Bill Viola famous quotes

03-17-2025

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

#Soul #World
Live your Art. Don't think about it.
-- Bill Viola

#Art #Thinking
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
Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.
-- Bill Viola

#Art #Self #Long
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
I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.
-- Bill Viola

#Inspiration #Writing
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
I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.
-- Bill Viola

#Age #Different #Forgotten
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

#Artist #Giving #Video
People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.
-- Bill Viola

#Art #Museums #People
For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean.Â As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it.Â That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge.Â 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.Â We call this the moment of death.Â That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.
-- Bill Viola

#Ocean #Moving #Water
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

#Solitude #Desert #Visionaries
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
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
There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.
-- Bill Viola

#World #Invisible
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 #Knives #Doctors
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
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

#Sides #World #Surface
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 #Video #Fundamentals
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
I like to keep the meanings in my work flowing and open.
-- Bill Viola
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
Revolution is something that actually starts in individual hearts.
-- Bill Viola

#Heart #Revolution #Individual
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

#Thinking #Artist #Oil
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

#Artist #Age #Video

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