Affects and medium: re-imagining media differences through Bill Viola's The Quintet of the Astonished

摘要

With the introduction of moving image artworks like film and video into the traditional art museum setting, a new way of instantiating relationships between different art and media forms has appeared. The video artist Bill Viola has been among the most important artists in the encounter between the traditional art museum and contemporary video art. While some critics, such as Rosalind Krauss, think that Viola's recent artworks 'derealize the medium' altogether, this paper argues by contrast that the aesthetics experience of his work forces the viewer to re-imagine the relationship between different art and media forms. The focus of analysis lies on Viola's The Quintet of the Astonished (2000) from The Passions series. The paper takes its cue from the concept of affect, as developed in the writings of Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, but insists on the necessity of introducing an empirical observer in the equation. The embodied confrontation with the moving image as the actual spectator enters the museum, which is mostly ignored in Deleuze and Guattari's writings, demonstrates the complexities of ways of re-imagining affectively media relations, whilst discussing theories of art, cinema, and media history.