Bill Viola’s figures of submersion as techniques of transindividual affect

Abstract

This article seeks to establish a fundamental continuity between distinctive periods in Bill Viola’s work. Examining two relatively early works—The Reflecting Pool (1977–79) and The Passing (1991)—and the more recent piece Self Portrait, Submerged (2013), I consider the artist’s physical presence as a catalyst for an inherent continuity between early formalism and the intense affectivity of the later period. Affect and its transindividual energies were present in Viola even before they came to acquire a more explicit articulation in the 2000s and beyond. We see in Viola’s work a merging of artist and artwork which drastically departs from traditional notions of authorial autonomy and mediation, giving rise instead to an event of transindividual affect. I consider the merging of artist and artwork here in light of Gilbert Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, a process-oriented ontology remarkably resonant with Viola’s art. I rely on Simondon’s concepts of the technical object, the preindividual and the transindividual, to examine: first, Viola’s immanent, transductive relation to his medium as illustrated in The Reflecting Pool; second, the way in which the artist’s participatory witnessing of technological ontogenesis transmutes into a directly affective experience in The Passing; and finally, the confluent affectivity of artist and spectator in Self Portrait, Submerged.