New equipment has made video a state-of-the-art art which is shown, very often, on a flat bright screen. Fourteen works by Bill Viola will be exhibited at the National Gallery from October until January - The Quintet of the Astonished, which took as a starting point Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked, was much admired when it was shown there in 2000. The clarity and sharpness of the images on the screen in which heads changed in slow motion - so slow that it took a moment or two to realise that they were moving at all - was as far from the blurred black and white videos produced in the 1960s and 1970s as Fox Talbot's earliest photographs are from the detailed prints made by the likes of Beato a few decades later.

LRB 11 September 2003 | PDF Download