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 VIOLAA 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.
More Bill Viola Quotes
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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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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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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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You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
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There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
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Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
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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.
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I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
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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.
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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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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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I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
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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.
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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.
BILL VIOLA