By contrast, The Messenger has been almost universally praised. Shown at both the Melbourne and Sydney Festivals, it was originally commissioned for Durham Cathedral in 1996 where the work was projected onto the rear doorway of the church. In Sydney, the work was exhibited in the Level 2 project space at the Art Gallery of New South Wales. The viewer entered one blacked-out room and then another, the extreme darkness at first provoking a strong sense of disorientation and then comfort once the screen appeared. It was a surprisingly intimate experience, given the scale of the work and its half-hour length.

The video consisted simply of a young man rising to the surface of a pool of water, gasping for breath, and then submerging again, a process repeated four times. The work’s slow pace and repetitious nature allowed the viewer to notice the details: the way the bubbles created haloes obscuring the man’s head; the play of water on the body as it surfaced, reminiscent of electric currents; and, strangest of all, the way the figure didn’t blink when he finally opened his eyes. Like a Tarkovsky film, The Messenger has a certain relentlessness, its negligible action commanding the viewer to find meaning in the minutiae.

Viola has stated frequently that art and knowledge are to be inhabited and experienced sensually, rather than being purely the domain of the intellect. The visual metaphor of the human figure submerged in water is highlighted by the work’s title. The messenger arises from the depths, knowledge having been gained through total immersion. This iconography has been utilised several times in Viola’s work, notably in the Nantes Triptych (1992) and Stations (1994). While there is a personal element to this (Viola almost drowned as a child), it also works to create spiritual imagery that transcends religious specificity. Viola’s reading ranges from Zen to Sufi to Christian mysticism, and his work appears to create a gnostic vision of human experience.

Other non-visual artists have approached the same ideas; Peter Brook’s universal theatre or the music of Dead Can Dance both take influences from a range of sources and try to reduce them down to a kind of Jungian archetypal essence. While these artists clearly strive for a sense of soaring beauty this kind of work is also susceptible to twin dangers. Reduced sounds and images can become oversimplified, with a clanging obviousness that tends towards the banal. By misrepresenting cultural specificity or subsuming it within a Western framework the spectre of appropriation raises its head. Video in particular is tied to a Western culture of technology and its visuality and linear time heavily mediates the images depicted.

This mediation is an integral part of Viola’s work, and his video installations consistently draw attention to the fact that these are not windows upon the world. In Heaven and Earth (1992), two video monitors, one featuring an old woman, the other a baby, face each other in a generational stand-off, while in The Sleepers (1992), the monitors sit in the bottom of water barrels. The Messenger presents the video screen on the scale of a large painting, and the pale, distorted body is reminiscent of the flickering figures of El Greco. While this imagery evokes a strong sense of the continuity of history, it is very much of its time. Video as a medium is precisely contemporary because of its temporality, both through its creation of narrative and its ephemeral status as a relatively new technology.

Although The Messenger was created for a church there are no great revelations. Its reconfiguration within a gallery placed a new set of readings and expectations upon what is largely a metaphysical work. While a work that strives for this kind of effect is rare enough, the problem is the fact that so little of Viola’s work has been seen in Australia. Placed in this larger context a greater sense of the artist’s purpose would emerge. It’s just that the message is yet unclear.

Russell Storer
1999

© The artists and
Courtesy of the Sydney
Festival.