The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.
BILL VIOLAThere is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
More Bill Viola Quotes
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I hope we’ll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I’m in Paris, I’ll buy a big bottle of champagne and I’ll save it for that day, for the day when they’ll be no more camera.
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I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
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When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional – a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.
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Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity… but theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.
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Human beings have always been creative. The guys who were making the pyramids, and archaeological research has showed us this, had little figurines made by the workers, to express their devotion to their god.
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I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
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Since the time of St. Jerome, it was mandatory for any kind of scholar or thinker to spend time out in the desert in solitude. It’s no coincidence that the desert has been a major part of the visionary or mystical experience from the beginning of time.
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Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street – your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what’s going on around you.
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Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
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My works really begin in a very simple way. Sometimes it’s an image, and sometimes it’s words I might write, like a fragment of a poem.
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In the mid- to late ’60s to the mid-’70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.
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Everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead – how the world meets the mind, not the eye.
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A lot of what making art is, is just being open, and empty. And putting yourself in the right place for things to, literally, come together.
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I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.
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Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
BILL VIOLA







