bill viola: the messenger; seung yul oh: bogle bogle; anthony mccall: drawing with light
The enduring complaint that mixed-discipline festivals are notoriously light on visual art still stands for the commissioned offerings of the 2010 New Zealand International Festival of Arts. Luckily the museums and galleries of Wellington have pulled out all stops to bring audiences a feast of exhibitions. At the NewDowse in Lower Hutt, re-energised under new director Cam McCracken, are a suite of exhibitions, the big cheese being Bill Viola’s The Messenger (1996) a single-channel video work originally commissioned for Durham Cathedral in the United Kingdom. Bringing this work to New Zealand audiences for the first time is a coup. The piece is installed beautifully within a hangar of a gallery, a space often occupied by collection hangs or temporary shows which struggle to address the giddying height of the room.
Having lived in London through the nineties, I have seen my fair share of works by Viola in a range of settings, and have become de-sensitised to the theatrical way they tackle the ‘big themes’; birth, life, death, etcetera. Operatic in scale, The Messenger’s looped sequence shows a pasty naked male rising to the surface of a body of water, taking a breath, opening his eyes, blinking and staring urgently straight at the viewer, before sinking back into the depths.
While most of the people around me were transfixed, a number stopped at the door and would not come any further; whether the scale of the projection was too daunting, or it was too dark, I am not sure. One parent with a gaggle of wee ones came upon the space just as the flaccid penis of the figure loomed large, and they high-tailed it out quick smart—which was