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Slow emotion
DISSECTING ROOM
Slow emotion Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works An exhibition at Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London, UK, showing until July 21, 2001, and then touring worldwide.
L
and a young woman. They pass from happiness to sadness, to anger to fear in moving images played in almost excruciating slow motion. In Catherine’s Room five videos playing side by side
golden light. The effect is powerful and it’s not hard to pick up on the allusion to spirituality and redemption that Viola is offering, or more than that, to experience something like the effect of being in
Bill Viola
ast month, in conversation with Neil McGregor, Director of London’s National Gallery, American video artist Bill Viola openly drew on his experiences of bereavement and fatherhood to talk about some of the unfashionably grand subjects he tackles in his work; subjects as universal as spirituality, love, and suffering. The shock of his mother’s death, he said, pushed him to consider the extent to which we attempt to deny the reality of suffering, to make it invisible. To illustrate the contrast between the sanitised environment in today’s hospitals where sick and elderly people go to die and past times, the artist drew on Grunewald’s gangrenous version of the Crucifixion painted in the 16th century. The painting was placed in a hospital for dying patients to meditate upon, to ease and elevate their suffering. All very well in theory, but if I had to decide on one or the other of the above, I know which century I’d choose. And somehow, this brings up a problem with Viola’s work right away. His attempts to marry the past and the present with contemporary versions of historical art forms seem perhaps too obvious. It is in his overriding nostalgia that the problem lies. Viola explores the human psyche with a movie camera to record and replay sense perceptions, often slowing down the images or building them into a complex installation environment in which the viewer becomes fully immersed. He uses video-editing technology to organise the human world of contradictory and unpredictable emotion with rigorous, almost scientific systematisation. In Mater, a kind of modern day illustration of the humours, we see a video diptych of an old woman
Detail from Catherine’s Room
show different times in Catherine’s day. There is no sense of voyeurism despite the intimacy of watching another person go about their daily business. The piece does not offer any acted emotion but rather, like contemporary dance, elevates the performance of mundane daily actions to meditative ritual. These restrained works do not prepare the visitor for the experience Viola has created upstairs in the gallery. In deep blue darkness, five images filmed under the sea slowly come into focus and the room is filled with a rushing sound. Suddenly, a figure plunges downward in a bubbled stream of
a sacred space. Five Angels is utterly different from the cool scrutiny of emotion in the portrait works, offering a sense of the deep, dark unknown, the essential mystery of consciousness that works against every narrative we construct to disguise or distract from it. It’s here where the artist doesn’t try to make sense of things, where he leaves us literally and metaphorically in the dark, that he succeeds in transmitting something that connects people across time. Catherine Wood Flat 3, 198 Camberwell Grove, London SE5 8RJ, UK
Early human development in pictures An Atlas of the Human Embryo and Fetus Jan E Jirásek. London: Parthenon, 2000. Pp 144. £65.00. ISBN 185070659X. his book is one volume in the Encyclopaedia of Visual Medicine series. The photographs of whole embryos and fetuses, as well as sectioned material, have been provided by Jan E Jirásek from the Laboratory of Reproductive Embryology, Institute for the Care of Mother and Child, Prague, Czech Republic. During his long career, Jirásek has collected an astonishingly large number of images of human embryos and fetuses at many different
T
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • July 7, 2001
stages of development and these form the basis of this volume. The book is intended to provide interested individuals with pictorial insight into the early stages of human development. Although there are many books about human embryology, most of the figures in those volumes are drawings or sections from fixed material. What sets this book apart, and indeed makes it unique, is the unparalleled access it provides to whole embryos and fetuses,
allowing normal and abnormal features to be seen in three dimensions. The material follows human development from fertilisation through early preimplantation embryonic cleavage; gastrulation, which will set up the three germ layers of cells from which all parts of the individual will develop; organogenesis; bone and muscle formation; and development of the circulatory system, the gonads, and the head and face. Some stages of development are
79
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.
Slow emotion Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works An exhibition at Anthony D’Offay Gallery, London, UK, showing until July 21, 2001, and then touring worldwide.
L
and a young woman. They pass from happiness to sadness, to anger to fear in moving images played in almost excruciating slow motion. In Catherine’s Room five videos playing side by side
golden light. The effect is powerful and it’s not hard to pick up on the allusion to spirituality and redemption that Viola is offering, or more than that, to experience something like the effect of being in
Bill Viola
ast month, in conversation with Neil McGregor, Director of London’s National Gallery, American video artist Bill Viola openly drew on his experiences of bereavement and fatherhood to talk about some of the unfashionably grand subjects he tackles in his work; subjects as universal as spirituality, love, and suffering. The shock of his mother’s death, he said, pushed him to consider the extent to which we attempt to deny the reality of suffering, to make it invisible. To illustrate the contrast between the sanitised environment in today’s hospitals where sick and elderly people go to die and past times, the artist drew on Grunewald’s gangrenous version of the Crucifixion painted in the 16th century. The painting was placed in a hospital for dying patients to meditate upon, to ease and elevate their suffering. All very well in theory, but if I had to decide on one or the other of the above, I know which century I’d choose. And somehow, this brings up a problem with Viola’s work right away. His attempts to marry the past and the present with contemporary versions of historical art forms seem perhaps too obvious. It is in his overriding nostalgia that the problem lies. Viola explores the human psyche with a movie camera to record and replay sense perceptions, often slowing down the images or building them into a complex installation environment in which the viewer becomes fully immersed. He uses video-editing technology to organise the human world of contradictory and unpredictable emotion with rigorous, almost scientific systematisation. In Mater, a kind of modern day illustration of the humours, we see a video diptych of an old woman
Detail from Catherine’s Room
show different times in Catherine’s day. There is no sense of voyeurism despite the intimacy of watching another person go about their daily business. The piece does not offer any acted emotion but rather, like contemporary dance, elevates the performance of mundane daily actions to meditative ritual. These restrained works do not prepare the visitor for the experience Viola has created upstairs in the gallery. In deep blue darkness, five images filmed under the sea slowly come into focus and the room is filled with a rushing sound. Suddenly, a figure plunges downward in a bubbled stream of
a sacred space. Five Angels is utterly different from the cool scrutiny of emotion in the portrait works, offering a sense of the deep, dark unknown, the essential mystery of consciousness that works against every narrative we construct to disguise or distract from it. It’s here where the artist doesn’t try to make sense of things, where he leaves us literally and metaphorically in the dark, that he succeeds in transmitting something that connects people across time. Catherine Wood Flat 3, 198 Camberwell Grove, London SE5 8RJ, UK
Early human development in pictures An Atlas of the Human Embryo and Fetus Jan E Jirásek. London: Parthenon, 2000. Pp 144. £65.00. ISBN 185070659X. his book is one volume in the Encyclopaedia of Visual Medicine series. The photographs of whole embryos and fetuses, as well as sectioned material, have been provided by Jan E Jirásek from the Laboratory of Reproductive Embryology, Institute for the Care of Mother and Child, Prague, Czech Republic. During his long career, Jirásek has collected an astonishingly large number of images of human embryos and fetuses at many different
T
THE LANCET • Vol 358 • July 7, 2001
stages of development and these form the basis of this volume. The book is intended to provide interested individuals with pictorial insight into the early stages of human development. Although there are many books about human embryology, most of the figures in those volumes are drawings or sections from fixed material. What sets this book apart, and indeed makes it unique, is the unparalleled access it provides to whole embryos and fetuses,
allowing normal and abnormal features to be seen in three dimensions. The material follows human development from fertilisation through early preimplantation embryonic cleavage; gastrulation, which will set up the three germ layers of cells from which all parts of the individual will develop; organogenesis; bone and muscle formation; and development of the circulatory system, the gonads, and the head and face. Some stages of development are
79
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet Publishing Group.