106. Bill Viola, The Greeting

Slowing down to notice

Bill Viola, The Greeting, 1995, 10-minute video/sound installation (photo by Kira Perov). Collection of the Fort Worth Modern Art Museum.

Bill Viola’s super-slow-motion videos reveal actions and emotions so fleeting they are lost on minds accustomed to moving quickly through the world.

The Greeting was a 45-second encounter that Viola stretched into ten minutes. Two women conversing are interrupted by a third, who appears to be pregnant. One of the women clearly knows her well, smiling and embracing her, while the other stands apart. The woman who has approached leans in and whispers something in her friend’s ear, momentarily excluding the third woman, whose face looks somber. Throughout it all, the women’s colorful dresses billow in the breeze.

Because the scene has been slowed down so dramatically, tiny nuances of body language, glances and gestures that would go unnoticed are suspended in our awareness. The ordinariness of the event—a conversation interrupted, it happens all the time—becomes fraught and layered with meaning.

Viola based this work on a painting from 1528 by Jacopo da Pontormo, who depicted The Visitation, the moment in the New Testament when the Virgin Mary tells her cousin Elizabeth that she is expecting a child. In the painting, it’s as if the suffering that is to come can already be read in the women’s faces. But Viola’s work is not explicitly religious—he calls it The Greeting, not Visitation, and aside from its Renaissance look and feel, it is an ordinary, secular scene. What the slow motion reveals is that there is something monumental, even sacred, in the everyday.

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Links:

• Bill Viola, The Greeting - Whitney Museum of American Art

• Remembering Bill Viola, the artist whose video work expresses the heights and depths of human emotions – Louis Jebb, The Art Newspaper, July 15, 2024

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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