Bill Viola

Acquired directly from the artist

London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Bill Viola, Five Angels for the Millennium and Other New Works, May - July 2001 (another example exhibited)

Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, 2003, pp. 98 and 271, illustrated in color (another example exhibited)

This work is in good working order. Other than light handling marks along the edges of the monitors, there are no apparent condition problems with this work.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING CONDITION OF A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD "AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF SALE PRINTED IN THE CATALOGUE.

This work is accompanied by a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist.

Universally acknowledged as one of the great pioneers of Video Art, Bill Viola uses the element of time provided by his medium to reinvestigate one of the fundamental themes of art history: human feeling and emotion.  Renaissance artists across Europe were constantly trying to refine the painterly rendition of human feelings in all their complexity and fleetingness. Thanks to their perfect understanding of the interrelation between a given feeling and its physiological response the likes of Leonardo and van Eyck managed at the heights of their career to translate in the painterly world some of the most intense - and often most conflicting- psychic state of their models. But their medium limited this to a fixed moment in time. With his innovative use of video, Viola picks up on this theme precisely were it been halted centuries ago. In Witness, Viola renders with a great poignancy the palette of variations which stands between one archetypical emotion after the other.  As the artist stated "[In this work] three contemporary woman maintain an intensive, locked gaze on the camera as they undergo a succession of strong emotional states. Joy, sorrow, anger and fear unfold on their faces in slow motion as continuous gradations of expression. The three moving-image portraits are presented as individually framed pictures mounted in a row on a wall. The women relentlessly staring eyes call out for the viewer to return their gaze. Their unbroken lines of sight cut across time and space to meet the viewer's eyes in a continuously shifting stream of emotional strength and vulnerability." (Bill Viola, Witness, 2001)

Although traditionally the video medium doesn't allow the viewer's gaze to settle on the subject, Viola's dexterous use of slow motion and state of the art digital rendering gives the beholder an unprecedented opportunity to scrutinize each stage of one's emotional changes. This new psychological insight triggers an almost contagious effect from the part of the beholder who slowly but surely entwines his feelings with the one represented in Witness, until a point where a mirror effect starts to come into play. As Peter Sellars noted "Witness is an elusive and irreducible piece which testifies directly to the interchangeability and interrelatedness of opposite moods and states the impossibility of sustaining "pure" emotion. You can feel your own mood shift as you watch three women open their eyes in calm and then look back at you with powerfully suggestive and even contagious emotional indicators. The piece is a rollercoaster ride through your own emotional landscape and brings home the confusion that we experience in the face of different versions, contradictory accounts and the divergent explanations of the world around us." (Exh. Cat., Los Angeles, The Getty Museum, Bodies of Light' in Bill Viola: The Passions 2003, p. 177)