Bill Viola. Images and Memory

Bill Viola, The Sleep of Reason, 1988. Wooden chest, vase and artificial roses, alarm clock, lamp, and video (black-and-white and color, sound), 169 x 230 x 264 inches overall.

fullscreen

In his three-screen video installation The Sleep of Reason (1988), Bill Viola expanded on Francisco de Goya’s print Los Caprichos (1799), translating the bats and owls that fly above the sleeping artist in Goya’s original into a life-size, digitally augmented, and physically disorienting interior. Viola’s works often draw on dreams, hallucination, and memory—spaces in the margins of human consciousness and on the edge of physical reality—to deeply probe the essence of being. He keeps extensive notes, often entire books, of ideas and images seen in his mind’s eye. One vision that has stayed with the artist since childhood is the watery paradise he saw at six years old, when he fell to the bottom of a lake. He recalls a kind of dream world of moving light and color like no place he had ever seen. Images of water appear frequently in Viola’s videos; the artist has gone so far as to compare the medium of video itself to “a kind of electric water.”¹