Bill Viola
He weeps for you, 1976
Artist
Bill Viola
Title
He weeps for you
Year of creation
1976
Technology and dimensions
Video camera and ceiling-mounted tube projector, copper tube with valve, water drops, tambourine, amplifier, loudspeaker
Year of acquisition
1993
On Bill Viola's business card, instead of the usual job description, there is only the word "video". This isn't coquetry, it's the program. He doesn't describe himself as an artist. Although he always has an excellent command of the latest video techniques, Bill Viola is not a material-loving video technician. It is not the video as a genre that is important to him. For his art, it merely represents the well-mastered tool with which he offers the viewer "new, never-seen images" in an adequate form.
There are no pictures in his studio in Signal Hill; it is more like a sober technical laboratory. All around him is the clock as a symbol of the end of life, an egg, a stone and a display board with the history of mathematics.
The video installation "He weeps for you" is a very early work in his now large oeuvre. He created it at the age of 26 and it was exhibited publicly for the first time at the "documenta 6" in Kassel in 1977. You enter a square, dark room, at the front of the screen there is a real water drop projected in which the image of the observer is reflected. The drop shakes and becomes fuller and fuller until it finally falls. The visitor perceives the sound of the drop on the visibly installed, electronically amplified drum. This process repeats itself endlessly. The moment the image appears resembles a birth process. The swelling of the drop shows the time of life in a condensed form, while the sound captures the moment of disappearance.
"He weeps for you" becomes a parable of a "mystical" event in which the surface of the water not only reflects the image of the person back onto himself in a mirror image, but the person first fades away, only to disappear in a warm tone, metamorphosed into nothingness, and then emerge from the water again. He has now entered another sphere, a mysterious world that we don't yet know anything about. The drop obscures the image for a moment, then disappears. This unknown other, this side of experience, will be explored in all of his further works from now on; it is Viola's intention to open the "gates of perception".
"In our horizontal models of time and movement, our image of the deposits of time and our expressions of 'down' through history and 'up' through evolution, the vertical pole is the ever-present, the connecting colors, the simultaneous , perpetual 'now' in which we live and have always lived in this very moment.
It is the individual point that, when it is moved, becomes the line, the surface, the solid structures of our world and our consciousness and that without the transfer of kinetic energy (time) and without the direction of movement (space) it becomes a point - a process that is further driven by our breath, since we all repeat its large structure in small ways in the course of our individual journey" (Bill Viola 1994).
Britta Schmitz
