Bill Viola's "Ocean Without a Shore' at PAFA

Video artists claim a place in contemporary art, but it's easy to be skeptical. Too often video art seems like bad television on an endless incomprehensible loop.

The exception, for my money, is Bill Viola, whose Ocean Without a Shore (originally commissioned for the 2007 Venice Biennale) was recently added to the Pennsylvania Academy's permanent collection. Video art requires time and patience, but here the reward for both is a compelling and intriguing experience.

In its small dark box of a room on the ground floor, Ocean Without a Shore stands in abrupt but refreshing contrast to the solemnly historical presence of the galleries upstairs. And yet, though its technology is light years away from Charles Willson Peale's carefully brushed portraits, Ocean Without a Shore has a conjuring kind of magic that's far more ancient than any civilized record.

Large vertical screens on three sides of the room face the door and form an enclosure for a centered bench, the work's intended viewpoint. Once seated, you are approached by figures that emerge slowly, one by one, from the apparent depths of those screens. The sound of water is constant; when the figures, like specters from a mythic netherworld, push through into clear immediate color, the rush of water rises to a pulsing, emotional crescendo, full of thrill and terror, as with the urgent throbbing of drums.

Polychromed saints

The characters that come to stand before you, soaking wet and fully fleshed, seem more real than real, as if they have pushed right through their screens into the room. They're slick and shiny as medieval polychromed saints, exuding a dark primordial sort of power even in their modern clothes.

Viola calls these two dozen sequences "a series of encounters at the intersection between life and death." He asks viewers to see in them reflections of fundamental human concerns— hope, love, regeneration, anxiety, death, being.

You can discover infinite narratives here; what each viewer sees will be shaped by individual emotion, mood and experience, and every viewing of the work will differ from the one before.

Earth mother

The narrative that took shape in my mind, as one character yielded to the next, was a cautionary tale of human greed and waste, presented as a procession of pagan gods, vaguely defined but full of force and intent.

I first watched a hefty middle-aged woman emerge, her hair neatly pulled back in a ponytail. This dripping apparition, dressed in an ordinary white shirt and pink sweater, was a strange admixture of the banal and the mysterious. For me she became Gaia, earth mother to us all; and as a mother's emotions played across her generous face"“ compassion, concern, anxiety, care"“ I heard her plaintive plea to stop risking our lives by destroying our only home.

This vision faded and a young androgynous Goth appeared, pierced and angry-looking. He glared with one kohled eye from under a lank lock of hair before re-entering the grayness, and then an attractive, robust young black woman emerged. She lingered, avoiding eye contact, while an older white male in sweatpants showed up on another screen, but he just shook his head in seeming disgust and was soon gone. The woman finally looked up with a stare that suggested hatred and calm triumph and, perhaps, at the last second, sorrow at what could have been.

Ocean Without a Shore, a compact installation in a small room, contains a vast world of possibilities. It will always offer something new and profound to discover.♦


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