Recently i was discussing the Whitney’s Bill Viola retrospective with a member of the museum’s staff, the sort of earnest young art-world type whose professional credentials consist most conspicuously in her wearing only black. She astonished me, however, by asking in complete earnest whether I thought the work on display was indeed art. I was surprised because I did not imagine that such innocent questions were still being asked in the circles in which she moved. Especially since the institution that employs her has played host of late to Sue Williams’s imperishable puddle of (plastic) vomit and to Jeff Koons’s basketballs floating in a fish tank.
The question Is it art? has haunted our visual culture since the middle of the last century. Lately, it has been posed most insistently in Yasmina Reza’s play Art. Each generation has tried to outdo the last in seeking ever more daring and original forms of visual expression. Bill Viola has chosen to accomplish this through video art. His new exhibition is radically different from the standard fare at the Whitney or anywhere else. Two and a half floors have been transformed into a nocturnal labyrinth whose every nook and cranny burps, splutters, flashes, and gleams with 18 different installations.
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