Bill Viola quotes

Bill Viola is an American contemporary video artist, recognized as a pioneer in the field of video art. His immersive installations explore themes such as birth, death, and the passage of time through moving images and sound. He is widely celebrated for his poetic approach and profound influence on contemporary art. Here are 20 of his quotes:

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.

Bill 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 Viola

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.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola

The fundamental aspect of video is not the image, even though you can stand in amazement at what can be done electronically, how images can be manipulated and the really extraordinary creative possibilities. For me the essential basis of video is the movement - something that exists at the moment and changes in the next moment.

Bill Viola

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

I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.

Bill Viola

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Bill Viola

Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

Bill 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 Viola

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola

Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

Bill Viola

When I started in video I was one of two or three dozen video artists in 1970. And now, to paraphrase Andy Warhol, everyone's a video artist. Video, through your cellphone and camcorder, has become a form of speech, and speech is not James Joyce. It's great, and to be celebrated, but it has to find its own level.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola

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.

Bill Viola