Bill Viola: Ascension

Bill Viola is not only one of the great video artists of our day but one of the truly great artists of our day. His installation at the Salt Lake City Art Center: “Ascension”, is an exhibition, while combining all of its elements, is not merely comprehensive or analytic but a true holistic experience. In Viola’s case, it is an experience into consciousness, both the conscious and the subconscious. In Viola’s words, these image “wash over you”, and the subject is “revealed on an unconscious level.” Bill Viola’s installation is a timeless narrative.
As one sits in the dark room, the first activity on the large video screen, out of the blackness is a cool blue followed by an underwater scene, not easily identifiable until the sudden plunge of a body from above shatters the darkness- immediately the screen is filled with a figure and a multitude of crystalline bubbles as the surface is broken.
Along with this anonymous figure, the viewer is drawn into this subterranean world, of sights and sounds. There is a serene quiet yet there are subtleties in sound produced in this underwater world, which lends an existential sensibility. We share the space along with this motionless figure, static and transcendent of his surroundings with no distraction than his suddenly felt self-conscious self. The figure seems almost comatose yet one feels the life, which he emanates in this environment.
There is no breath, no movement, and the viewer finds themselves at harmony with this body as he sinks slowly, watching this being sinking deeper into the darkness. The figure, in a cocoon of the crystalline bubbles of crisp light and incandescent blue, ascends once more, not breaking the surface, and then once again descends slowly to the unknown.
He is motionless yet he and we are in a state of flux. Temporality is suspended, yet not temporality of mind. The figure once again ascends to the top of the plane, never encroaching beyond the limits dividing the outside world, and then begins the final descent, ostensibly towards the subconscious. Slowly, with some anxiety from the viewer, the figure transgresses the depths and sinks from sight, below the frame of the imagery.
The viewer is left with an uncanny absence and recognition of their own consciousness- either conscious or subconscious. The frame is phased out and the viewer finds themselves, with neither surface nor depth, with the vague blue that initiated the sequence…and then blackness. The journey is complete and the viewer is left to pure contemplation.
Viola’s exposition is complete, but the viewer must ask, “What is the title ‘Ascension’ to mean? Certainly the figure descended into the abyss.” It may be that Viola’s inquiry is not to explore that, which we descend to on a conscious level, but that to which we ascend to on a subconscious one.