Art - Richard Cork searches for redemption in Bill Viola's harrowing images of pain
Three years ago, Bill Viola brought video art to the National Gallery with his installation The Quintet of the Astonished. Taking as his springboard Hieronymus Bosch's macabre painting Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), of around 1490-1500, he showed five men and women transfixed by overwhelming emotions. But unlike the vicious, cackling tormentors in Bosch's painting, they seemed caught up in a slow-motion drama of ever-shifting feelings.
Now the same work returns to the National Gallery, as one of the opening exhibits in a full-scale Viola show called "The Passions". I cannot imagine a more appropriate context for the work in this show. Viola has been studying the old masters with great intensity over the past few years, and his art thrives on its proximity to painted images from the past.
Not that his sources of inspiration are exclusively western. On the top floor of the Haunch of Venison gallery, Viola is displaying an earlier work called Hall of Whispers above a selection of sparely brushed paintings and calligraphy by celebrated Zen monks and artists including the 18th-century master Ito Jakuchu. In Hall of Whispers itself, ten life-size images of human heads confront us on both sides of a narrow, darkened space. Although they are all trying to speak, their mouths are gagged with painful tightness. They struggle to continue talking, but we hear only a muffled and bewildering cacophony.
Apart from a single corpse, the people in Viola's National Gallery show are able to speak, shout or cry. But we cannot hear them. In the first room, an unshaven man in a denim shirt is seen from head to shoulders on a single screen. Filmed in silent and exceptionally slow motion, he moves from left to right and back again. Tears run down his cheeks and he opens his mouth to sob. He keeps breaking down and, as we speculate about the cause of his misery, the two National Gallery pictures flanking him suddenly appear relevant. In Man of Sorrows by an unknown Umbrian master, the figure of Christ shows us his pierced hands against a backdrop of hysterical angels and the cross. It is a ferociously distraught image, while on the other side Giovanni Bellini's Dead Christ Supported by Angels is even more heartbreaking. By placing his own distraught man between these two Italian paintings, Viola openly declares his sources of inspiration. He even calls his work Man of Sorrows, as if determined to make the influence clear.
But the titles of his other exhibits do not make such overt Christian references. Zen teachings stress the importance of releasing the rational mind in order to gain self-understanding. In a tall, single-screen work called Observance, everyone is bent on scrutinising an object we cannot see. Forming a line, they move forward at a funereal pace. When reaching the front, each of them gazes down sorrowfully at something below the frame's edge. It could well be a figure lying in a coffin, as they take it in turns to stare with a sense of utter desolation. We ought to feel frustrated by Viola's refusal to identify the source of their grief. But his dramatisation of their reactions is so absorbing, and painful to behold, that we end up accepting the element of mystery.
Later in the show, Viola explores equal despair in a work entitled Emergence. But this time we are able to see exactly why two women, seated by a marble cistern with a cross on its side, become so upset. After a while, a naked young man rises up from the water. Judging by his glacial flesh, he is dead. At first, the women's astonishment seems fired by the hope that he might regain life. The parallels with the resurrection are clear, but the man slumps into the women's outstretched arms, and they lay him out carefully on the ground. The most moving moment occurs when the older woman struggles to prevent her companion from pulling a sheet over the dead man's face. She needs to see and touch him, and the work ends as she cradles his head tenderly on her lap. The whole event is performed with understated gravity, yet I found it excessively theatrical and self-conscious compared with the most painful work on view.
Like some of the old master paintings Viola admires, Surrender is a diptych. But instead of placing the two screens side by side, he displays them one above the other. At the top, a sorrowful man in a red vest gives uninhibited vent to his misery. Beneath him, like a reflection, a woman in a blue vest appears upside-down. She is equally despairing, and they both lean forward in ultra-slow motion as if to look at each other, even kiss. But the truth is that they are standing waist-high in water, and their heads merely disappear beneath its surface. When they rise up again, their bodies are subjected to violent, alarming distortions. Faces threaten to collapse into torsos, and they appear to gasp for air as their forms break up. They resemble the figures in the most convulsive paintings by Francis Bacon, and the ripples in their bodies are so relentless that I found myself longing for it all to stop.
Viola, though, pushes the deformation process to its most alarming extreme. Man and woman end up dissolving into grotesque, luminous par-ticles forever on the move. Eventually they vanish into darkness and the work ends. But then the whole cycle starts again, this time with the woman above and the man inverted below her. It is a gruelling spectacle to watch, and yet Viola holds out the possibility that surrendering to such disintegration may ultimately be redemptive.
"Bill Viola" is at the National Gallery, London WC2 (020 7747 2400) until 4 January and at Haunch of Venison, London W1 (020 7495 5050) until 12 November
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