Tokyo
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A couple stand side by side, divided by a split screen. In agonisingly slow motion, they contort their faces and bodies, apparently wracked by a violent argument and the draining aftermath. At the climax, the two of them burst into explosive screams before shock and bewilderment descends.
Is it the latest Aerosmith video? A lost Sam Peckinpah-directs-soap-opera tape? No, it's Bill Viola, the self-described world's most famous video-installation artist, and he has touched down among Earthlings in Tokyo, bringing messages of birth, death, rebirth and the unfolding of consciousness. All in high-definition, plasma-screen colour.
A sort of hi-tech Zen philosopher, Viola has been doing this for a long time, having helped mount experiments in video art for Yoko Ono in her early days. First Dream, his first Asian retrospective at the Mori Art Museum, 25 years after he began studying Zen Buddhism in the Japanese countryside and video technology at the Sony labs, is expected to draw serious crowds. The show opened yesterday.
Drawing on ideas of religious transcendence, Viola's work at its best can be mesmerising and beautiful. At its worst, it's bland. Britain's Guardian newspaper once said his installations can resemble commercials for organic shampoo. Viola 'intends his art not for decoration or diversion or education but for transformation', says the introduction to his London National Gallery show in 2003.
Japan has been an abiding influence: one of Viola's formative experiences was watching Japanese museum visitors pray to Buddhist art. The encounter, so unlike western museums, where objects have been 'disconnected from their sacred role', made him question whether works of art could be brought to life, with the artist using lighting and sound instead of plaster and paint.
Take 1995's The Greeting, for instance, a large video projection based on The Visitation, a painting by Renaissance artist Jacopo da Pontormo. It's not terribly exciting: two women meet and slowly kiss in greeting as another looks on. It's probably trying to say something about the complexity of simple social interactions. But the pleasure is the lush detail - like a huge Florentine painting come to life.
In The Raft, a deluge pummels a group of everymen and women, washing away the surface differences that separate modern urban dwellers.
The piece resonates with the vibrations of contemporary catastrophes such as the 2004 Asian tsunami, but will its lesson - what art commentator John Walsh calls 'the possibility of survival through compassion' - be lost on the MTV-Jackass generation? Surrendering to Viola's stately visions brings insight and possibly even (whisper it) enlightenment.
Ends Jan 8
