Zen and the Art of Video with Bill Viola September 15, 2008

Bill Viola, Three Women, 2008, color high-definition video on plasma display mounted on wall; performers: Anika, Cornelia, Helena Ballent, Photo: Kira Perov

Bill Viola kicked off the 2008 Clarice Smith Distinguished Lectures in American Art series last week to a full house at SAAM. His talk "Transfigurations" gave a behind-the-scenes look into the artist's Zen-influenced philosophy of art, life, technology, and death. He has been making poetic moving images since "he first touched a video camera" in 1970, and as technology has deepened so has his art. The evening got off to an unexpected start when he collided with media arts curator John Hanhardt on his walk to the podium, sending his papers flying and rearranging the order. So, an artist known for non-linear thinking and works of art that connect time and space presented a non-linear talk that let us get as deep into the artist's marrow as I've heard in a long time: it was biography as personal philosophy.

Quoting from favorite philosophers and poets, he perhaps set the tone of the evening with this line from Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, "All creative acts are a kind of dying." For Viola, life and death pour out of the same spring. He related the story of holding his newborn son in his arms when all he could think was, "He could die." Life and death are not polar opposities but often come at you in one fell swoop.

Viola made repeated references to the arc of time and talked about how many of the Italian Renaissance artists  who we think of as "Old Masters" were the young radicals of their time. "All art is contemporary," according to Viola. Michelangelo was twenty-four when he created Pietà, Raphael was twenty-five when he did some of his finest work. These artists were the avant-garde of their time and employed new tools, such as the science of optics, when creating their works. Riffing on the present times Viola commented, "The meeting of art and science and the parallels today are extraordinary."

With that in mind, technology today can be used for good or its opposite. The finger that you can use to press SEND and wreak havoc on the Web is the same finger you use to tickle a child or caress your lover. Technology is fundamentally neutral, he reminded us. It's how we use it that defines us. "Like it or not," he added, "we are woven together in a way that has not happened in human history."

Though time was limited and he could only show us two examples of his work, the evening ended with the powerful Three Women, which Viola exhibited at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Here, a mother and her two daughters  first appear in grainy black and white, as if taken from a nineteenth-century painting or an early photographic image. They walk slowly, deliberately, until one by one their physical bodies become conduits of water, and they are released from their everyday lives. They also enter a world of color.

In comments Viola made to a group during the reception that followed, he told us that the woman was a friend who used to take care of his children when they were young, and the two girls were her daughters. Viola was also asked what he hoped to be doing next, to which he gave the very Zen reply: "Breathing."

You can view Viola's talk here.

• Bill Viola, Video, Clarice Smith, American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum