On the threshold between life and death

I've never been a fan of video art. Maybe it's because my attention span jumps like a hyper kangaroo or maybe I just don't know how to appreciate it. (It referring to the video art, not the hyper kangaroo.)

Enter Bill Viola's Ocean Without A Shore. (Look it up. But only after reading this.)

My entire time in the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne was spent with this piece. The introduction for Ocean Without A Shore states that it "explores the threshold between life and death, or as the artist has stated, 'the presence of the dead in our lives'."

For someone like me who feels compelled to record my experiences in scribbled sketches or scraps of brochures, it's frustrating to spend this much time with art this amazing and not be able to take any sketch or image of it with me.

But when all else fails, benches beckon and ink meets paper.

So here, in words scribbled into my journal, is my attempt to preserve my experience of Bill Viola's Ocean Without A Shore immediately after emerging from the room.

~

It's absolutely mesmerizing. You enter a small, darkened room and take a seat on a bench. It's silent except for a constant muffled noise as if you are underwater and water is falling some distance above you. A large vertical video screen is ahead, maybe five feet in height. Two more screens stand guard, one on the left wall, one on the right. All three propped up on altar-like structures.

Newcomers stand uncertainly at the entrance before their eyes adjust to the heavy darkness.

Each screen is fuzzy, noisy, dark, and grey, with tiny muffled figures in the distance, one figure per screen.

Slowly, one figure starts to move forward. Slowly, ghostly. Their image shifts, blurs, falters, even as they grow larger in their approach.

A sheet of water, invisible prior to contact, separates them from us.

They begin to cross the threshold into the world of the living. One figure's fingertips graze the sheet of water, testing, testing. Another figure walks erect, chest pushing ahead of neck, nose ahead of forehead. No hesitation. Yet another presses their palm to, then through, the liquid sheet. Another bows their head and pushes through, unseeing.

Noise of falling, rushing water fills the room, increasing in intensity as more of the person's mass interrupts the flow of the water

As they emerge, color floods their drenched figures, sometimes with jarring saturation in their attire. They stand in the world of the living for varying lengths of time, with varying degrees of interaction with we living spectators.

Some refuse to open their eyes. The world of the living must be met with caution.

Others hold your gaze. Disconcertingly.

One old woman emerges with great joy on her face. Contagious joy. But it soon turns into a troubled expression as if she knows she can't stay. She lingers for a very long time once she passes through the water back to death. Even in death she is reluctant to leave the living, breathing.

A woman dressed in vibrant green has her head bowed slightly, to the side as if listening, deliberating. She takes a very long time to open her eyes. But when she finally does... slowly... she lingers...

And as she stands there cautiously in the world of the living, a man in the middle frame walks quickly to the water, through the water, and stands surveying this world. He puts his hands on his hips as if he doesn't care much for what he sees. He turns and walks back, easily, quickly. All this while, the woman lingers on...

The people do not emerge from the left to right frames in an orderly fashion with similar speeds. Life is not predictable. Death is not predictable. We are not predictable.

They make contact with the water differently. They move through it differently.They are individual and unique in how they enter the world of the living and how they respond to it.

But the constant truth is glaring. Invariably, every single one of them must leave and return to death. And we, sitting in a darkened room in the world of the living, can't help but feel ...