London

What is it? A form of art that relies on moving pictures and audio which began in the ’60s.

The experience Video is the artistic medium I’ve always been least interested in. I’m suspicious of its anti-professionalism – the sense that nobody involved knows much about photography or lighting or editing, and that it doesn’t matter. I know that’s partly the point, and why Fluxus artists like Dick Higgins and Yoko Ono were attracted to it in the late 1960s. But I don’t like faux-naive art and whenever I think of video art I think of Andy Warhol’s famously boring eight-hour study of the Empire State Building. Which is unfair, because it isn’t a video; it’s on film. But I’m sure he would have made it on video if he could… Feature continues

Apart from the ‘Nantes Triptych’, which is impossible to avoid in Tate Modern, I’d never seen Bill Viola’s work, and I knew almost nothing about him before I went along to the St Olave’s College half of his new show ‘Love/Death: The Tristan Project’. I quickly found myself disregarding the ‘Tristan und Isolde’ dimension – and treating the show as a sort of High Definition son et lumière. It’s all about the sheer force of Viola’s elemental imagery. Unease that parts of it were too suggestive of the visual language of advertising (the couple holding hands wandering into the sea in the grainy, black-and-white ‘Lover’s Path’) gave way to real admiration, especially – and I know this sounds perverse – for the sound design. Dolby 5.1 is old hat now, yet I’ve never heard it used as effectively as in ‘Tristan’s Ascension’, when a tower of water thunders down onto Tristan’s prone corpse. I felt totally immersed.

I deliberately didn’t research Viola before I went. Now I know how important he is and have read the (mostly bad) reviews the show received, I can see how people might dislike its ponderousness and mysticism. Adrian Searle concluded harshly in the Guardian that the show was ‘lousy as art’. If, like Searle, I’d sat through countless Viola shows over the years, I’m sure I would be bored rigid by his fire/water, light/dark, noise/silence shtick. But it was my first time, and I found it moving and peculiarly powerful. At least part of that is down to the space. St Olave’s cavernous halls turn the show into a sort of walk-through installation.

Some pundits believe that in the near future, when paper-thin plasma screens become the norm, video will become the default medium in our homes as well as galleries. As long as there’s an option to turn the sound down…

What to say
‘You can see how Viola incorporates the theme of renewing cycles of life into the sensory environment which he creates.’

What not to say
‘When is there going to be a car chase?’

Where to start
Sketch shows artists’ videos during the day – Catherine Sullivan is on now. Christian Marclay’s ‘Video Quartet’ is on display at the Tate Modern. And look out for Chinese video art taking over Battersea power station in October.