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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.

Bill Viola

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That’s a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.
BILL VIOLA

Floating Moving Ocean Water
Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
BILL VIOLA

Heart Individual Revolution
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.
BILL VIOLA

Creative Devotion Express Guy Pyramids
It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
BILL VIOLA

Impression Second Vision
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.
BILL VIOLA

Art Hope Reflection Something Space
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.
BILL VIOLA

Fragment might Simple Writing
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.
BILL VIOLA

Embody Everything Experience Memories Microsm Retina
The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.
BILL VIOLA

Death DNA Light Material Speed
I don’t believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We’re always borrowing.
BILL VIOLA

Art Believe Borrowing Original Thinking
We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
BILL VIOLA

Call Death Metaphor Moment Ourselves
You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
BILL VIOLA

Art Experts Feelings
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 VIOLA

Brain Earth Honestly Thinking
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.
BILL VIOLA

Experiences Mystical Solitude Wisdom
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.
BILL VIOLA

Feelings Identity Interconnected Rocks Tree
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.
BILL VIOLA

Everything Issue Man Mind Walk
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
BILL VIOLA

Images Inspiration Writing
When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water.
BILL VIOLA

Container Outside Water Merge
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.
BILL VIOLA

Art Change Students Thinking
I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
BILL VIOLA

Flowing Keep Meaning Open
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.
BILL VIOLA

Art Being Just Together
Emotions are the key to many aspects of life. They are precisely the elements that make human beings human. I think the fact that emotions have been reduced and put off to the side in intellectual work, particularly in the 20th Century, is tragic.
BILL VIOLA

Intellectual Keys Thinking
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.
BILL VIOLA

Age Artist Coming Panasonic Video Year
Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
BILL VIOLA

Fast Paced Soul World
I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
BILL VIOLA

Age Different Forgotten
There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
BILL VIOLA

Invisible Living World
Live your Art. Don’t think about it.
BILL VIOLA

Art Live Thinking
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.
BILL VIOLA

Able Cameras Paris

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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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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Popular Authors

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