Immersion in Bill Viola’s video
art is a singular experience, said
Ilene Dube in Hyperallergic.com.
“It is as if we are dipping into
a pool that brings us into other
realms of consciousness.” The
Queens, N.Y.–born artist, now
68, began producing pioneering
work in the 1970s, when video
art was still in its infancy, and
he remains one of the medium’s
best-known practitioners. His
work is invariably searching and contem-
plative; he often presents simple acts or
interactions in slow motion, “which creates
the sense of a portal into the subjects’ inner
life.” And he is after big game. His art, in
fact, “takes us to the core of humanity,
exploring birth, death, and transcendence.”
Viola’s work at times demands too much
patience, said Thomas Hine in The Phila-
delphia Inquirer. In The Greeting, a 1995
video that purposely evokes a 16th-century
painting of the Virgin Mary informing her
A still from Ascension (2000): A plunge into the deep endExhibit of the week
I Do Not Know What
It Is I Am Like:
The Art of Bill Viola
The Barnes Foundation,
Philadelphia, through Sept. 15
24 ARTS Review of reviews: Art & Music
cousin that she’s pregnant, a 44-second
encounter between women is stretched
to 10 minutes, 22 seconds. “I watched
the whole thing, wondering why.” But I
wouldn’t say the same of 1976’s He Weeps
for You, which presents a live, enlarged close-
up of a water faucet and the droplet that
forms and falls from it roughly every two
minutes. The droplet becomes an unstable
wide-angle lens that takes in the whole room,
including you, the viewer, and it’s “really
something to see.” Still, in a show that prom-
ises profundities, a childhood brush withdeath that Viola often speaks
of “seems to explain almost
too much about his art.” When
he was 4 or 5, he jumped off a
raft and sank to the bottom of
a lake, so mesmerized by the
strange realm he’d entered that
he would have drowned had an
uncle not pulled him to the sur-
face. He later memorialized the
experience in Ascension, a video
installation featuring a clothed
figure plummeting downward
through dark water and never
resurfacing. “There is a religious
dimension to this. But it is the
turbulence and the bubbles that
really grab the eye.”The Barnes isn’t the best place
to see Viola’s art, said Philip Kennicott in
The Washington Post. Each work “requires
a mental effort at quietness and receptiv-
ity,” and the Barnes’ insistence on leaving
its paintings hanging, nearly from floor to
ceiling, doesn’t easily allow sustained focus.
That said, “each one of the works in the
Viola exhibition is an event,” including The
Greeting and the 90-minute title work. His
videos “do everything one wants art to do.
They are arresting, absorbing, and reward-
ing; they tend to suspend time and flood
the mind with thought.”Bon Iver’s latest is “a
sonic masterpiece filled
with indelible songs,”
said Mark Richardson
in The Wall Street
Journal. Taking a slight
step back from the frac-
tured, tech-heavy exper-
imentation of 2016’s 22, A Million, Justin
Vernon and his collaborators in Bon Iver
have now integrated those tactics with the
orchestral folk-rock they’d previously been
known for. Backed by a full band and aided
by numerous collaborators, he has deliv-
ered a 12-song suite that progresses from
jagged sound collages to soaring anthems
while overflowing with “moments when
you grasp something emotionally before
having the words to convey what you feel.”
Given the cryptic lyrics and chopped-and-
diced musical textures, “finding a way into
i,i takes a fair amount of perseverance,”
said Eric Danton in PasteMagazine.com.
Yes, “the bright spots are incandescent,”
particularly the three-song minisuite that
begins with “Hey, Ma.” But despite the stu-
dio skills that Vernon and his mates dem-
onstrate, this “objectively dazzling” album
is “not always easy to love.”
The new Sleater-Kinney
album “all but jettisons
Sleater-Kinney’s long-
time musical identity,”
said Jon Pareles in
The New York Times.
Known for making
“smart, knotty,” guitar-
driven riot-grrrl rock, bandmates Carrie
Brownstein, Corin Tucker, and Janet Weiss
brought in St. Vincent as a producer to
help manage a pivot toward synth pop.
“Unfortunately, most of the time it’s a
wrong turn.” Four years after the celebrated
trio ended a decade-long hiatus with the
brash but purposeful No Cities to Love, and
weeks before this record’s release, the hard-
hitting Weiss quit the band, and the timing
is probably no coincidence. But there’s
still plenty of guitar interplay amid the pop
experimentation, said Katie Rife in AVClub
.com. And despite some songs that express
despair over seeing sexual predators
assume top national posts, “this may be
Sleater-Kinney’s lustiest album yet.” Given
the temptation these days to simply shut
down, “thank goodness that Sleater-Kinney
is striding boldly into the future, bruised and
broken, but still very much alive.”The band Nérija “could
only have come from
London,” said Matthew
Kassel in Pitchfork.com.
The nearly all-female
jazz septet is a prod-
uct of a vital local jazz
scene that draws on
contemporary club genres and “folds in
sounds from all over the world.” These
young musicians “have a familiar rapport
that allows room for risk,” and their “earthy,
atmospheric, and danceable” debut album
taps the songwriting talents of all seven
members. The presence of four horns play-
ing layered lines gives Nérija “the air of a
big band,” but even when the musicians are
trading solos, “the music thrums with ten-
sion while never losing the reggae and funk
bits that remind you this is club music at
heart.” Guitarist Shirley Tetteh’s “sparkling,
rhythmically infectious” flourishes contrast
nicely with the warmth of the horns, espe-
cially on the opening tracks “Nascence”
and “Riverfest,” said Matt Collar in
AllMusic.com. “Last Straw,” the very next
track, mixes a kinetic Afrobeat groove with
angular horns and “sounds like a Blue Note
arrangement of an electronic dance track.”Bon Iver
i,i
++++
Sleater-Kinney
The Center Won’t Hold
++++Nérija
Blume
++++