BILL VIOLA: GOING FORTH BY DAY
Bill Viola approached me to design the book for his exhibition Going
Forth by Day for the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin. Viola is a video artist,
so I gave special consideration to the implications of representing time-
based work in a book format. His work explores the idea of the room
as an instrument, as a living dynamic space where walls and the empty
area they define are an active part of the experience. My thinking was
to activate unexpected surfaces and “corners” of the book through se-
quence, image, text and materials. Multiple images are full-bleed and
placed in a cinematic flow, while vellum sheets with text are interlaced
with the images.
In an earlier book on Viola’s work, Bill Viola for the Whitney Museum, I confronted the sequential and temporal questions a book on video art poses. How can the book (and its designer) introduce a sense of duration or the passage of time? To begin with, we need to differentiate between film and video, as they have profound differences: film evolved basically out of photography (it is a succession of discrete photographs) and video evolved out of audio technology (waves of sound becoming waves of images). In designing the first Bill Viola book, I considered the formal aspect of the video signal as it is generated on the screen: it is composed of two channels and the signal is formed of alternate lines. This translated into a book design bisected horizontally, dividing the ‘page spread’ top and bottom, which in turn made the space much more conducive for sequential images. “The design solution,” co-editor Peter Sellars told me, “for the first time manages to convey the dynamic sense of movement in Bill’s work that is most often lost when, in books, his work is treated as a painting.”
“When I saw her initial designs for the Selected Works section of this book, I felt that I was seeing my work brought to life on the page for the first time. She was able to capture the movement and flow in the work in a way no one has done before. Through all phases and transformations of the project, Rebeca always maintained a passionate desire and perseverance that the book be special, unique, and creatively approached. Her creative powers proved resistant to compromise and she has clocked up the long hours to prove it, well above and beyond what was expected. For this, her determination and faith in the project, I am truly grateful.”
— Bill Viola.
Exhibition Venue: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
Published by: Deutsche Guggenheim
In an earlier book on Viola’s work, Bill Viola for the Whitney Museum, I confronted the sequential and temporal questions a book on video art poses. How can the book (and its designer) introduce a sense of duration or the passage of time? To begin with, we need to differentiate between film and video, as they have profound differences: film evolved basically out of photography (it is a succession of discrete photographs) and video evolved out of audio technology (waves of sound becoming waves of images). In designing the first Bill Viola book, I considered the formal aspect of the video signal as it is generated on the screen: it is composed of two channels and the signal is formed of alternate lines. This translated into a book design bisected horizontally, dividing the ‘page spread’ top and bottom, which in turn made the space much more conducive for sequential images. “The design solution,” co-editor Peter Sellars told me, “for the first time manages to convey the dynamic sense of movement in Bill’s work that is most often lost when, in books, his work is treated as a painting.”
“When I saw her initial designs for the Selected Works section of this book, I felt that I was seeing my work brought to life on the page for the first time. She was able to capture the movement and flow in the work in a way no one has done before. Through all phases and transformations of the project, Rebeca always maintained a passionate desire and perseverance that the book be special, unique, and creatively approached. Her creative powers proved resistant to compromise and she has clocked up the long hours to prove it, well above and beyond what was expected. For this, her determination and faith in the project, I am truly grateful.”
— Bill Viola.
Exhibition Venue: Deutsche Guggenheim, Berlin
Published by: Deutsche Guggenheim
