Bill Viola, Slowly Turning Narrative, AC1995.146.1
Overview
Excerpted from Los Angeles County Museum of Art (World od Art series). Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; London: Thames & Hudson, 2003.
Bill Viola, a member of the first generation to grow up with television, is an acclaimed pioneer of the medium of video art. Encountering his Slowly Turning Narrative, the viewer enters a darkened gallery where overhead projectors are aimed from opposite sides of the room onto a rotating plane perpendicular to the floor in the center. One surface of the plane is a white screen that receives the video projections, while the obverse surface is a mirror that casts the reflected images around the walls of the room.
One projection features a colorful procession of vignettes of daily human activity and life: newborn babies, children at play, people at work, automobile accidents, lovers, celebrations, city life, nature-a catalogue of everything that constitutes the world we inhabit and the events that construct our individual histories. The other is a black-and-white projection of a close-up of the artist reciting the phrases "the one who knows," "the one who cries," "the one who reads," "the one who loves," "the one who believes," and so on. His incantation evokes human consciousness and the reflective nature of humankind. The reeling images at the center of the room and coursing its perimeter thus enfold the viewer in a colloquy between the daily events of the physical world and the contemplative self, which has the uniquely human capacity to reflect on and ascribe meaning to life.
