spiral

"out beyond ideas of wrong doing and right doing
there's a field, I meet you there"

Why are you so afraid of silence, silence is the root of everything.
If you spiral into its void a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.

Mevlana Rumi

"What is art but life upon the larger scale, the higher. When, graduating up in a spiral line of still expanding and ascending gyres, it pushes toward the intense significance of all things, hungry for the infinite."

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

Bill Viola

'I'm interested in moments and places of instability: thresholds of transition in between two things. for example, my favourite times of year are springtime and the autumn. in the springtime, the flowers try to come up but sometimes it's still snowing. in the autumn, you have the trees holding on to their life, some of them are loosing their leaves and some are green. those are the kind of moments I like, where things are not clear and you can't decide between this and that. the age of computers is a very dangerous time for us because computers work on 'yes or no', '1 or 0'. there's no maybe, perhaps or both, it's only yes or no. I think this is affecting our consciousness, because nature doesn't work that way. nature works on maybe and poetry comes from maybe, not from a hard fixed order. those kind of transitions and thresholds are very very important in my work.

'... we have all come from a place of the unborn and we
are all here for a short period of time. we have to cross a
threshold of water and light to arrive and to leave. we will
ultimately all go back to this eternal non-spatial, non-temporal
world of potentiality. a lot of my work deals with questions
like this ...
http://www.designboom.com/eng/interview/viola.html

VIOLA: In terms of video, it's interesting to note that when you look at Old Master pictures in historical art museums, there are two natural elements conspicuously under-represented - water, up close and flowing, and fire. There are reasons for that - those elements represent the fundamental dynamism of nature, and that's impossible to embody in a static form.
DOUGLAS: Unless you're Turner..

VIOLA: O yes! He got it when he was out in that storm tied to the mast! So did he Abstract Expressionists in a different way - they made the important breakthrough of equating the fluidity of paint with the flowing of time. They were really painting time itself.

Douglas, S 2005 The ArtInfo Interview: Bill Viola. ArtInfo, James Cohan Gallery, NY

You've been walking the ocean's edge, holding up your robes
to keep them dry.
You must dive naked under, and deeper under, a thousand
times deeper and deeper under

Rumi