Bill Viola Quotes

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.

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.

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.

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.

Live your Art. Don’t think about it.

People have experiences in art museums today that they used to have in church.

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.

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.

Art has always had as its test in the long term the ability to speak to our innermost selves.

A doctor once told me that with crying you aren’t sure what its derivation is. If someone comes at you with a knife, you don’t cry: you scream, you try to run. When it’s over and you’re OK, that’s when you cry.

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

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.