Somebody Calls It ‘Art’

The Tate Gallery itself is
impressive, with a beautiful museum carved from an old power plant on the
South Bank of the Tames River. I was particularly impressed by the huge
open space inside that gives the museum a light feeling not usually
associated with power plants. Once inside the actually exhibition space,
the mood changed for me. I was overcome by wonder. I was full of wonder
that someone could think of that stuff as ‘art.’

Does anyone really understand the
meaning of a big wooden box with a red interior? I know the Japanese are
weird, but a black room filled with little calculator screens counting to
999,999,999? My personal favorite is in the National
Gallery, East Wing in Washington DC. It is three panels of canvas
painted white, with the title ‘White Panels’. Next to it, are
three panels painted black, called? Yes, ‘Black Panels.’ The
museum paid $90,000 for each ‘painting,’ which is beyond me.

Now, in all this mess, there is a
modern artist that I can understand, most of the time anyway. Bill
Viola works with huge video installations, and I can still remember
the first
one I saw many years ago. You walk into a dark room where a huge
panel, almost the size of the room, rotates in the middle. It is white on
one side and a mirror on the other, alternately showing or reflecting a
video of random and intense images.

I don’t remember if I reacted
the way he wanted me to, but I do remember standing in that room until my
friends dragged me out. In the same show, I saw his notes on how each of
his installations should be presented. Down to the millimeter and floor
angle, Bill commands exactly how each work should be displayed, with
explanatory notes on why the paint must be gloss vs. flat black.

Now I don’t get all his works.
The one in which a huge video shows him either on
fire or under a shower
escapes me, but the film I saw on Sunday really hit home. In the Tate’s
‘Between
Cinema and a Hard Place‘ exhibit, Bill Viola’s ‘Nantes
triptych‘ was on display.

Using the triptych from the
Renaissance Church altarpiece as a format, Bill has three videos showing
next to each other on huge screens. To the left is a woman in the final
stages of a natural childbirth, in the middle is an image floundering
around a swimming pool in a white sheet, and on the right is Bill’s dying
mother in a hospital bed.

Yes, he is showing the cycle of
life, where we flop around between the beauty of birth and the horror of
death. I was in awe watching the film, so caught up in the screams of the
mom, the weird music of the sheet-man, and the rasping of his Mom’s
ventilator, I didn’t notice my own physical reactions. By the time the
Mom started giving birth, I was not breathing right, and the moment the
child’s head came out of the woman, I was so lightheaded that I had to sit
down for fear of passing out and collapsing in the theatre.

I’ve never been so moved by a
work of art in my life. Yeah, Salvador Dali is tight with detail,
Rembrandt sweet with light, and Michelangelo a whiz with stone, but none
ever took my breath away so long I almost fainted.

I still can’t give modern art
much credit, for Bill’s work is amazing but it cannot make up for all the
soup cans of stupidity. Maybe if they took a page from Mr. Viola, and come
up with something better than a giant wood 3-way plug I would be more
impressed and wander to the Tate Modern again.