There’s a church in Rome, just near Colosseo, called San Clemente.  It’s not one of the showstopper churches, at least not from the outside. However, venture inside and descend into the depths and it becomes an eerie and remarkable experience.

The church one enters from street level was built in the 12th century.  It features golden mosaic walls, a homely courtyard.  It also features, over in a corner, a makeshift set of stairs leading to the structures that have been excavated below the present-day church.  The first structure is the remains of an earlier basilica built in the 4th century, a set of faded murals showing the halos and faces of long ago saints.

The journey does not stop there.  There are more stairs, this time descending deep below the road surface to the remains of an apartment building built in the 1st century AD.

At this level, one stands in the dank Roman earth and looks through a grille to the remaining chamber of the building, a chamber made into a mithræum, a temple for the worship of the pagan god, Mithras.  In this small cave there are two stone benches, and between them an altar showing a relief of Mithras slaying a bull.  And as one is standing there, staring at the pagan figure, one suddenly becomes aware of something else.  It is the sound of rushing water, the sound of the Cloaca Maxima, the ancient sewer used to take water to and from the nearby Colosseo.  Built over 2,000 years ago, and here it is, still working, still rushing.

Another subterranean roar

I was reminded of the Cloaca Maxima on hearing another subterranean roar of water, this time in US artist Bill Viola’s mighty video work, Ocean Without a Shore. As the sound of water announces the irruption of the past into the present under San Clemente, so it does in Viola’s work too.

There’s no evidence Viola was thinking of the Cloaca Maxima – the title of the work, for example, is taken from the 12th century Sufi mystic, Ibn Arabi (1165-1240) – but it is poetic to consider it was first displayed in an ancient Venetian church as part of the Biennale in 2007, just 400 kilometres north of San Clemente.

Since 2008, Ocean Without a Shore has been installed in the National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) and now all Melburnians can have the pleasure, a discombobulating one to be sure, of meeting the large cast of Viola’s ghosts swimming up from the depths in their new dark home.

The work features three life-sized video screens, one on each wall, with a bench for viewers making up the fourth side.  What the viewer sees on entering will differ each time, depending on which point of the video sequence has been reached.

On one screen perhaps there’ll be a figure emerging from the gloom, walking towards the screen.  On another, a different figure retreating back into the depths.  On the third screen, maybe, a grey swirling mist, the hint of a figure newly swallowed by the gloom, or not yet emerged.

The climatic moment

Or perhaps the viewer has entered at the climactic moment, the moment in which a figure is completing their solemn journey out of the depths by breaching a sheet of water that appears to lie just behind the screen’s surface.

As each figure approaches the sheet of water, still invisible to the viewer, the dull subterranean roar increases in volume and the first shards of illuminated water begin to strike off the parts of the body going in advance: breasts, noses, mostly hands.  Then, suddenly, the figure is in the midst of it.  Lighted water gushes from the body, clothes stream.  The sound takes off like a jet engine.  And then a moment later they are through, sodden, and the torrent rattles away.

The figure now stands fully lit just behind the screen surface.  As each emerges from their watery trial, plastered with cloth and hair, they are revealed in all the outward particulars of their individuality.  A middle-aged man in shirt and tie, a grandmother, a glamorous woman, a youngish man in a tracksuit jacket, and many others.  At first, despite the outward differences, they appear indistinguishable in tone: flat, unemotional, blank.

It’s not until one watches a few of these emergences that the variations start to show up.  Some of the figures don’t have a smooth passage.  A man in his 40s, limber, bracelets on his wrists, takes two attempts to get through.  A young girl of 9 or 10 merely pokes the sheet of water with a finger and decides not to proceed.  Most moving is an older man in a pink shirt who breaks through hands raised, shoulders hunched as if waiting for a blow, an attitude that scarcely relaxes when he’s through.

After they emerge, each figure stands silent for a few minutes.   Some push the wet hair from their foreheads.  Then, after a time in which nothing much happens, there is the same tiny adjustment as they shift their weight to one foot and slowly begin the journey back.  A few look longingly over their shoulder as they turn; most are unmoved.  They go back through the sheet of water again, and recede slowly into the depths whence they came.

“The presence of the dead in our lives”

The NGV describes Ocean Without a Shore as being

emblematic of Viola’s considered attention to human beings undergoing various states of transformation and renewal.

Certainly, the passage through the water suggests baptism and also, the breaking of the waters at birth.

But Viola himself has something narrower in mind.  For him, the figures swimming out of the subterranean gloom are meant literally as ghosts.  The work, he says, is about “the presence of the dead in our lives,” and is based on a poem by a Senegalese poet, Birago Diop, which includes the following lines:

The dead are never gone:
they are in the shadows.
The dead are not in earth:
they’re in the rustling tree,
the groaning wood,
water that runs,
water that sleeps …

For this viewer, listening to the Cloaca Maxima still, Viola’s video is about the continuing presence of the past, or the permeability of time.  It speaks to me of what the novelist William Faulkner once observed:

The past is never dead. It’s not even past.

*****

Images: San Clemente and National Gallery of Victoria, courtesy Wikipedia (top); still from Ocean Without a Shore (middle), Bill Viola, courtesy The Age; portrait of Bill Viola (bottom), courtesy Bill Viola website.