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拍品专文
Incrementation is a video installation that functions as a metaphysical self-portrait. Essentially consisting only of a monitor displaying a video portrait of the head of the artist and a numerical LED display that counts incrementally each of the artist's breaths, the work suggests that human life can be read purely as a temporal entity that is calculable and represented by a finite number of breaths.
Using modern technological apparatus to display this deceptively simple idea, Viola also raises questions about the human body and the human soul. The displaying of only the artist's head on the video monitor generates the effect of a dismembered or disembodied human life that is reduceable by such technology to a simple incremental number. At the same time, however, this work, like many of Viola's works, is an artistic response to and an illustration of one of the sayings of the great Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jallaludin Rumi (1207-1273); "This breath of ours, by degrees, steals away our souls from the house of the earth."
This is a saying that explores the Sufi notion of breath and breathing as a bridge between man and God. The breath is a divine presence within us - a concept that has given rise to the idea of our Creator 'breathing' life into inanimate matter in order to make it live. This concept when looked at from the point of view of Western Rationalism also reveals breath and breathing as a distinction between animate and inanimate matter. An indication of life, it is also a constant reminder of our mortality. When looked at objectively, dispassionately and rationally, without regard to the mystery or mysticism of life, breathing can also be seen not as a bridge between ourselves and God but as a bridge between birth and death. There are a finite number of breaths in any life and it is this concept that this machine showing Viola's image and counting his breaths reflects. In human terms, to measure a life by counting the number of breaths is absurd, yet in rational, mechanical and perhaps even medical terms, it is not, it is logical.
Concentration on and control of one's breathing is the foundation of all meditation and all paths to the higher consciousness expounded by Eastern religion and mysticism. In Incrementation, Viola presents a visual metaphor of a modern Western equivalent.
Using modern technological apparatus to display this deceptively simple idea, Viola also raises questions about the human body and the human soul. The displaying of only the artist's head on the video monitor generates the effect of a dismembered or disembodied human life that is reduceable by such technology to a simple incremental number. At the same time, however, this work, like many of Viola's works, is an artistic response to and an illustration of one of the sayings of the great Persian poet and Sufi mystic Jallaludin Rumi (1207-1273); "This breath of ours, by degrees, steals away our souls from the house of the earth."
This is a saying that explores the Sufi notion of breath and breathing as a bridge between man and God. The breath is a divine presence within us - a concept that has given rise to the idea of our Creator 'breathing' life into inanimate matter in order to make it live. This concept when looked at from the point of view of Western Rationalism also reveals breath and breathing as a distinction between animate and inanimate matter. An indication of life, it is also a constant reminder of our mortality. When looked at objectively, dispassionately and rationally, without regard to the mystery or mysticism of life, breathing can also be seen not as a bridge between ourselves and God but as a bridge between birth and death. There are a finite number of breaths in any life and it is this concept that this machine showing Viola's image and counting his breaths reflects. In human terms, to measure a life by counting the number of breaths is absurd, yet in rational, mechanical and perhaps even medical terms, it is not, it is logical.
Concentration on and control of one's breathing is the foundation of all meditation and all paths to the higher consciousness expounded by Eastern religion and mysticism. In Incrementation, Viola presents a visual metaphor of a modern Western equivalent.