Bill Viola and the country of OZ
By Juan Díaz Infante,
Mexico City, September 2, 2002

Bill Viola was invited to show his work at the Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City as the main event of the Mexican Video Festival Vidarte 2002.

I arrived slightly late to avoid the political speech and always that other speech thanking all the non-participants (?).
I thought the event was going to be in the exhibition halls, to see some sort of an installation or something like that, I was confused from the beginning, because they had brought an artist to speak about his work and not his work.

I found out it was a sort of lecture that had been planned for Bill to give with projections at the main theater. I had seen the work of Viola in other electronic festivals, and I had not thought of it as anything special, nonetheless as I always do, I give the benefit of the doubt to the artist, and I always think that maybe there is something that I missed.

Since I had arrived late I had to seat in the back of the theater, and then, it started to happen, one of the most terrible disappointments I have ever had, I met the myth that was not the myth, and in reality Bill was the wizard and was selling the green glasses. The theater was half empty and getting emptier, most artists, critics and people of certain level of culture and good taste were leaving the premises like a very thin rain. The public remaining were the administrators and the VIP guests.

Since I had not heard anything yet I decided to put a lot of attention, needless to say, Viola is the most boring speaker I have ever heard, again, I put a lot of effort into listening to what he was saying. Then again, disappointment after disappointment, his discourse was falling all in common places like a collector of stamps. Besides of the fact of falling in common places, his references were completely off, it was very clear that his anecdotes to the Persian culture were learned from the guide tour and his references to Saint John of the Cross only showed that he had completely misunderstood the mysticism of the Carmelites.

Any decent person had to leave the place, Bill Viola’s speech fell in the ridiculous and insulting to the thinking person. There were a lot of people already at the cocktail table in the outside hall, 30 minutes before he had finished, staying only for social reasons, being politically correct. My friend Carlos qualified Viola as a poet, but a bad poet. He explained he could not leave the room because he was in the first row. My wife from India, Persian descent immediately caught the enormous misunderstanding of Viola and qualified his speech as “pocket metaphysics”, being kind. Carlos and I spent some time trying to come up to some conclusion as how a body of work so empty can be considered as good video art. Which set of
values, arranged in which order could yield Viola to be considered as an artist.

We came to some conclusions, Bill Viola inherits the iconographic culture of America, which is very poor, therefore he borrows “Meaning” from other cultures to bring to the land of the blind. He is trying to propose a language to a culture with extreme material values, a life that is closer to their sitcoms than poetry. How can someone create beauty from that?
He emerges as a dyslexic prophet of American media culture, he retakes the logics, the semantics of misunderstanding, like the American priests that kill the followers to catch a passing comet, the misunderstanding of mysticism and poetry generates a new language.

70 Mexican artists that had submitted their work for exhibition, asked Dolores Creel, director of the festival not to show their work. Important note of Mexican context: Today’s culture politician believes that any criticism comes from people that want their job. I want to make very clear that today I do not want the job of Dolores Creel or Sari Bermudez.

Thank you. End of note.

*Enviado a la revista Inter de Canadá y a Generación de México, al foro de Universe y al de Net-time en inglés.