#documentation and interpretation

Researching Bill Viola Viola considers universal themes of life, death, love and spirituality, Viola gives tangible visual form to abstract psychological and metaphysical experiences. He explores facets of the human condition and holds a stark and intimate mirror to our strength, fragility, and the impulses and inevitabilities that unite us. The eight works installed in the Underground Gallery continue Viola’s investigations of the unseeable, the unknowable, and the place between birth and death. His new work, The Trial (2015), depicts, in Viola’s words, “five stages of awakening through a series of violent transformations.” A young woman and a young man, both bare-chested and on separate screens, are each doused with a sudden and unexpected succession of different coloured liquids. Their ordeal intensifies then wanes as the cycle progresses and changes, from despair to fear to relief and then purification.

The exhibition also features three works from the Transfigurations series, which reflect on the passage of time and the process by which a person’s inner being is transformed. In Three Women (2008), a mother and her two daughters slowly approach an invisible boundary through which they pass and eventually return. Viola combines images recorded in grainy analogue video from an old surveillance camera with those shot in High-Definition video to bring the viewer to the intersection of obscurity and clarity – from death to life – and back again. Two other related works, The Return and The Innocents (both 2007), use the same device of an unseen wall of water to render visible the momentary threshold between life and death.

Inside the 18th century Chapel, a short walk across YSP’s historic deer park, Fire Woman and Tristan’s Ascension (The Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (both 2005), draw on the ancient story of lovers gripped by a passion that is blind to duty, honour and social obligation and which can only be consummated beyond the grave. Originally created, together with Night Vigil, as part of a four-hour video for theatre director Peter Sellars’ production of Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, the two works are shown one after another in a continuous loop, and combine to make a visual and aural experience that extends Viola’s lifelong engagement with mortality and transcendence.

Simmel G. (2000) ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’ In. Miles, M., Hall, T., Borden, I., The City Cultures Reader. London: Routledge

This is a piece of writing I have been looking at called the “Metropolis and Mental Life” by Georg Simmel, whom is a German sociologist, philosopher and critic. Georg Simmel analysis and documents urban life and seems to ask “what is society?” throughout his writing. Simmel has wrote a number of essays that still apply to modern life today even though Simmel’s description of city life was wrote in 1903.

I chose this source because it linked to my recent project “Documentation and Interpretation” where I was looking into modern life and the overwhelming effect it has on us that make us want to escape. Simmel gave me a better understanding of urban life, and why it forces us to want to escape to another world, which therefore helped me with my studio project. Moreover, because this source is a piece of writing, it has broadened my research, which I learnt I needed to do in my formative assessment, this research helped my creative practice to be more varied and developed.

Furthermore, this source will help me with my short essay, as I am writing about “the everyday” and what I believe it to mean. This piece of writing has given me an understanding into everyday life in the urban city, how it is repetitive and boring which forces us to have what Simmel describes as a “blasé” attitude towards life, so I can expand and write about in my essay.

My last word is “escapism”, this is a noun I encountered in my studio work during my last project “Documentation and Interpretation”. I was interpreting a David Bowie song “Life on Mars?” which I think is a song about escapism, how our boring everyday lives makes us want to escape to a different world, in Bowie’s example, the world of entertainment.

I came across this word in my contemporary practice in context lectures, it is a word that I had not heard before but the grandeur of it interested me. When I researched the word, the official definition can mean the capital of an area or a “very large and busy city”. To me this word describes an area that is compact and chaotic, I imagine a very hectic environment.

I came across this word in my Contemporary practice in context module, and studio practice when I was researching Georg Simmel, a writer that described our urban environment. Blasé is an adjective that has origins found in French and German. The dictionary definition says blasé means “unimpressed with or indifferent to something because one has experienced or seen so often before”. To me this word describes an attitude, it means someone is unenthusiastic, emotionless or uncaring towards something, in my project’s context, we become indifferent to our urban city environment.

My second keyword is “everyday”, I came across this word in my Contemporary Practice in Context module and continued to use it in my project work, where I was looking into our chaotic urban world and our repetitive routine which makes us want to escape. In the dictionary, “everyday” is described as a “happening or use every day” and is associated with “chores” and “day-to-day” which is a repetitive phrase in itself. I think this shows how the “everyday” is boring, it becomes tedious to us. Therefore, making us want to escape it, which is the concept of my last project. 

Documentation and Interpretation -

Final outcomes:

The simply made mattress, almost immaculate in appearance, lies with its fragile and ‘unsupportive’ head rest above it. The sign reads ‘BED’ above that. To end this process, that last thing to do is use it for its purpose. I lie down on the mattress, crumpling and crushing the integrity of its structure.