The true work of art
In 1993 I visited the KAOS exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), one of the exhibited works was Bill Viola’s installation “The Theater of Memory”. I saw the title and I walked into the room, there was the tree with the lanterns, the video projection, and the sound, and there was the title “The Theater of Memory”. The experience of the installation was so intense that it never really left me again. More than 30 years later, “The Theater of Memory” still inspires and I still return to it, to me it represents the true work of art.
If you look up “The Theater of Memory” on Bill Viola’s IMDb page, the description says “Presents a psychic landscape or “inscape” in which the viewer experiences the workings of the human mind, in particular, the process of remembrance.”. It is one sentence only, you can use it to confirm your experience, but otherwise you don’t need it. The title “The Theater of Memory” is sufficient to tell us where we are.
You definitely don’t need an artist statement or an explanation, you don’t need an introduction where Bill Viola talks about what he was thinking of when he created the installation, you don’t even have to know who Bill Viola was, to experience this work.
There is a video recording of “The Theater of Memory” at the KAOS exhibition here
