Bill Viola: Video and the drawings of Michelangelo

Bill Viola:

The Royal Academy exhibition whereby some of the drawings of Michelangelo are exhibited alongside the video installations of Bill Viola has just closed. It had been severely slated by critics, therefore I wanted to make my own mind up about how well Viola video installations stand up against Michelangelo and other classical drawings.
Adrian Searle had this to say about the exhibition when he reviewed it in the Guardian: "Michelangelo is always engaging, on the level of drawing as much as subject matter. Drawing cheats time. Viola’s art is so much of its own time that it is already dated, dead in the water. So what I wondered was Searle so dismissive about when it came to Bill Viola's work?

Michelangelo

Michelangelo

I went to see the Bill Viola installations in St Paul's Cathedral and on entering that religious space had to ask myself some serious questions as to the nature of art in a secular society. This it felt was the first question to consider, before a secondary one of whether or not contemporary media can have as powerful an effect as traditional drawing techniques. 

This is how the cathedral prepares its audience for Viola's work.

'Our visitors are able to encounter the universal spiritual questions of life and death that this extraordinary work lays before us. A contemporary medium that so often controls mass culture is slowed and shaped to unravel that control, allowing us to face ourselves alone in our fragility and potential. The rumour of God is very loud in the work, as enigmatic as it is profound, and I have no doubt the work will be a spiritual encouragement to those who spend time with it.

Today martyrdom is often spoken of in terms of what people kill themselves for and others with them. It is more authentically a word that focuses on what a human being might be willing to die for – faith, conscience, justice, love of others. This work deepens our perceptions by slowing them down. We see the courage and resilience of the human in the face of all that would destroy what is true and good. We each have been given the gift of being. The gift we have to offer in return is who we become and how our lives, and deaths, might transform the world.' This was not about something that was 'dead in the water', so someone has got the wrong end of the stick. 

The writer of the cathedral's text begins with a presumption that 'spiritual' questions of life and death are universal and that Viola's work allows us to 'encounter' these questions in some way that allows us to face ourselves. 

The first thing that you are aware of with the Viola is that people have come to see the work who expect a spiritual reaction. The art's position in the cathedral is designed to make you feel that these works are important to what you are experiencing, not just some art fitted in somewhere, which can often be the case. Positioning within a ritual building is vital to the context and Viola has been given two excellent spots. 

Because you have to stand alongside other people, you become aware that they are also investing time into thinking about what these two works mean for them. This like all communal experiences heightens the feeling of engagement and you don't want to dismiss feelings that you sense are being shared by others looking at the work. 

The introductory text tells us that what we are experiencing is a 'contemporary medium that so often controls mass culture', but it...'is slowed and shaped to unravel that control'. Now this is something else, it is suggested to us that in some way by looking at this work we can understand how contemporary screen based media controls mass culture. Is this I  wondered a reference to Marshall McLuen's the medium is the message? Or is this a reference to changing values? It used to be thought that religion controlled the masses. It was argued that for thousands of years, power over populations was maintained by a very close association between rulers and ruler sanctified religions. In particular some of the central planks of the Christian faith, such as 'Blessed are the meek for they shall inherit the Earth', it was argued, were used by the not so meek, to ensure that people understood their place in society and accepted it as a good thing. Looking around at the building we were in, all its visual rhetoric was designed to assert authority; huge intimidating spaces, over life sized statues of important state figures and an entrance designed to ensure you have no doubt that this is a building of the most highest importance. Religion and the state would in this form appear to be fused. Friedrich Nietzsche in particular stated that Christianity fostered a kind of slave morality. He argued that it had been used to suppress free will and that it was used to contain and restrict natural human desires. Nietzsche in ‘The Gay Science’ went as far as stating that even though God is dead, there are still caves within which his shadow still exists and that ‘we still have to vanquish his shadow’. So is what I am experiencing in looking at Viola's work some sort of 'shadow' of God? Nietzsche would no doubt argue that what Viola is doing is providing a way for us to continue to hold on to old belief systems, without having to 'sign up' for the religion. It would seem that we need our rituals, and they are important to us in our day to day negotiation of life, but are old recycled Christian beliefs the best and is Viola in using the media technology we associate with the world of advertising and mass communication, in the end simply selling us an old idea repacked as some sort of extended bath salts advert. Those adverts where water is slowed down and naked people are seen to emerge slowly from their showers or baths, whereby we are led to believe that they have also undergone some sort of 'spiritual' change, this time in the name of a commercial product and one that as long ago as 1972 John Berger in 'Ways of Seeing' had picked out as being sold using a deliberately constructed fantasy. 

I'm afraid I was beginning to side with those that criticised Viola's work. But perhaps for other reasons. I felt that he was using certain visual conventions without really questioning them. Instead of searching for new rituals, that we all, as I have already pointed out seem to need, he was recycling old ones and merging them with certain conventions that have been used in advertising to suggest 'spiritual' change. These tropes can be seen in adverts for alcoholic drinks as much as for bathroom relaxation products, slow motion hair dripping shots can be used by hair conditioner sellers just as easily as artists. 

This is very different to the more private experience of looking at old master drawings. Leeds City Art gallery has an exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical drawings on at the moment. The lighting is kept low and each image is presented in such a way that you can see that it is very special, and something to be revered. Again something that the commercial world is aware of, and I have been in some expensive jewellery shops, where tiny spotlights have been used to give some sort of almost religious 'aura' or glow to expensive items of jewellery. In this case the low lighting, it is argued is to protect these drawings from the corrosive power of bright light. Even so the low lighting levels make you feel that you are entering a cave like experience. 

Leonardo

Entering Leeds City Art gallery you find the Leonardo exhibition immediately on your left opposite the entrance to the cafe. Although the building has that solid worthy presence that so many of our civic buildings have that were built during Victoria's reign, it is of course not a building designed to 'house God' or his spirit and therefore there is not that same sense of religious participation and control that St Paul's has. This is of course a similar situation to the Royal Academy and this is where another problem for the reception of Viola's work might come from. 

The Royal Academy as a place to show work is all about 'art'. As a building it has been a centre around which debates as to art's worth and meaning have taken place many times. It is a building that in many ways stamps its authority on what is shown within it. It gives a formal secular 'blessing' to what it shows, raising the status of art on display and in doing so, reinforces its own reputation as a world art measuring stick. Therefore expectations are different and what Searle is writing about is how Viola's work measures up to the art world 'measuring stick'. Is it worthy of standing company with contemporary practices as well as does it compare with older practices?

I have seen Viola's work in several different religious settings, Durham, Venice, the church in the Yorkshire Sculpture Park and now London, all of which I found to various degrees emotionally moving and I have also seen his work in more secular surroundings and I found it far less moving. As I have argued above, I have caveats about his work in these places but at least there is a sort of recognition that the 'spiritual' nature of the siting reinforces the message and that whether or not I like that, it is a better place to explore possibilities for new responses to the need for post-Christian religious experiences than an art gallery. 

But what about Michelangelo's drawings? Perhaps it’s best to separate out the drawings from the finished works. If you have to compare Viola to Michelangelo it would be more appropriate to look at frescos rather than drawings for ideas. It is in this separation that I can find a more personal reading of the differences. Michelangelo's drawings show us a thinking and searching hand/mind. The drawings demonstrate to us how his ideas were unfolding. The frescos are 'finished' productions of their time that fulfilled their remit as statements about the power of the Christian idea, statements that were made right at the centre of the Christian power base for the then ruling Pope. The Michelangelo drawings still speak to us of the man, whilst the frescos tell of history and the changing reality of power structures. The frescos might be wonderful works of art, but they are works that have a charge that comes from their synthesis with the architecture of St Peter’s, they are inseparable from their context. So is this how we should be looking at Viola’s work? Situated in St Paul’s cathedral, we again have that pomp and majesty associated with official Christian religion and Viola’s videos are housed in casings not too dissimilar to those units devoted to holding relics or significant church ornaments. They are though clearly recent additions, their technology is of the 21^stcentury. If we look at this technology, we are immediately aware of other uses for it, as the ‘blurb’ we are asked to read suggests, Viola has used modern methods but slowed them down in order to ask his audience to meditate on the experience. However, once aware of this, I was forced to think carefully about his production values. 

One problem I felt with these videos was that they were over produced, the struggle that he must have gone through in order to realise his ideas is hidden behind the slick finish of the various edits used. Beautifully lit, composed carefully, his videos somehow become anodyne, their underlying visual tropes, referencing commercial advertising as much as historical painting. I was reminded of those beautiful adverts for tonic water, whereby water is poured over ice cubes, the bubbles and flowing liquid enlarged to a scale that references a slow motion natural waterfall. 

From Schweppes adverts

Bill Viola

Liril advert

But what would be Viola’s equivalent to Michelangelo’s drawings? Would it be the pre-edited footage, would it be a documentary of the making of the work, such as the 'The Road to St Paul's' 

Documentary 'The road to St Paul's'

I find the documentary interesting and it makes us aware of several technical issues that lie behind Viola's work, however there is nothing quite like a drawing in the way it can reveal intimate thoughts. Perhaps the nearest is a poem’s original note form, those handwritten stanzas that are crossed out and edited in such a way that you see the final form emerging out of the making, such as the one by Wilfred Owen below.

Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen

Both the edited poem and the adjusted drawing are things that any of us could contemplate working on. Most of us have had ideas about what to say or what to visualise and have attempted to put those down on paper, so we can have an immediate affinity with a small drawing or written note. The technology of a fresco or a video is complex and only really understood by a specialist practitioner. The necessary distancing required by the power holder, (the Catholic Church or the High Anglican Church), suits the grandeur of high production technology, but spiritual experience for myself would seem to require personal intimacy and I feel confused by the differences between ‘church’ and ‘religion’. It’s the word ‘organised’ that is missing here and this is my own problem, I have a deep suspicion of ‘organised’ anything. From my horror of the scout troop I was made to go to as a boy, to organised sports and especially organised belief systems. I don’t want to belong to anything that smacks of masonic rituals or enter into a compact with something that absolves me of my own responsibility for what I do. 

Michelangelo: Study for crucifixion

So finally I have to point to the democratic nature of a small drawing and suggest that whether or not Viola’s work is effective depends as always on the observer. I am too suspicious of the High Church and its motives, which means that I am also worried that Viola has not thought through the implications of placing his work in these contexts. However for a devout Anglican Christian, entering this place of worship and coming across Viola’s works may well be a life affirming and spiritual experience, it’s just that I am of a different cultural set. The struggle of any individual to arrive at an image that can be used to carry an idea is one I can empathise with, so if asked which of these works I would point to if I was asked to pick out the ones that had influenced me, it would always be Michelangelo’s adjusted and worried over images of the crucifixion. 

 See also:

Drawing and Spirituality

Stations of the Cross

Drawing and life

William Kentridge once stated, “I believe that in the indeterminacy of drawing—the
contingent way that images arrive in the work—lies some kind of model of how we live our lives. The activity of drawing is a way of trying to understand who we are and how we operate in the world.”

So how can drawing both reflect on and help negotiate the complexity of the human experience? Can the process of Drawing offer possibilities of negotiating the terrain that lies between personal and communal experience? Can the immediacy and accessibility of Drawing allow for an exploration of the physical as a bridge to the metaphysical? The experience of life is ephemeral, however the marks of a drawing made in response to that life are ‘frozen’ or fixed, thus making it possible to share an experience and in that sharing creating a community of interest, thus hopefully, adding to a meaningful experience.

I’m having to think about this in some detail as I have to give a conference presentation on my own practice, ‘Drawing as collective allegory’.

Michelangelo Crucifixion

I have mentioned the crucifixion drawings of Michelangelo before, however as an exploration of the physical as a bridge to the metaphysical I think these drawings are sublime. I've put the image above into this post at its largest possible size so that you can see the traces and marks of the artist's hand much more clearly. You can see the hand/eye thinking going on before your eyes, each time we look at these drawings they open themselves back out to us and reveal the shadows of their making.

These drawings inhabit the realm of the physical in three ways. The first is composed of the actual physical materials used to create the work. Michelangelo liked to use high grade cream or white paper on which to draw.This has however discoloured over the years and mould or stain marks have also changed the paper surface. The drawing is made out of black chalk. This is a soft carboniferous schist, usually mined at this time in Piedmont. It came in a variety of colours and densities, red and ochre as well as a range of blacks. This chalk is quite dense, with a fine grain that allows it to be sharpened to a point; it can therefore be used in technical drawing, the sharp ruled lines of the cross being a case in point. It is also strong enough to resist crumbling when pressed down hard, therefore artists can use it to create emphasis as they perhaps want to bring out muscle energy or hold on to an area of bone. It can also be used to create modulated hatching, which is often used to re-create tonal lighting effects. Chalk hatching can also be used alongside finger and stump work, areas of tonal change made even more subtle by blurring the edges between marks.

Black chalk can also be used wet, by dipping the point in water, an artist can make the chalk achieve a much darker tonal range. This together with an awareness of different densities and granular makeup of chalks from different mines, meant that an artist like Michelangelo had a high level of finesse available to him when using this material. If you compare his 'for sale' finished drawings which also use black chalk, you can appreciate the difference in approach, the drawing above is much more direct and the working methods of the artist are not hidden. A reasonably grainy paper with a certain tooth is needed to make a chalk drawing, however the tooth or grain of the paper also holds onto the grains of chalk as they are removed, therefore it is hard to remove marks, therefore as the artist begins to clarify an idea, he has to deal with the images left behind. Sometimes by working over the areas of previous adjustment with darker marks and sometimes by painting them out.

Michelangelo has used lead white to remove and change areas of drawing in the image below. This goes transparent over time and so we are given an 'unveiled' view of some of these drawings, they are not the same as they would have been when they left Michelangelo's hands.

Michelangelo Crucifixion

In the image above it is easy to see the areas that were painted over in lead white.

The second way that these drawings inhabit the realm of the physical is in their documentary nature. In order to depict the physical body of a man hanging from a cross, another physical body had to exert itself in making a series of marks that were designed to be read as an image.

These drawings are mainly constructed out of of a series of wrist bound arcs, which are a frozen document that in effect record the movement of Michelangelo's arm, wrist and hand.  There is a certain imprecision or almost shakiness, as well as a changing of mind as the drawing arrives. The drawing is a 'tracing' of an old man's gestures. It is a physical embodiment of one man's actions, the record of his body movements made as he struggles to imagine another body struggling with a near death experience.

Finally, the third way that these images inhabit the realm of the physical is in the fact that the image itself is of a physical thing. These are images of human beings suffering both mental and physical agony. The maker of these images is aware of this at one point writing,

"Oh! Flesh, Blood and Wood, supreme pain, Through you must I suffer my agony." Michelangelo has many years experience of the physical world, has seen bodies in action and felt his own body change and become suspect to ageing. The physical nature of his drawing materials is something he knows he has to work with, he is sympathetic to their limits, whilst at the same time aware of what he is aiming to achieve. The struggle of the mind/eye relationship is clearly evidenced as Michelangelo adjusts and changes the image, each time finding a position for the figure that more readily fits the slowly emerging 'idea' of what it is to depict an image of a man who is also a God; of someone realised at that moment when their earthly flesh is at its most weighty, and yet it is also a moment when someone will pass through their humanity and attain the status of a God. All flesh being cast aside and only spirit remaining. The fluttering marks of adjustment, also become the marks of movement as arms become wings, the dead weight of the body about to be borne aloft by arms pushing themselves free of their cross.

As the three aspects of physicality combine to be read in their simultaneity, the physical readings become fused with a mental picture that is driven into being as the image arrives in the brain. The nature of the paper and its age, the black chalk searching out the forms of the body, the slightly shaky mark, the traces of the hand and the shaping of a body, constrained in its curvature by the geometry of a cross, all impact on and impact with our existing awareness of the Grand Narrative of Christianity. The audience may or may not be aware of this religion, but it is clear that the maker of this image is trying to shape it towards a purpose. The moment of transformation can only occur in the observers mind however and therefore no outside observer will really know if it did occur.

This final image from the same series of drawings, opens out one further issue in relation to this post. That is the importance of repetition, or trying to say the same thing over and over again until you get it right, or at least in a form that is communicable. By approaching this subject several times, we can ourselves begin to read Michelangelo’s intentions. Each image creates a variation on the form of a curved body set off against the geometrical hard shapes of the cross. The drawn bodies are made with arcs of gestures that are built up to form muscles and bodies, they vibrate between the solidity of modelling and the energy of mark-making. This is the language we are having to learn, and we can only learn it because Michelangelo has given us several examples of this language in use.

I would argue that as drawings they achieve something that all artists would aspire to, a form that fuses together a metaphysical concept with a physical reality. Reaching across the gap between one mind's construction of experience and another's is one of the hardest and yet most meaningful things to do, and only by imagination can we do this.

Happy Christmas

See also:

Drawing and spirituality 

Bill Viola
Michael Kenny: Drawings for Easter

The diagram as art and spirit guide

That uncertain certainty