Bill Viola Quotes
Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
Video artists being at the low end of the totem pole economically, one of the ways we survive is to go around showing work and giving these talks.
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.
There's another world out there just beyond the world we're in. It's just on the other side of that translucent, semitransparent surface.
You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
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.
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.
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.
The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.
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.
The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.
