Bill Viola on floating
“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.”
More Bill Viola quotes
Live your Art. Don’t think about it.
Bill ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
Bill ViolaBill Viola A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.
Bill ViolaBill Viola People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.
Bill ViolaBill Viola Today, basically, on Wall Street, the big money is made by taking risks.
Bernard MadoffBernard Madoff Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
Bill ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.
Bill ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
Bill ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
Bill ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola 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 ViolaBill Viola
