Bill Viola, a pioneer of video art, is internationally known for works that explore experiences of physical and spiritual transformation-birth, death, waking, dreaming, emergence, transcendence. In 1998, he spent a year as scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute studying representations of the passions in medieval and Renaissance art. Two years later, Viola began a new series of works focusing on extremes of human emotion that included The Quintet of the Silent. To Viola, this new theme offered "a challenge to represent the unrepresentable."
For this piece, Viola assembled five actors in a composition that recalls a Renaissance painting. He instructed the performers "to show pressure, tension, and stress in a general arc of emotion as it enters, manifests, and leaves the body," but allowed them to interpret the instruction in their own way. Viola filmed the video in one minute in real time, but the final work plays in slow motion for fifteen minutes and then repeats in a continuous loop.
The Quintet of the Silent and other works from this series are unusual in Viola's body of work because they do not include a key element-sound. The artist realized early on "that the kind of thing I was after emanates from a human being, from within. . . . Once I started working with the actors, I realized that someone screaming in silence, for example, is incredibly powerful: it just rings in your brain."
Human emotions have infinite resolution. The more you magnify them, they just open up. Infinitely.
-Bill Viola, 1999
