Author Marita Sturken talks to artist Bill Viola and reviews his retrospective show which was held at the Whitney Museum in New York City in April 1982, and followed his return from an artist in residence stint with Sony Corporation at their Atsugi plant in Japan.

Viola's art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience and cycle - birth, death, love, emotion and a kind of humanist spirituality. An ongoing theme that Viola constantly explores is dualism, the idea that you can't understand what you're looking at unless you know its opposite. For example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, stressed and calm, loud and quiet, etc.