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Art: 'Ocean Without a Shore' addresses the mystery of existence through video

Art began, thousands of years ago, as spiritual communication, and retained that function in the West at least as long as most people organized their lives around religious doctrine and observance.

An image from "An Ocean Without a Shore," a video installation by Bill Viola at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
An image from "An Ocean Without a Shore," a video installation by Bill Viola at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.Read more

Art began, thousands of years ago, as spiritual communication, and retained that function in the West at least as long as most people organized their lives around religious doctrine and observance.

In today's secular culture, some artists still try to express various manifestations of "spirituality," but I haven't encountered many lately who dare to confront the fundamental enigma of existence head-on.

It's both surprising and gratifying, then, to come upon Bill Viola's video installation "Ocean Without a Shore" at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

You might think, video - how existentially gravid can that be? With Viola, one of the most talented and widely acclaimed artists working in the medium, it's what one has come to expect.

Viola's videos are characterized by an ultra-slow-motion technique and a visual style that combines precise realism with intense color and theatrical lighting that often suggests Italian Old Masters, particularly Jacopo Pontormo and his pupil Agnolo Bronzino.

Figures in Viola's projected tableaux move almost imperceptibly; as scenes unfold, they resemble paintings struggling to come to life. Consequently, each movement is magnified in a way that suggests monumentality and profundity.

"Ocean Without a Shore," which the Academy recently purchased for its collection, is on view in the space formerly devoted exclusively to the Morris Gallery program. It's not a narrative, but a serial allegory - one basic image repeated, in variations and on three screens, during a 90-minute cycle.

One doesn't have to watch all of it, and no doubt you won't want or need to; for me, about 20 minutes in the darkened chamber conveyed the essence. This is the image:

A figure emerges from a gray, fuzzy miasma, walking slowly toward the camera (and the viewer), becoming more distinctly defined as it grows larger.

At what would be the picture plane in a painting, the scene shifts abruptly from black-and-white to color, as the person walks into, and through, a drenching wall of falling water, up to that point invisible.

The figure emerges from the deluge, distressed, momentarily disoriented, perhaps even in pain. He/she slowly turns around and walks back through the aqueous curtain and, as the picture reverts to gray, slowly recedes into darkness.

All three screens, which form a three-sided array, are active, but each displays a different version of this sequence that is either behind or ahead of the other two.

So the action is continuous, and accompanied by an alternating crescendo and diminuendo of roaring water. Several dozen "everyman" characters of different races, male and female, old and young, most in colorful clothing, act out the ordeal.

The most plausible interpretation of this piece is birth-death, and perhaps even resurrection. It presents itself almost immediately, to the exclusion of any other. And yet it does so in purely existential, not religious, terms, as a vivid visualization of the central mystery of being.

Viola doesn't attempt to clarify or resolve this mystery, he simply animates it with his typically lush palette. The message is as old as time, and as inscrutable as the future. An artist can't get much more spiritual than that.

Medieval alabasters. "Object of Desire" at the Princeton University Art Museum offers a more traditional view of spirituality, or more specifically of religious devotion.

It consists of 60 alabaster sculptures, mostly high-relief plaques dating from the late Middle Ages, that represent a particular type of religious art not often seen in America.

As British scholar Francis Cheetham wrote, these sculptures "constitute a large part of our surviving heritage of late Medieval English art."

They were carved in the English Midlands between the mid-14th and mid-16th centuries, primarily in the city of Nottingham, which was close to quarries of high-quality alabaster. All the examples in the traveling show were lent by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

They are survivors of the Protestant Reformation, which convulsed England under King Henry VIII in the late 1530s. Many of the alabaster panels and free-standing sculptures housed in churches and monasteries were destroyed.

Fortunately, specimens that had been shipped to continental Europe were available to collectors and museums when interest in the genre revived in the late 19th century.

The majority of the carvings were made as multiunit altarpieces encased in wooden frames. The exhibition includes as a prime example five panels depicting the Passion of Christ from an oratory of the Knights Templar on Mallorca.

The Passion was one of three principal, and familiar, themes favored by alabaster carvers and their customers, the others being the life of the Virgin Mary and events associated with popular saints such as Michael, Christopher, Anne, George, Catherine, and John the Baptist.

A few scenes are gruesome, such as the beheading of St. Catherine, the flagellation of John the Baptist, and the disemboweling of St. Erasmus. Generally, though, the sculptures encourage devotion; tableaux of the Virgin and Child and heads of John the Baptist were typically favored for this purpose.

There aren't any mysteries or ambiguities in these works because they come from a period when religion was still intrinsic to everyday life. They are analogous to biblical illustrations in that the characters and the events portrayed were as familiar to the faithful as rhythms of nature.

This accounts in part for a sense of standardization; the panels tend to be roughly the same size and the iconography similar through the decades.

A relatively soft and easily carved stone, alabaster chipped and scratched easily, which made it unsuitable for large works or, because it absorbed water, for outdoor display.

Its softness also meant that, unlike marble, it couldn't be carved too finely, so the sculptors avoided intricate details. That contributes to the overall stylistic homogeneity of these examples.

Traces of gilding and polychroming suggest that, like the figures on the Parthenon, these sculptures were more vivacious when they left the shop than they are after seven centuries of use.

Today, most have weathered to the cafe au lait of antique ivory. Even in that state, though, they evoke an ethos of intense and widespread daily devotion that Western societies have pretty much abandoned.

Art: Spiritual Images

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