Top Bill Viola Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Bill Viola Biography

Bill Viola (born 1951) is a contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.

Read about Bill Viola in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Bill Viola Quotes

Live your Art. Don't think about it.

Art, Live, Think, Thinking

You are just as qualified as any expert to make a judgment and have a feeling or a response to any work of art.

Art, Experts, Feelings, Judgment, Response, Work

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.

Might, Poem, Simple, Works, Writing

I came of age at the end of the 1960s, just when video was also coming into the world. Companies such as Sony and Panasonic were starting to market it and we artists immediately knew how it could be used.

Age, Artist, Market, Panasonic, Sony, Video

I think we're in an age where artists really have an incredible range of materials at their command now. They can use almost anything from household items - Jackson Pollock used house paint - to, you know, advanced computer systems, to good old oil paint and acrylic paint.

Artist, Artists, Oil, Think, Thinking

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.

Basis, Creative, Essentials, Manipulated, Though, Video

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.

Another World, Side, Sides, Surface, Translucent, World

There is an invisible world out there, and we are living in it.

Invisible, Living, World

I don't believe in originality in art. I think we exist on this earth to inspire each other, through our actions, through our deeds, and through who we are. We're always borrowing.

Actions, Art, Believe, Deeds, Exist, Thinking

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

Away, Infinite, Moving, Ocean, Persian, Water

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.

Beings, Elements, Intellectual, Keys, Thinking

In the mid- to late '60s to the mid-'70s, when I was a student, there was a major change in the thinking about what art can be and how art is made.

60S, Art, Mid, Students, Thinking

I would prefer to be forgotten, then rediscovered in a different age.

Age, Different, Forgotten, Rediscovered

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

Images, Inspiration, Texts, Time, Writing

When I make my work, I am making what I hope to be something functional - a space for individual contemplation and reflection. I want my art to be useful.

Art, Contemplation, Reflection, Space, Useful, Work

The human brain is probably one of the most complex single objects on the face of the earth; I think it is, quite honestly.

Brain, Earth, Honestly, Probably, Think, Thinking

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 theres a feeling that life is interconnected, that theres life in stones and rocks and trees and dirt, like there is in us.

Feelings, Identity, Rocks, Separates, Tree, Trees

I hope we'll be able to see that in our lifetime: the end of the camera! When I'm in Paris, I'll buy a big bottle of champagne and I'll save it for that day, for the day when they'll be no more camera.

Bottles, Buy, Cameras, Hope, Paris, Save

The electronic image is not fixed to any material base and, like our DNA, it has become a code that can circulate to any container that will hold it, defying death as it travels at the speed of light.

Dna, Electronic, Light, Speed, Travels

It only takes a second for an impression to become a vision.

Become, Impression, Takes, Vision

1