Words matter. These are the best Bill Viola Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don’t say ‘insecure’ in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: ‘Are they good enough?’ ‘Is this the right thing to do?’ I really beat myself up over that.
The world is fine and everything is normal and then, bang, you just get bowled over by the wrathful deities somehow. That happens in very small ways and happens in very large ways when you have a major conflagration in the world. It’s another cycle of existence of human beings.
The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.
Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
The future art historians are going to be software guys who are going to go into the depths of the code to find out what was changed hundreds of years before.
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.
You can always tell in a movie when they are setting you up for something. If someone leaves an important object on the table and walks away, the camera will have some way of indicating that to you.
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.
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.
I think we’re in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items – Jackson Pollock used house paint – to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.
In the 1970s, a lot of critics didn’t understand video. I got a lot of bad reviews. But film-makers didn’t understand what we were doing, either. There were actual fistfights between film-makers and video-makers. I was witness to one.
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
When you come into my pieces, it’s not an intellectual experience, it’s a physical experience. It’s coming at your body. There’s light, there’s sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There’s loud roaring sound happening.
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.
Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It’s a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you’re in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.
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.
You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.
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.
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.
I cry a lot. Usually once a day. I think it’s one of the most profound forms of human expression.
