Emotional Systems
Okay, an admittance, I don’t usually like all performance art (pls to be disregarding that last Yoko worship, I guess). Makes me a bad dancer, a bad art historian, sure, but there you go. But there is a lovely, perverse simplicity to the work below. Like the best kind of art, impo, it refuses mercy, and literally preys on and plays on the basic physio-emotional human responses. (Esp. the ones we are ashamed of?) Shunt aside the Biblical allusions, or the author’s insistence on 9/11-vision, take a line of commuters rubber-necking at a car wreck, put it in a gallery space, and there you have Observance:
Bill Viola, Observance, 2002.
“Actors enter and exit the performance space with their eyes fixed on a set point that remains hidden but seem to be located in the spectator’s space. Although we are not permitted to see the cause of the performers grief, we can guess that death and loss are the reason for their emotion. […] The face of most visitors, when entering the room and seeing the video, becomes solemn and almost sad. In neuroscientific terms, Viola’s work illustrate how empathy can emerge through visual impact and the triggering of mirror neurons, inducing what can correspond to an involuntary act of ‘mimesis’.”
— Regine, via Emotional Systems, at the Strozzina in Florence via We-make-money-not-art via shootingelephants. (thx SE: super-rad link!)
