Long attracted to the reflective, transformative and symbolic properties of water, the artist explores the ways in which water sustains, cleanses, blesses, and takes life away. Birth and death, each conceived as a dramatic transition in consciousness rather than as a conclusive beginning or a definitive end, are given shape as unfathomable mysteries. In an interview with Viola, art historian Hans Belting refers to these apparitions as “an act performed in front of the beholder.” “In the context of religion,” Belting elaborates, “the most important images were those that appeared to the very few and granted them privilege. An image appearing is an image happening.”160 The video sequences, the original length of which ran only thirty-five to forty seconds, are slow and meditative, and take considerable time (ten to fifteen minutes) and patience to absorb, wherein the viewer is engulfed in sensory experience—random and unsynchronized accelerations and decelerations—within a darkened room. Viola explains: “There are no cuts in the sequences, no montage in the traditional sense. There is only a gradual permutation in the continuous, inexorable progression toward or away from the moment of the plunge into the water . . . This ‘deep seeing’ is a vital part of human experience that draws on our powers of inner concentration and identification, both characteristic of the visionary experience.”161 Philosopher Cynthia Freeland, in language marshaled to conjure a sense of the Kantian (mathematic and dynamic) sublime, further interprets the work:
Each of the gigantic panels dwarfs us, but they are also dispersed, so that one cannot view them together. We cannot take in what we are seeing or hearing. We cannot make sense of what is showing on any one screen, nor understand how the five figures are related. The low roars and bubbling sounds seem to speak an alien tongue . . . The sensory overload presents an intellectual conundrum. Despite this, we may feel exalted because the pieces are so stimulating. They are exhilarating because of their carefully coordinated scale, vividness, their sheer bursts of energy. At certain points when we dimly grasp that a body is emerging . . . from the water, the works suggest the enormity of our own creative powers.162
In our following the illusion (it isn’t quite a narrative) of the images—or attempting to—Viola urges us to contemplate how the limits of the image and its manipulations of space and time—velocity, simultaneity, succession—force us to reevaluate what we have really seen, our perception of reality; we are left positioned on the boundary between the visible and the invisible, or more accurately, we are left with the invisibility of the once seen (the angel) and the anticipation and knowledge of its return.163 Amidst a swelling and ebbing soundtrack—heard before anything is seen, what Rhys Davies calls “the sound of being”164—and unsynchronized percussions of figures striking the water’s surface and plunging beneath it, Viola creates, as the artist himself has tellingly called it “an enveloping emotional experience like that of a church.”165
In fact, Five Angels, as a multi-part work, is perhaps most reminiscent of Viola’s earlier (1996) single projection installation, The Messenger (see Figure 20), commissioned by and installed at Durham Cathedral to mark the UK Year of the Visual Arts. That controversial piece—controversial as it was originally intended to be projected onto the great west wall of the Cathedral and seen down the length of the nave from the altar, but then prudishly screened from general view—begins similarly in portentous darkness; then, slowly, an emergent light takes shape, and the form of a naked man gradually rises from the depths of water until he breaks the surface with a climactic gasp of breath as his eyes open, only to descend and disappear back into the dark depths until the cycle begins again. David Jasper has accounted for the work’s multivalent theological references:
Many people seemed to want to see The Messenger in purely Christian terms. Viewed through the [baptismal] font, it was interpreted as an image of the mystery of Initiation, of the baptismal immersion with Christ and the rising with him into new life . . . But the complex, universal symbolism of water was appropriated by Christianity as it drew upon a rich heritage of biblical stories—from the myths of creation to Noah’s flood, the Exodus through the Red Sea, the crossing of Jordan into the promised land of Canaan, and the baptism of Jesus by John.166
And while indeed thoroughly infused with Christian symbol, Viola’s own statements and writings indicate a wider set of resonant spiritualities captured in this piece and in his work in general. For instance, in an interview in 1997 with poet and cultural critic Lewis Hyde, Viola was asked specifically about the connections in his work to spiritual life. After acknowledging his Christian (Episcopalian) upbringing and his later encounters with Eastern religions, the artist remarked:
I guess the connection ultimately, if I can say it in one encapsulated way, has to do with an acknowledgement or awareness or recognition that there is something above, beyond, below, beneath what’s in front of our eyes, what our daily life is focused on. There’s another dimension that you just know is there, that can be a source of real knowledge, and the quest for connecting with that and identifying that is the whole impetus for me to cultivate these experiences and to make my work. And, on a larger scale, it is also the driving force behind all religious endeavors. There is an unseen world out there and we are living in it.167
Figure 20.
Also shown at Durham Cathedral at the same time was The Crossing (1996) discussed above. “These works embody,” Hans Belting summarized in the interview with the artist cited above, an “epiphanic character . . . In them, you always feel the presence of a threshold which the figures have to confront and cross . . . Thus, such appearances relate metaphorically to birth and death, but if I see it correctly, they more accurately reference a spiritual birth and death within the individual.”168 Once again, Viola presents the viewer of his work with that sense of liminality and its inherent vulnerability:
To the European mind the reverberant characteristics of the interior of the Gothic cathedral are inextricably linked with a deep sense of the sacred and tend to evoke strong associations with both the internal private space of contemplation and the larger realm of the ineffable . . . Cathedrals . . . embody concepts derived from the rediscovery of the works of the ancient Greeks, particularly those of Plato and Pythagoras, and their theories of the correspondence between the macrocosm and the microcosm, expression in the language of sacred number, proportion, and harmony, and that manifest themselves in the science of sound and music. These design concepts were not considered to be the work of man, or merely functions of architectural practice, but represented the divine underlying principles of the universe itself.169
Jean-Luc Marion and the Saturated Phenomenon
In reckoning with the idea of representing the invisible, Bill Viola’s art may be situated within postmodern notions of the “unrepresentable.” Theologically this invokes the idea of seeing God in “glimpses” or “traces,” never knowing God completely, but only in part—or as St. Paul had it “in a mirror dimly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). Moreover, the apophatic description of God as an abstract experience, not conceptually definable in terms of space and location, nor confinable to conventions of time—God as transcendent of essence—can be theorized within the context of “unknowability” and, as I want to show, French phenomenologist and mystical theologian Jean-Luc Marion’s “God without Being.” While Marion’s philosophy is complex, central to his argument about a God free of all categories of Being—and therefore its particular relevance to this study—is his distinction between what he characterizes as the idol and the icon, “two modes of apprehension of the divine invisibility.”170