Quotes by Bill Viola

Bill Viola

American video artist

Lived from: 1951 -

Category: Artists

Born: 25 january 1951

Quotes 1 till 20 of 21.

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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • Art is, for me, the process of trying to wake up the soul. Because we live in an industrialized, fast-paced world that prefers that the soul remain asleep.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • Creativity is not the property of artists alone. It's a basic element of the human character, no matter what culture you're in, no matter where you are on Earth or in history.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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
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  • If you look at landscape in historical terms, you realize that most of the time we have been on Earth as a species, what has fallen on our retina is landscape, not images of buildings and cars and street lights.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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
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  • One of the most important things for me in terms of my working method is doubt. I get very insecure about my ideas. And I don't say 'insecure' in kind of a paranoid way. I mean just: 'Are they good enough?' 'Is this the right thing to do?' I really beat myself up over that.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • 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
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  • The velocity and knee-jerk response to events happening in real time that television brings us precludes any kind of reflection or contemplation and therefore analysis. And that's been one of the greatest political dangers in the post-war era. The idea of the reasoned, thoughtful response goes out of the window.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • The very first video experience I had was in high school. They brought a black-and-white closed-circuit surveillance camera into the classroom. I will never forget, as a kid, looking at that image.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • There is a big push that we all are engaged in, in wanting to have the newest in innovation - and I think that's all really great. But I also feel that human beings need to be aware of, and grounded in, history.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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
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  • This thing called the camera, that takes everything in equally, taught me a lot about how to see.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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 there's a feeling that life is interconnected, that there's life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • When you come into my pieces, it's not an intellectual experience, it's a physical experience. It's coming at your body. There's light, there's sound, the lights in some pieces are going on and off. There's loud roaring sound happening.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • When you're making video, you're giving structure to time, which is what a composer does.
    ― Bill Viola
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  • 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
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Questions and Answers

What are the most famous quotes from Bill Viola?

The two most famous quotes from Bill Viola are:

  • "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."
  • "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."

When did Bill Viola live?

Bill Viola is still alive and was born in 1951.