Bill Viola Quotes

Quotes about:

• 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

  World, Sides, Another World

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Reflection, Space

  26 Copy quote

• 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

  Creative, Essentials, Video

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Keys, Intellectual

  26 Copy quote

• Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.

  Bill Viola

  Soul, World, Fast Paced

  56 Copy quote

• People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Museums, People

  25 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Believe, Thinking

  14 Copy quote

• Live your Art. Don't think about it.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Thinking

  30 Copy quote

• It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

  Bill Viola

  Vision, Impression

  22 Copy quote

• There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

  Bill Viola

  World, Invisible

  16 Copy quote

• I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.

  Bill Viola

  16 Copy quote

• Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Self, Long

  20 Copy quote

• Fifty years from now I don't think optical realism is going to be an issue in visual communication any more. Experience is so much richer than light falling on your retina. You embody a microcosm of reality when you walk down the street - your memories, your varying degrees of awareness of what's going on around you, everything we could call the contextualizing information. Representing that information is going to be the main issue in the years ahead - how the world meets the mind, not the eye.

  Bill Viola

  Memories, Fall, Communication

  21 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Together, Just Being

  15 Copy quote

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

  Bill Viola

  Age, Different, Forgotten

  "Portrait of the artist: Bill Viola, video artist". Interview with Laura Barnett, www.theguardian.com. May 15, 2012.

  13 Copy quote

• Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.

  Bill Viola

  Heart, Revolution, Individual

  18 Copy quote

• 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

  Art, Feelings, Experts

  23 Copy quote

• Vision connects you. But it also separates you. In my work, and my life, I feel a desire to merge. Not in terms of losing my own identity... but theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

  Bill Viola

  Rocks, Tree, Feelings

  30 Copy quote

• 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

  Writing, Simple, Might

  4 Copy quote

• 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.

  Bill Viola

  Art, Thinking, Students

  12 Copy quote

• For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

  Bill Viola

  Ocean, Moving, Water

  14 Copy quote

• The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

  Bill Viola

  Light, Dna, Speed

  17 Copy quote

• 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

  Thinking, Brain, Earth

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Doctors, Knives

  14 Copy quote

• I hope we'll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I'm in Paris, I'll buy a big bottle of champagne and I'll save it for that day, for the day when they'll be no more camera.

  Bill Viola

  Paris, Able, Cameras

  14 Copy quote

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