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The QUINTET of REMEMBRANCE
26 May 2009
St. Petersburg – Peter and Paul’s Fortress
 
To our friends in St. Petersburg,
Kira and I are very sorry we cannot be there in person with all of you for this special occasion. We fell in love with your magnificent city last summer when we were there for the Tristan opera, and so we were thrilled to know that one of my works would be presented in this special place of historical and cultural significance, the Peter and Paul Fortress. It is an honor to present a work here in this place, and it is an honor, always, to show work to people in a free and public environment. I wonder what the various political groups who controlled the fortress over the centuries would think if they knew that in the 21st century, so-called “avant-garde,’ radical art would be shown here. Yet, in this season of Spring, as the newly awakened life force of nature regenerates the land, this seems correct.
In any age, it is most often the artists and poets who first identify and give form to the direction and shape of change. New art is always about a rebirth, a “Renaissance.” Just as the Renaissance of 600 years ago was empowered by the confluence of scientific and humanistic schools of thought, the current technological revolution, with its accompanying social and political forces, is also transforming contemporary societies in profound and unprecedented ways. Yet, every revolution, positive or negative, has a human toll. We are emotional beings, and we can suffer pain and be wounded in our souls as easily as we can in our material bodies.
The work we are showing here today, The Quintet of Remembrance, involves this unseen, emotional center of our beings that lies beneath the surface. Its essence may be invisible to the eye or to the camera, yet its agitations and disturbances can be clearly recognized in the traditional “mirror of the soul,” the human face. Just like a small pebble thrown into a pond can disrupt the fragile image it reflects, an emotional disruption can send waves of undulating distortions out to the very boundaries of the self, taking a very long time, even a lifetime, to settle and return the image, and its host, to their original state. It is this continual process of disturbance and renewal that defines the essence of a human being, and it is the arc of emotion, the movement of consciousness and feeling rather than the visual image, that is at the heart of this work.
The Quintet of Remembrance was first presented at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in the summer of 2001. When the planes hit the World Trade Center towers on September 11, the work took on a deeper and specific relevance to the museum’s visitors. Over time, the gallery room constructed for the piece gradually became a place of contemplation and prayer, and the museum extended the run of the exhibit into the following year to accommodate the people who wanted to see it, many of them repeat visitors. Grief and pain can be difficult to experience, let alone comprehend, and watching a work of mine turn from being a personal artwork about the death of my parents into an object for mourning and consolation by a group of strangers was gratifying and humbling. Watching visitors see the work in that context, and remembering the performers themselves going through intense emotional experiences that left them drained, I thought about pain and suffering and was reminded of the words of Rumi, the Sufi poet and mystic of the 13th century, who said:
“The wound is the place where the light enters you.”
Kira and I would like to thank Elena Kolovskaya and the Pro Arte Foundation for their work in bringing this piece here to St. Petersburg, and to all the sponsors and workers who made this presentation possible. We send you are warmest regards from California and best wishes for a successful exhibition.
Thank you,
Bill Viola and Kira Perov
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2010 • [July]
Russian 197046,
Saint-Petersburg,
Petropavlovskaya Fortress,
Nevsky Curtina,
Left side
Pro Arte
Foundation
[map]
Phones:
+7 (812) 233-0040,
+7 (812) 233-0553,
Fax:
+7 (812) 233-0040
e-mail:
office@proarte.ru
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