In 2003 I was interviewing artist and friend Bill Viola for Flash Art Magazine. It was an extensive interview about his exhibition at the Getty, and it began with the question, “have you ever witnessed a miracle?” It turned out to be a great conversation from that point forward. In the middle of the hour and a half we spoke together, we were talking about the effects on artists who work with negative or toxic imagery and I will share something Bill said:
“Unlike what I was taught in art school that emotion was simply, in imagery, mere sentimentality, cheap shot, ‘don’t go there you don’t need to’, in actual fact we have come to understand emotions are integrally bound to ideas of moral and ethical behavior. It is the people who didn’t have the emotions who were able to put all the Jews to death in the concentration camps. It was the intellect that did that, not the emotions. In fact, I don’t know what that was like for them to go to sleep at night, because emotional thread exists in everybody, in even the most fascist dictator’s mind, and yet they were able to override that not by feelings because their feelings got out of control but because their intellect took over. And so we are moving into a new phase of new humanism that is just made possible because you had the atrocities occurring in Bosnia appearing on your television set, Rodney King getting beaten appearing on millions of television sets, that no matter what the authorities and powers that be are telling you and the voice over they are putting over that image, your body is telling you that that is morally wrong, what is going on. We witnessed that as Viet Nam, young people in the Viet Nam years, that was a big disconnect, was the pictures coming into your living room every night were telling this horror story of atrocities and inhumane treatment to other human beings, and the propaganda of the government was telling something else. And they learned now, the powers that be, how to get into the images and manipulate those but artists will always, masters of images that they are, will always come through, will always go through that, will have that power and be immutable and undeniable. I think as for what is going on right now, I think we are going to move into an age where the mistrust of the visual image will grow, not recede, its happening already, a lot of people don’t believe what they see on CNN. That disconnect from the visual which has so defined our era now I think is, as digital tools extend, the advantage we have is, the reality is a code, not an image, and those codes are the underbelly of the infrastructure of what we are experiencing. So I think the artists of the future are going to understand the image as a surfeit and their work as artists will be in the subterranean levels beneath the image, where the real reality is.”
