2003年盖蒂博物馆访谈（英文）

by Clayton Campbell images from the exhibition 'Bill Viola: The Passions' at the J. Paul Getty Museum: http://www.resartis.org/index.php?id=101&L= I sat down with Bill Viola in January, a few days before his major exhibition, "The Passions” at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. The Getty, while not a collector of contemporary art, is becoming a significant presenter of important contemporary work. Viola had been in residence as a visiting artist in 2000, and participated with a group of scholars in a study of "the passions”, the kind of pedagogic enterprise the Getty often undertakes with interesting results. For Bill, who was coming off an exhaustive period and had hit a bit of a dry spell creatively, the chance to reflect upon the Getty collection opened up new territory for him and resulted in the creation of significant works but also an opportunity to reflect upon what was really important to him as an artist, a man, a father, a world citizen. We spoke for an hour about things which mattered to us, as the threat of war hovers over our shoulders, and uncertainty about the future permeates the atmosphere. In the solitude of the Getty, surrounded by the arts, the measure of the successes and failures of civilization, we managed to get to some questions and thoughts which are beginning to come into the foreground of contemporary arts discourse. CC: We can have a conversation about all kinds of things, but I was really taken with your personal issues, because I have gone through some stuff recently, my father passed away, my mother was ill, catastrophic things, these are tough moments, but there is something on the other side which is exalting. I don’t know if this is the correct word or description, but they are transformation, epiphanies. BV: Yeah, epiphanies. CC: So, I wanted to ask you if you have ever witnessed a miracle? BV: (after a long pause) Hmm, ahm, yes I have. When our first child was born. In this day and age the father is taught a lot more about the birth process than my dad was, and is involved in it actively. So, I had all the info about what to do and how to participate, but one thing I was not prepared for was the immensity of the experience. It’s not unlike seeing countless photos and calendars of the grand canyon and then going there yourself and walking out on the rim of that extraordinary ten mile wide depression in the earth. This thing really, I just never, never had imagined had any idea what it was really like, to see a human being arrive in the world. And it was miraculous, and the idea of that as a miracle was so profound and so special and truly unique, every birth is unique. The miracle of it was that it happened all of the time, it kind of destroyed my delusion, misconception, that miracles only happen once and basically, you know, they are mystic. And so that’s why they are turned into stories, so Christ breaks bread on a mountain for a thousand people with only one piece of bread, or turns water into wine. And of course in our literal mind in the scientific age we tend to miss the whole point of miracles that they were part of the natural order and that they were very special to them, they were by no means unique and proprietary. And that strengthens the feeling of the miraculous and the spiritual side of life. CC: For me the birth of our son was a similar kind of event, which reordered my worldview in a fundamental way sort of from the ground up. It connected me to my body, birth stopped being a cerebral sensation. When your parents passed away was there a sense of miracle somehow in that passage, as birth is a passage? BV: I had the extraordinary privilege of being at my mother’s side, holding her hand when she left her body, and being at my father’s side holding his hand when he left his body. Those events were separated by about eight years. So that was another event, my mothers death happened three years almost to the day after the birth of my son and those events are intertwined in my life, and it also happened the day after my sons third birthday, literally that night of the birthday party. I went to the nursing home with my brother, we were visiting down in Florida where my Dad lived and she died at 6AM. So every time those dates come up on the calendar there is incredible poignancy and then, so, the other side of the miracle is the arrival of the human being into the world, the portal we all pass through, seeing the head emerge first, so there is my wife with her legs spread apart and there is this head between her legs, with this old shriveled up man looking up, a face that’s unbelievable, and then seeing my mother take her last breath and seeing the life force leave a person and understanding like a lightning bolt for the first time after reading all this stuff from Eastern cultures, the Upanishads, and Buddhist texts, and Sufi texts, and seeing what the Hindus meant when I read many, many times that the word prahna in Sanskrit means is connected to the root of the word for breath, as well as well as the main primary meaning, knowledge, and the Greeks had this idea of pneumo, or life force, which we have taken as the pneumatic, which is connected with movement and also has to do with breath, and to experience literally the last breath of a human being, but not just any human being but my own mother was just the most extraordinary thing I have ever witnessed in my life. To see a being, who even at that point had been in a coma for three months, nonetheless alive, and to see that life just leave and see a person on a bed who was my mother in an instant later become some material object like a pile of clothes or an old chair, just something inanimate, just cold, physically there, was really, I’ll never, ever forget that, and, uh, those two poles clearly, in everything that happens in between those two poles and we happen to be occupying that place right now at some point in the future we will step aside and let others take their turn to occupy that space. One source of error that we inherited in our western culture is the divorcing of the personal from the professional. One of things that is really striking in television, in all of those sitcoms, all of those crime dramas, and all of those movie and TV shows you rarely see people worship. Never! "Cheers” and all these programs where they become part of family life for people who watch regularly over years and years you never see worship there. It’s kind of a revelation to see a Bochco (American television producer) kind of TV show starting showing peoples’ inner lives in ‘Hill Street Blues’, but that just became a form that was just repeated, but you don’t see people worshiping or really in one of those epiphanies or moments we are talking about now, it is kind of striking. So we kind of divorced that personal side of things from us, the public or objective, I guess divorcing the subjective from the objective side of life. And the other thing which is incredibly glaring in much of the culture is taking the body out of the equation of knowledge, to the point when we go to school we have this thing called PE, or physical education, and that’s like stuff you do for exercise and it doesn’t really have anything to do with what you do in math class or in history or social studies. Which is a big problem, because all of Eastern religions are one thread which does unify this as opposed to Western, predominantly Christian, but even today traditions in which you don’t go into the body. The Eastern way is you effect and transform self into being and the mind and heart by dealing with the hardware, the physical stuff. So you meditate and fast, you realign the senses to whatever you do to get clear vision back, which has been clouded in the mental world of confusion and ignorance. CC: The work you are doing right now, a couple of questions I have, one is you are very involved in ritual and a personal spirituality, and humanistic pursuits that have not really been at the forefront of deconstructive art theory or even what the arts institutions have been promoting heavily since the 1970’s. I am curious how you threaded your way through all of that. You really are an iconoclast, put up against the Robert Longo’s or David Salle’s or a host of other artists. The kind of vernacular we are using now, how do you thread that together with the art vernacular? Because you are part of the art world, a significant part. BV: It’s funny, I would never, I was always interested and perhaps a little shy to participate in the more intensive debates about art theory in art school. And I was confused, I was being taught one thing that ‘this is really important’, in those days it was the Clement Greenberg-ian kind of worldview, which was giving way to interesting stuff in the turn of the decade, interesting stuff- Vito Aconcci, Dennis Oppenheim, Terry Fox doing this performing space art which again oddly enough and not ironically, and not coincidentally addresses body. I was drawn to that, it was new and interesting and other arts were definitely mid career and older, you know, Noland, Rothko, Mark Louis and Helen Frankenthaler, I couldn’t relate to that so much. I think what happened was two things. I think video itself opened up a lot of possibilities simply because of its formal technological structure. The kind of things it was calling out for you to do such as Bruce Nauman being alone in the studio and turning on the camera and walking around and playing the violin, for a long time, longer than you were supposed to do for video. With just that solitary moment of an artist in his own space, had never been represented that way before. CC: Are you familiar with Butoh dancing, or performers like Eiko and Koma? Have you spent any time with them? BV: No, I have spoken to them on the phone a bit, but I have seen a number of times in Japan a guy named Min Tanaka, who was unbelievable, but that leads me to the next kind of thread, you have this technology, which was sort of, like all technologies do, when you have oil paint coming out of tempera paint in the 14th and 15th centuries, you have this technology of video arriving postwar, or even later postwar period, and opening up new possibilities. And it’s temporal based mediums, so right away you are in the domain of the human condition. You are in the idea an image that is literally born and created and is going to die when you turn off the machines. And then, circulating through all of that, my generation of the 60’s, Viet Nam generation being really open to Eastern religion. You had at that point, several generations of Zen masters in the US, you had Hindu people reading Upanishads in the university and Bhagavagita, and you had the American transcendentalists on the other hand, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman circulating through all of that. People were starting to learn how to meditate, so it was like, the stuff was there. Once I started reading that, probably started like everyone else just out of curiosity and fashion of the time all of a sudden you are reading a true ancient text. At that point I had left my Christian background long behind, I was not interested in reading the bible. So I was picking up these texts which are not, so different from the novel the way most people receive literature today, and I am getting these ancient texts that are not written to convince, coerce, or describe something but are talking about ineffable universal mystery. And that was floating in there, and more than anything opened me up to the classics which had occupied audiences for a long, long time. The universal stories of mankind. CC: We come from a similar background, I am 51. BV: I am 52. So you remember what those times were like, they were seminal. CC: In my mind, I haven’t seen transference into the art world in a way that it is particularly substantial. I view what you are doing, and a handful of other people who still carry those values, as mentors to a younger generation of artists. I guess that is what I am referring to, you’ve been doing something different. BV: That’s a very good question! It’s a very good question. You’re right, it didn’t catch on! If anything it might have caught on more now, like with Ann Hamilton, people doing stuff now, that you didn’t have going on even 10 or 15 years ago in the same way. I just do what I do, so I don’t know, I don’t pay much attention, I don’t read art magazines, it doesn’t interest me too much. And the art of recent times has become very theory driven, I am more interested in practice. CC: Do you spend much time in art schools? BV: Occasionally. I have been quite busy this series, everything you saw in this show was produced between May of 2000 and September of last year, including the big piece I had up at the Guggenheim, a big fresco cycle piece, the biggest thing I have done to date. A 2 _ hour, 5 projection panel five scene movie with hundreds of extras, a building which gets flooded out, a big huge project. So I have been non- stop working. But I do like, and have gotten a lot from the time when I visit art schools, and I have to say it is the unplanned, informal discussions that I have been able to have with small students rather than the lectures, which is really special to me. CC: I find a lot of younger artists are so immersed in thinking about art that they are kind of paralyzed when it comes to actually making art. BV: Hmm. CC: There is no abandon there. It may have to do with a theory driven academic culture. BV: The postmodern thing, the whole idea of context and framing, I think that is important, it is a sign that there is a re-evaluation going on, and I think things were a little bit too quick to jump to the conclusion that we were in a fully formed era yet. The hallmark of any major transition is the awareness of a context or a frame around this, what you are in now that you never saw before, and you step back and see that and we haven’t actually made that part of artistic practice and I think that we are coming even through that further now which is a healthy thing. Because art did sort of become by the 90’s very much about, what you might just call in another way, in another situation, social studies, the kind of effects of art on the society. All good questions, important ones, but in terms of art making it runs the danger of the self consciousness of the maker, and they are looking at the effects of what they are making, rather than the inner journey one takes and must necessarily take to complete, to lose oneself in the creative process of making something or else if you don’t do that it’s going to be some ego expression. CC: So I am basically thinking art comes out of some type of inner necessity, maybe the artists’ role is a spiritual vocation, which encompasses a lot of stuff, but at its heart is spiritual. The experiences you have had with the passages in your family are watershed moments which have changed your work, so for a younger artist, how important is life experience? Without it, how does a 25 year old, unless you have an extraordinary amount of life packed into that short amount of time, the average person is following a certain kind of art based on minimal experience. BV: It’s true. I don’t know. I was fortunate enough to have experience when I was really young. I almost died when I fell in a lake, I was actually six years old. I don’t want to wish that on anybody, but the idea of life, the ones who are blessed are the ones who manage to get through the most serious accidents and circumstances. There is a shamanistic tradition, a prerequisite to being shaman, a requirement to get the ‘degree’, where very often some life threatening illness preferably at a young age where you almost died or perhaps did die for a brief amount of time and then came back with special knowledge. CC: Usually some kind of ‘night sea journey’, in Jungian terms, would be involved. I have had experiences with Taos Native Americans and their rituals, and how they work with young men and bring them through a kind of transformative, adept, process. Another was in Mexico, where a tribe of indigenous peoples used mushrooms as a way of divining what dis-ease could be afflicting someone else. BV: Right. CC: I want to shift gears just a second. When you talk about your recent, big piece, it has to do with the physicality of seeing, or experiencing your work, or video art in general, as it is presented in galleries. It is not like sitting in the Arc Light Theater, or the Cinerama Dome (two Los Angeles movie theaters) …. BV: No. CC: It is very different. You are standing up for hours, in a very stuffy, uncomfortable, converted room. BV: It’s true. CC: In an ideal world, I was at your show at LACMA, and it was impossible to get through the entire show, see everything, without aching feet, a sore back. What would you prefer? Just the physicality of experiencing your work now, should it be seen in the context of a private experience where it there over a long period of time? Should galleries be more like screening rooms? BV: Well, I think, I’ve never, well my work in a way, traditionally, has formally broken down in to two threads or streams, one is single channel video tape, which I never really felt comfortable calling those public art works. I always felt from very early on that they were more in the private domain of individual experience, and I was very happy when Bob Stein an LA media entrepreneur guy approached me and my colleagues in the early 70’s and 80’s to release our work on VHS tape so people could take it home. I thought that was great because then people could actually see it in the comfort of their own homes, in their own space, on their own terms, when they wanted to see it . And I always advocated early on that my video tapes at place like Museum of Modern Art in New York where the curator Barbara London, Whitney Museum, John Hanhart, from very early going back to the mid 70’s, were presenting work, and I always advocated them to them I preferred having my work shown in the theater in the museum as opposed to the gallery. And when I started making installation pieces, which was at the same time, from the beginning, my first in 73, I recognized those immediately as architectural type forms that were appropriate in the gallery space. So, that’s one thing, and the other thing, there, in terms of specifics of these individual exhibitions and works, like the show you saw at Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the 25 year survey, quite acknowledged on our part had more work than you could take in. It was like there was idea there is a horizon line, over the horizon, part of the message of that show for people was that this is an art form that has been around for awhile, that its got at that time a 25 year, in case of Nam June Paik, a 30 year history, and of course it is going to have a horizon line that is going to have things over on the other side of it, that you can access both in terms of the historical message of the show, but spiritual inner message of the show too, this whole notion of the experience exceeds the world, exceeds your ability to actually perceive and grasp it. So that was one thing, and that is a different situation than the show here which has 13 works in it, and can be more or less experienced as a whole with an adequate amount of time span for each piece. We have benches here, there’s a lot of physiological things you are talking about, comfort. When my parents started to age I became more sensitive to elderly people who might need to sit down than young people who might come in and sit down, camp on the floor. CC: The large piece, you mentioned, was that shown in a theater? BV: No, that was installed in the Guggenheim in Berlin last February, and we carpeted the floor with the intention people would sit down, and we also had them get these little portable seats, which they are going to get here that you can get sometimes at museums. At the Guggenheim they didn’t want to do that for certain logistical reasons, so we carpeted the floor and people did sit down but it is difficult, and for me too now, to stand on my feet for a long period of time. There is another thing which clicked with what you are saying Clayton, and that is in doing this show too, people in the media are used to work which has narrative development, that has a series of cuts in it, which my work initially had none, and that is taking your hand and carrying you through, a landscape through it, a path through the material, and its speaking to you like a book, chapters, characters and plots. And so people are kind of expecting when they see a movie image they have to see all of it, and you don’t necessarily have to see all of this work all of the way through, because the camera never moves, it is locked down, there is not going to be a scene that is going to be cut that you haven’t seen right now, what you see when all these pieces open and they are on cycles ranging from 7 minutes, the longest time is 16 minutes, you are not going to see anything different, there are no cuts there, the meaning is not transmitted through montage. So you have a situation where people can glean a lot from just the first few minutes of viewing, and if you see the whole thing it unfolds, once you get into it unfolds and gives you a lot back. But I guess what I was trying to say, I really learned a lot relatively recently and have come to understand and respect in a way, these works and other works I have seen in Tom Day’s studio are complete in an of themselves but not complete in an arrogant ‘I am together and you’re not’, but whole in the sense that if their durational aspects temporal aspects exceed our comfort zone of perceptual comfort. Or just literally the time it takes to see an Andy Warhol 7 hour ‘Empire State Building’, a good example. I look at that and I look at some of the pictures I have made and some of my colleagues as much in a sculptural way. Andy Warhol’s 7-hour ‘Empire State Building’ is a great work and it exists independent of you or I. Some other domain. And if we don’t happen to see the whole 7 hours, the work is still the work. You know? It is not always convenient, the right situation, the right way to present these works, some of my works I know it is hard for people to see the whole piece, but they are there, and the temporal existence of that work is an actual palpable real thing. CC: There are a couple of other questions I would like to jump to. I brought up Eiko and Koma because they have slowed movement down to same speed you have with your recent work, and they are very much about the expression of emotion. And, are asking the viewer, which maybe viewers 300 years ago understood, there is a meditation involved in being with a work of art which is not just a representation, but an evocation. BV: Good distinction. CC: What I wanted to ask you is, your work, is it an evocation? BV: That is a beautiful and essential distinction you’ve just made, because when you understand all things are a function of time which the East has done much better than the West has, in other words the fact that the objects in this room aren’t moving, you come back in 200 years and see what it looks like. When you understand all things are the function of time then you understand that all things exist because of some cyclical, temporal realities, that human beings have sought to codify in the form of ritual. Then the idea of a ritual itself is a very high fidelity snapshot representation of how the world works, an essential part of the world. It’s not just a series of activities that human beings do, to honor things, it is actually a reflection and embodiment of how the world works from the temporal domain. Because nature is both cyclical and linear. And, so, the idea of embodiment is really important because when I was starting to make videos and looking at this world I was struggling with what I first felt to be the separation that the camera was imposing between me and the object of my attention. At very first I thought it was a connection but when I started to use it I began to feel a separation which many, many people have written about and talked about with photography, and then I think because it wasn’t a still medium, it was actually a moving medium, I began to feel the connection developing after awhile, that it was connecting me to these things. Once I realized I could take a video of this coffee cup on the table, lock the camera down, not move it, and do a close up of the cup, shoot for 20 minutes, that is so vastly different than taking a photograph of this cup. Even though there is nothing in the image that could possibly indicate it is moving, no shadow passes over it, nothing happens, it is identical to a photograph but its not. It’s a 20-minute chunk of temporal existence in the life of this cup. That kind of idea of the body, like, that’s why I started making these installations, I wanted the viewer to be inside the image with their body, not with their intellect, not regarding it from a distance where it is framed off from you and therefore we are studying, looking at this thing. It’s whoa, you are not standing over the side of the pool and looking at the ripples on the water, someone pushed you from behind and you are under the water, you are the water, you become the water. That is a special form of knowledge that you can’t gain in any other way except with direct experience. It’s a mindset about making art that sculptors have been blessed with more than painters in a way because they are there, in kind of an idealized way their hands are in the clay, maybe. CC: That goes right to the point, one note I had here, are you connected to your body? BV: Hmmm. CC: You know, clearly you are a thinker, I am a thinker, but when we are connected to our bodies this is where the emotive centers are, and you can speak about chakras and different things like that, you can find a correlation. The process the viewer might go through in experiencing your work, for example, when I was in the gallery in New York in 2000 seeing some of this initial work, I went with my son and we spent three hours there, which is hard for a nine year old to do. And it was a great time of quietude in a driven, artificial environment, as New York, and cities tend to be. And I saw people in the gallery unashamedly expressing emotion, and I think that up until the advent of photography this was not uncommon, people understood that images, in painting and sculpture, had another purpose other than representation. I am getting the same sense this is where your work is headed and is doing the same thing. What I saw were people crying, not in discomfort. That is unusual in a contemporary art gallery, seeing people reacting this way and losing themselves in the work. It is not really a question but an observation responding to what you just said about the analogy of the coffee cup. BV: There are really beings being present, individuals, in these pieces now, its not just the specific performer, it’s this woman in a form that has enough fidelity to our experience with other human beings that kind of looks like a person and is considered a representational image. I think art has taken us in to quite abstract realms, and I believe everything is important in history and is kind of all linked up in a deeper way, but to go through the formal Bauhausian kind of agenda, then the Clement Greenberg axis, which has been so dominant in 20th century art, it is kind of necessary now to get to the understructure of things. That’s fine and it shows we weren’t really aware of it all, but we’ve now come through that and we can now take this new view and understanding of this understructure and start putting things on top of that understructure in a new way and the old masters to me are resonating in ways that they never, when I was in art school I was just not interested whatsoever. I had the art history classes that were certainly very interesting moments, Rembrandt, but on the whole it was not that relevant to what I felt at that time I my life as a young artist, but now it has become integral. CC: It is what I always return to. I was trained in Vienna as a ‘classical’ painter… BV: Really! CC: I was in Rome a year and a half ago and I spent all my time tracking down every Carravagio and Bernini I could find, because they were dealing with narratives, really evocations, of moments, spaces in between that are coming towards life or receding from it, you are never quite sure. But maybe the last 20-30 years have been a little bloodless (in the arts) and I think people are a bit desperate to feel something authentic again when they experience art. They really want that. BV: Exactly. And I think the people you are mentioning there, one of the things we have to realize, things are poised in the avant garde, Caravaggio you mentioned, those old masters, Vermeer, were so out there. Reading up on the advent of early Renaissance perspective, Masaccio painting the trinity in Florence in 1423, he painted that thing, he was 24 years old, a young Turk, he was using a brand new system which came through into the West through the Arabs that had been preserved going back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, Euclid, geometry and optics, and so this was the latest cool, far out, quantum physics stuff. And certain thinkers had codified and presented, like Brunelleschi, as a systemic way to think about the image in a brand new way. And who gets it? The young guys. Who got the Internet? The young guys, you know. So the young avant garde paint stuff, the trinity, you can just see it, people were floored, the public is really not as dumb as the mass media makes them out to be whatsoever, it’s incredible. But people in Florence were so, they didn’t understand what they were seeing but they knew it was something major and important and really interesting. Older painters, brushed it away, they were saying, ‘ah, that’s not art’, can you just see it, a fifty year old painter bad mouthing a twenty three year old web head who is doing a new web piece. And it’s so beautiful when you really think of it, because that’s not painting! Painting is like the poker face two dimensional Madonna who has no perceptible reality at all because she is not supposed to, she is supposed to represent an eternal moment, not a temporal momentary event, so who are these young guys who just didn’t change the style, they completely asked different questions entirely, 90 degrees off axis. They changed how images worked and that is what is going on now with technology. CC: Let say you are a bridge future generations are going to cross; where are they going, and who is interesting who is coming up? What are they going to be working on, what are the ideas, what are the core ideas and values that really will concern them? BV: Alright, the core ideas are that through these media tools, I am not saying the future of art is not going to be media per se, I don’t even know myself what media art means. It has to do with a certain set of tools right now but the way technology is changing you just wait twenty years and you think these cd players and tape recorders we have now, wait till what happens in the near future, might not bear a lot of resemblance to what we have now. On the other hand I think it wrong to focus too much on the tools, and I trace a lineage of technology, very important lineage which distinguishes the broad based technology, like a tool in the stone age leading up to hammers, and jack hammers, and giant, big cranes that build buildings, I distinguish a subset of technology having to do with extending and expanding human perception coming back to the microscope in 1500, literally the first time we saw creatures living on this earth that we couldn’t see, and verified them to be real, so it was a view into the invisible world which the spiritual guys have been talking about for eons, so these tools which have now taken center stage in our evolutionary development are really tools of expanding the senses and therefore expanding the mind and the heart, and getting everybody else to see an entire vast, invisible world unless we have special powers we had no idea it existed. CC: In thinking about some of the things we have been talking about, art as a healing activity, ethics… BV: Yes. I gotcha. CC: Will these have currency? BV: 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. CC: Let’s say then that ethics is an important part of every creative persons psyche, do artists have a particular responsibility right now? BV: Well, the big responsibility right now is to develop an understanding and awareness of the effects these images have. We are in a situation now culturally whereby the people who have created this huge, giant image machine which is inundating us, flooding us with images, every night every hour every day all around us, have no knowledge or awareness or understanding of the real effect those images are going to have on us. Its like someone who is so focused on the food you are eating and getting the taste to be right, and the food hits your mouth but hasn’t got a clue about nutrition, about what happens after the food comes in and goes into your body. I mean hamburgers are going to give you cancer. And it is the same thing with images, they go in there and they live in you, all these things you’ve seen, these presences, are living in you and continuing to affect you. Great works of art, I have companions in me I treasure dearly, I don’t need to own any paintings. I don’t even need to see these paintings on a daily basis, the moments I have with art works live in me and I know they are in there, certain key things. And there are certain corrosive, corruptive media images in there I can’t deny. So mastery of the body, same situation recognized thousands of years ago by Indian yogis, we are at that point right now. We must pass through the body, you can’t let the appetite of desires control you which is exactly what advertisers and corporations are going for, because these tools are so physical and visceral. CC: Maybe visual artists now, say of our generation as we become mentors, as our elders pass away, we move into ourselves and act as some sort of filtering process. A lot of younger people, my son included, receive such a mosaic of images and information and they have no real developed filtering process… BV: No, the entire society is illiterate, and they are being controlled by the people who can read, that is the controllers of these images, the image-makers. CC: Your work alludes to this and what brings people to it, is that an artist creates a space where people can cry or just feel something unashamedly, where this is permissible and completely normal. BV: Yeah, the Renaissance ideal, truth and beauty. That wasn’t just a pretty picture, that was the essence of life, these images we see that move us contain deep truth sometimes. They are not just passing fancies or just momentary entertainment or a feel good boost. They are actually at the root cause themselves, deeply connected with the deepest knowledge human beings have evolved on this planet. So it is a privileged position artists have.