built in the natural world. The rituals begin with the gathering of pottery from the puddles of a muddy plot of land. Dressed in garments of white, like her figure in Eve, she performs various tasks with the vessels at the appointed stations. until her white, mime-like mask is washed clean from her face in the "rain machine," completing the ordeal.

Closer to the Light is the alter ego of Ritual Obstacle Course. It is the child’s version—the title coming from a book of the same name that addresses near death experiences of children. It is a stop-action, puppet animation that finds the central character—a doll that seems a cross between Snow White and Alice in Wonderland—performing identical tasks in a world of toys. This is the child-like Bible Bath version of the actual biblical tale. Day wants the viewer to understand that we sometimes require a re-telling, a re-imagining of our archetypes, in order to better dissect their content. Our familiarity with the stories and practices of our youth may cause us to neglect the high seriousness of their full implications.

Performance and even video art are like a foreign language to many people. They do not often possess the intrinsic beauties that many assume are the hallmarks of good art. Amy Day’s work is fun and humorous, but also serious. She uses the first two elements to elicit questions in the minds of her viewers so that the latter is palatable. It is these vivid reinterpretations that work on our imaginations over time.

As Plain as Black and White: The Art of Kara Walker and William Kentridge

Regrettably, the United States and South Africa share a tainted history of repression of the black citizens in their midsts. Even though the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and the emancipation of enslaved African Americans in the mid-nineteenth century predated the fall of Apartheid, Americans have little to hold over the heads of our South African brothers and sisters. The far reaching effects of generations of mistreatment and inequality cannot be wiped perfectly clean. Even a chalk board leaves residual traces of its previous content.

Coinciding with the political struggles for equality in the tumultuous decade of the ‘60s was the burgeoning business of identity theories within the art world. The art of the twentieth century had dismantled the traditional media, modes, and subject matter of art making of the previous centuries. When there was no longer a common, shared narrative artists were forced to seek other avenues for inspiration. Many of them looked inward and found their subject matter in such topics as feminism, sexual orientation, Marxism (or other political theories), and ethnic identity.

While this change of events has had the unfortunate effect of giving us far too many details about what goes on in the bedrooms of some artists, there are also some positive outcomes. Underrepresented artists, such as women and persons of color, have gained a voice that they did not previously possess. This has provided a much needed spotlight on issues and concerns that were virtually absent within the general discourse.

William Kentridge is an heir to this form of political and ethnic art. His is not a direct descendant, however. Kentridge is a South African of white European descent. His work, while often narrative, is not overly didactic. It often contains metaphors and references to the troubled past (and present) of South Africa and the relations among its inhabitants.

His medium of choice is charcoal on paper. And while the graphic contrast of black and white is not accidental, this is also not simply drawing. More often than not Kentridge’s drawings are given an animated life through the media of film and video. He repeatedly draws, erases, and then draws again on single sheets of paper; photographically recording each new, altered image. As the scene changes with each new drawing, the version played back is more than a typical animation. The animation retains the history of its creation. Like the chalk board, it leaves a residue and reminder of what came before.

This residue in black and white befits the continuing challenges that face South Africa. A nation can make claims of equality and enact laws that prohibit oppression but that does not blot out the reality of history. That is a good thing. The sticky quality of our collective history can be our conscience when we would rather ignore our past offenses and biases.

It is little surprise that Kentridge fell into this particular niche of politically tempered theatricality within his art. In college, in Johannesburg, he studied Politics and African Studies, as well as Fine Art. By the 1980s he had moved to Paris to study mime and theatre. For nearly two decades he worked in theatre and television—behind the scenes.

It seemed almost inevitable that Kentridge would take up the challenge, in 2005, of set design and production for Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute. The essence of opera is over-the-top theatricality. The artist embraced the baroque elements of the medium as he combined the frenetic qualities of his typical style with live action and sound. His drawings, as well as text, flashed behind and sometimes on the performers. The remaining, more stable, parts of the set were also rendered in his trademark expressionist style. Essentially, everything was executed in black, white, and gray. The gray implies that the unending struggle of black and white is seldom "black and white"—life is far more gray.

William Kentridge’s American counterpart, in some respects, can be found in Kara Walker. While Kentridge continually chips away at the sins of society, Walker manages to offend nearly every possible faction with her explicit art works. Heralded and derided from the time her work first caught the attention of critics upon her graduation from the MFA program at the Rhode Island School of Design, Kara Walker utilizes stereotypes to push the envelope with topics of both gender and race. The immediate and forceful quality of her work brought her to the attention of the MacArthur Foundation, from which she received the coveted Genius Grant—one of the youngest recipients ever.

It is also not an accident that, like Kentridge, Walker limits nearly all of her output to black and white. The medium with which she is most associated is cut-paper silhouettes. Sometimes the black image is painted directly on a white wall, but most are mural size works that she first draws on sheets of black paper then meticulously cuts out with an X-Acto knife, finally adhering to the wall with wax. Though the process and materials are simple, the imagery is complex and almost always offensive. That is where the controversy exists.

Walker’s imagery is derived from the antebellum south. Since all we see is the silhouette there are certain gaps and ambiguities that arise between figures. Figures blend together into complex forms in which appendages are difficult to ascribe to a specific individual. Men and women, adults and children, blacks and whites morph into one another, along with various elements of flora and fauna. The results are fantastic and sometimes repulsive.

Walker easily presents the offenses of white slave owners against their black slaves. This may be physical abuses, but the sexual abuses are equally represented. They can be in the form of adults on children, men on women, and even men on men. No one is really left out of the mix. This is exactly why Kara Walker has received such intense criticism. For her, it seems that nothing is sacred or off limits.

Because the imagery is often the result of mixtures of stereotypical and politically incorrect illustrations from the period, even Walker’s African American viewers have taken exception to her work. In particular, artist Betye Saar, who had herself questioned stereotypical representations of African Americans through her work in the 1960s, proposed a letter writing campaign against the exhibition of Walker’s work. She found Kara’s work to be an odd reinforcement of the stereotypes her forebears had worked so hard to eradicate. Yet Walker has been given major exhibition after major exhibition.

There is no denying that Walker’s work is offensive, but she is an equal opportunity offender. This is part of the power of her work. She makes everyone complicit in the atrocities depicted. Everyone plays a role. And though the imagery is black and white, delineating cause and effect is about as tricky as it is in real life.

The choice of cut-paper silhouettes is important not only because of the black and white elements but for the social connotations associated with the medium. It is a lowly craft form, not on par with arts such as painting. It could, thus, be taken up by eighteenth and nineteenth century African Americans—those in a lower station of society. Walker also took it on as a medium because it was a more democratic form that required no special training and was often associated with the lower standing of women in the culture.

Though her images are static on the wall, they share a theatrical bent that is crucial to William Kentridge’s work, as well. Similarly, Walker has begun to utilize video within her art production. Though the work is very different from Kentridge’s stop-action animation, it is analogous in the way it incorporates the elements of Walker’s primary medium. The videos are akin to Balinese shadow puppetry. Walker creates silhouette puppets that she manipulates behind a backlit cloth scrim. The work is put into motion and takes on a new dimension that can never be achieved through the motionless forms on the wall. Kentridge, himself, had worked with puppetry decades before.

In both Walker’s and Kentridge’s work the theatrical becomes a key to understanding the message. The use of black and white imagery has much more to do with conflicts between ethnic groups than clarity of meaning. The theatrical element shows the viewer that the concept is so significant that an almost melodramatic turn must be taken to lift us out of everyday existence. Something extraordinary—which mimics life but is apart from it—is needed to call our attention to the matters at hand.

What both artists are able to achieve in their various works is a component that lies at the core of what art is in contemporary times. Even though each artist is adept at creating representational imagery, that is far from the final goal of their works. Transcendence is the key. The work transcends mere representation and fills viewers with questions instead of answers. Since it is somewhat politically based, the work is forcing viewers to examine and acknowledge their role in the interchanges of society. This transcendent quality will lead in various directions depending on the art and the artist , but the best of contemporary art will take viewers outside of itself and outside of themselves. It is only when we view ourselves from another vantage point that we are able to critique our attitudes and behaviors.

Mapping Purgation—The Ritual Art-making of Craig Goodworth

Art, as we know it, was born out of ritual and religious ceremonies. In his seminal work, Art in Action, the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff explains that the essence of what art once was changed when Western cultures began to remove the artifacts and objects of ritual from their primary functionality. Once monarchs in Europe began amassing artwork in collections built for aesthetic contemplation alone, the founding of public museums was quick to follow.

By the 1950s and 60s this trend of aesthetic contemplation had transformed modes of art making. One of its purest forms was Minimalism. This work left some cold and it objectified art to a certain extent so that it existed as little more than a commodity. A reaction against a purely aesthetic style eventually arose in the format of process and performance based artworks. Artists sensed that the new religion that art had become to some was lacking the spirit of art from the past. The ritual of making the art—the process and not the product—became the essential artwork.

Ritual is at the heart of Craig Goodworth’s art. Like many conceptual and performance based artists, Goodworth relies on documentation of his acts through photographs and videos. The bold, primal, and masculine nature of the work is a reflection of its author. An imposing and intense figure, Goodworth does not produce art for traditional aesthetic effect. In fact, many would object to his work as offensive and perhaps inhumane. Surface, however, should never detract from the underlying substance. The work is, in his terms, a sacred offense.

Goodworth’s rituals are rooted in Eastern Orthodox traditions and bound to the natural world. The activities are tied to a rural and ancestral heritage. They have been documented at locations as diverse as Pennsylvania, Slovakia, and the American Southwest. The practices are built upon asceticism with an overriding theme of sacrifice, emptying (purging), and filling.

Mapping Purgation is Goodworth’s journey through a series of rituals that embody this concept of emptying and filling. The opening sequence is a genesis, or literally birth, of the artist’s vision. The camera captures the birth of a calf. Like any birth, one senses the miraculous. A farmhand assists in releasing the newborn bovine from the heaving hulk of its mother’s body. Elements coalesce to make the occasion more solemn. The crisp air is accented by the steam of new life. As the calf is ejected from the safety of the womb its mother instantly rises to lick the amniotic sack from her offspring, in an act that is both instinctual and tender. She gently prods the calf to a wobbly stance within the straw covered stable. Even while we recognize these as ordinary farm animals there is an undeniable connection to the circumstances of the miraculous birth of Christ—among the lowly beasts of burden and in the obscurity of the ordinary.

The video then proceeds to chart the slaughter of various animals in locations around the world. It is graphic but it is not senseless. Whether on farms or ranches, most of these events are built purely upon sustenance. The animals were raised as food. The slaughtering of the animals—and this is a word that now holds more connotations of violence and unjust war than food supply—is a form of sacrifice. The animals die that we might live.

Of particular note is the emptying of the bodies of their internal organs. Although what one views are not religious rituals, Goodworth has imbued the ordinary with spiritual significance. The interior of each carcass is painstakingly purged of its vital organs until all that remains is a hollow, or even hallowed, form. The emphasis on purging is inextricably connected to the filling of that which has been emptied.

One particular early segment of the video—Concrete Cruciform—begins to hint at the more sacred purposes of the artist. In a simplified, almost Bergmanesque framing, Goodworth emerges from the cool late autumn air in hooded coveralls. This figure is on a journey or pilgrimage with a wheelbarrow laden with the carcass of a deer. The cowled figure is reminiscent of a medieval monk. This fitting comparison signals the months that the artist has spent with a group of Eastern Orthodox monks in a secluded region of Northern New Mexico.

Eventually the hooded pilgrim arrives at what seems to be a pyre made from the branches of felled trees. He secures the carcass atop the pyre in an inverted cruciform. One immediately associates the sacrificial parallels to both the Abrahamic tradition and the story of Christ. The interesting twist is that this deer has already been gutted. It is not simply left as a decaying stand-in for sacrifice. Instead, Goodworth counteracts the purgation with a ceremonial filling. He mixes enough concrete to fill the void left in the deer. Once the carcass has fully decayed what will be left is this fullness—the literal volume of the once living elements of the dead beast.

Goodworth’s quest in these ritual acts was initially linked to the aesthetic theories of beauty. In conversations with the artist I questioned him on his choice and emphasis on the beautiful when the subject seemed to, increasingly, be leaning toward the category of the sublime. As his concept began to change in consideration of this, the separation between life and art began to break down. Spiritual quests (his stays at the monastery) aligned with personal quests focused on his heritage (trips to his ancestral home of Slovakia). All of these were interrelated within the work he had been producing in the studio and in natural settings.

The offensiveness of the sacrificial acts was minimal compared to the precepts of the artist’s faith. The scandal of the Christian faith is bound to the belief that a perfect and sovereign creator became his own creation and subjected himself to the limitations of the physical human form. While other ancient religions had rather anthropomorphic dieties, it was a rather outlandish claim that a god would sacrifice his power and life on behalf of humanity. It was offensive to the contemporaries of Christ and this sacred offense, that makes the hideous the object of ultimate beauty, is exactly what Craig Goodworth is after in his work.

However, one should not see the scenes within the video as voyeuristic. The work is not produced by Goodworth for us to simply gaze upon in disgust, even when he is the cameraman documenting the sacrificial acts of others. He is actively performing these rites and rituals in most cases. He is acting as an intermediary or like a high priest (in much the same way Christ is referred to as a high priest in the biblical passage in the book of Hebrews) on our behalf.

Near the end of Mapping Purgation Goodworth performs one of the most tasking and revelatory acts in a three day event entitled Triduum that takes place over Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Easter Sunday. When he discovers the empty and desiccated carcass of a deer in the desert the artist pierces it with forty or fifty steel rods. The interpenetration of a corpse makes us aware of the way an eternal God, through his son Jesus, intersected time, space, and humanity. By the time Goodworth found it, the corpse had already been life giving. In the death of this animal other scavengers were nourished. Again, the comparison can be made to the sacrament of the Eucharist, in which the body and blood of Jesus become nourishment for his followers.

Traveling to and from the remote location of the animal, carrying the steel rods, is an ascetic practice. It is like the completion of the forty day purgation of the Lenten season. After the exhausting task of pulling the rods back out of the carcass, Craig documents how they have changed the shell of the deer. Certain views show light piercing through the hide. Within the interior, a place of darkness and death, light is now streaming. Once again, Goodworth is allowing us to see that it takes the darkness of purgation to reveal the fullness of God.

In the final scene Goodworth is found in the beams of car headlights on the side of a remote highway. He has come upon a wounded deer that can no longer walk. The fear and pain are evident in the darting eyes of the deer. The beast is now only suffering until it can ultimately die. Goodworth realizes that this event is the bookend to the opening scene of the birth of the calf. He performs his final sacrifice as a mercy killing, cutting the animal’s throat that it may finally be free of the pain. The mercy shown is what is referred to as a severe mercy. Sometimes the difficult path is the best for us.

Through all these scenes Goodworth reminds us that the physical is inextricably linked to the spiritual. He denies the Manichean and Gnostic notions that humanity is called to shed the physical in order to come to some super spiritual state. Instead, he reveals that we only understand the spiritual through the physical. The physical is our primary language. It is through the ugliness of the sublime that we have a proper foil against which we can perceive true beauty.

Bill Viola: Video Art’s Role in the Museum Experience

When an artist chooses to produce work in a medium that is not a more traditional material the general viewer can find the work somewhat suspect. This may be more pronounced when it comes to video as an art form. Video, by no means, is new. Artists have been using it for over forty years, in one form or another. In the 1960s and 70s much of the video work produced had documentation as its basis, though there were some truly experimental pioneers such as Nam June Paik. Today, with the proliferation of miniDV recorders, video phones, and iMovie software anyone with access can create video works. Much of what the novice produces in this medium still has documentation at its core, and video remains a democratic medium. It is for everyone.

The fate of video is related to its older sibling, photography. Both have had some difficulty gaining acceptance as full fledged art media. The popularity and accessibility of each with the masses is at the heart of this. Once Kodak made film cameras inexpensive enough for the average middle class citizen there was a certain cheapening of the medium. Everyone could fancy himself or herself a Photographer. However, the snapshots for which most of us are responsible are simply not the same thing as a photograph produced by a fine artist. The medium is the same but the skill, intent, and process are worlds apart. It used to be that an artist spent an exceptional amount of time in the darkroom, assuring that the final photographic print was tweaked in just the right ways. Now that time is often spent in Photoshop. Either way, there is much more to these images than what results when most of us snap a cell phone image while on vacation at the beach.

Returning to video, the analogy can be made with YouTube. There are many humorous and interesting videos floating around cyberspace. The vast majority can scarcely be considered art and the creation of these does not prove their maker to be an artist or a great cinematographer. Yet there does remain some video that is, and should be, considered high art.

My observation, time and again, relating to the general public’s attitude toward video as art, has less to do with the medium than a broader attitude toward art. When video art is displayed in gallery and museum settings a common scenario is repeated day after day. Viewers approach the screen or wall where the video is displayed, look at what is transpiring for maybe ten seconds, get bored and move on. This isn’t unique to video. It happens with traditional paintings and sculpture as well.

The best of video art, however, has something unique to offer those who wish to view art. Time. Without the time element a video is just a still image—a photograph. There, of course, can be sound, too. That is peripheral to the element of time, though it may certainly be essential to a given work. The misperception with which many approach video is that it should be fast paced and to the point—instantaneously understood. This is exactly what a consumerist culture has prepared us to accept and expect. We view more traditional art forms in this same fashion because our lives move at fiber optic speed.

A contemporary master of video—and the element of time in particular—is Bill Viola. His ideas and themes are ancient though his choice of medium is fairly modern. Blending elements of Christianity, Buddhism, Sufism and other eastern philosophies, Viola explores the questions that have plagued us since the birth of humanity. These ideas are so pertinent that he demands our attention—our time—through his medium of choice.

There is a particularly excellent example of Viola’s work in the Yale University Art Gallery. When I came upon Study for Emergence in the museum galleries it was just over half-way through its 10 minute playing cycle. I expect that this may be another reason why viewers abandon video pieces so quickly. When you start mid-way through you miss important information. Patience is essential. This is a fairly long piece. It moves achingly slow. Two women are perched upon low steps. At the top of the steps is a large stone box. Not far into the piece each woman proceeds to move through an anguished and dramatic act of grieving. Because the scene is significantly slowed down we observe their pain in a more heightened and intense way.

The women interact in a cursory manner. They are never fully consoling one another. Their grief seems common, but not actually shared—it is deeply personal. Ever so slowly, water begins to cascade down the sides of the stone box. It flows down the steps, interrupting the women in their sorrow. Again, very slowly, the women begin to move up the steps to what is now being revealed as a sepulcher. From within the water filled tomb rises a pale and limp figure of a man. The women muster enough strength to lift the body from its chamber and rest it upon the steps on which they first began the sequence.


The imagery would be poignant even at normal speed but the belabored slowness of the work acts as a magnifying glass on their emotions. I viewed the work about two and half times. This is asking a lot of the viewer. Without that kind of commitment, however, the nuances are not revealed. Not only is the artist asking much from the viewer, he is asking a lot of the art. That is what is actually expected from art, that it is transcendent, able to take us above and beyond the banalities of every day existence.

It is a tall order to ask viewers to invest this kind of time on an individual work of art. With the current trend of crowded blockbuster museum exhibitions it isn’t really even feasible in many instances. Still, the challenge to the viewer is relevant. Art is one of the exceptions for most people. We approach it passively, expecting it to tell its story and reveal its meaning immediately. When reading literature we expect to work a little at it. There are truths to be revealed but we have to dig a little to find them. Even those who enjoy watching sporting events understand that in order to fully appreciate them they need to understand the rules of the game. In short, we have to do our homework.

Contemporary art is not self evident. It does not become any clearer by avoiding it. The challenge is to take the time to look past normal expectations and preconceptions. Viewers need to be in dialogue with the work. That, like all things worth doing in this life, takes an investment of time.