Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

Renowned video artist Viola participates in a conversation that provides new insight into his current interests, his creative process, and the images and texts that serve as sources for his work. Color photos.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Presenting a wonderful opportunity to observe artist and museum collaborate, Bill Viola: The Passions catalogs an exhibition born of this pioneering video artist's involvement in the Getty's scholars-in-residence program on the theme of the passions. As visiting scholar, Viola studied medieval and Renaissance art depicting passionate emotions, closely observing artists' representations of facial expression and body language. He then worked with actors to develop pieces influenced by the art he had studied, making use of close-up and extreme slow motion to emphasize gesture and using state-of-the-art plasma screens for their clarity. The result was The Passions, a series of 20 video works presented in this beautifully designed book through sequential images, foldouts, and other attractive design features. Included are an excellent essay by the exhibition's curator, John Walsh; an interview with Viola by art historian/media theorist Hans Belting; frame sequences from each of the Passions pieces, with the artist's descriptions; the artist's handwritten notes; and a Viola chronology, exhibition listing, and bibliography. Recommended for libraries collecting in contemporary art or curatorial studies. Representing the Passions is a collection of essays written under the auspices of the Getty's scholar-in-residence program and addressing the theme of the passions, with a few pages dedicated to Viola's work. Included are essays encompassing the visual arts, music, history, linguistics, and technology, often within the context of 17th- and 18th-century European culture. The cross-disciplinary contributors include Martha Feldman, Teresa McKenna, and Horst Bredekamp. The essays address "a social need to name and represent the passions" and explore how literature, music, philosophy, and visual culture serve as reference points for our understanding of the passions. The methodology draws from the field of cultural studies; the content is fascinating and demanding. Best suited for libraries serving scholars and advanced students in art history, visual studies, and cultural studies.-Michael Dashkin, PricewaterhouseCoopers, New York (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

It's not easy to encapsulate the work of a video artist in an exhibit catalogue, but Viola's art lends itself to stills and those stills to long scrutiny. His 20 recent videos called The Passions feature close-ups of faces on a black background distraught, happy or fearful frame-by-frame. Setting the work in a post- September-11th context, curator and former Getty Museum director Walsh finds that by displaying other human beings and thus ourselves in extremis, Viola bypasses the rational intellect and causes disturbances against which we are normally well defended. Disturbed, we are no longer mere spectators. Some of the work consists of a single performer moving through an arc of intensity, as in Dolorosa, but Going Forth by Day involved elaborate sets, stunt performers and hundreds of extras. As an exhibition catalogue (for a show currently at the Getty in Los Angeles) with a chronology, bibliography and essays by Walsh and theater director Peter Sellars, a multifaceted account of Viola's career and creative methods compete for attention with the work. Also included is a conversation between Viola and Hans Belting, a professor at the School For New Media, and an enticing reproduction of the artist's handwritten production notebook/journal How to take the intellect, clever, deceiving, insightful, and, through sheer force of will, forge it into the emotional? he asks himself in his nondescript print. Juxtaposed with the notebook entries are works by other artists from other ages mostly masters from the European Renaissance, as well as Indian and Arab masterworks. When one turns back to the emotive heads in Viola's still frames, human feeling crosses centuries. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved