VIDEO HEAVEN : Long Beach Artist of Image and Sound Gets a $245,000 Surprise

Bill Viola, a video artist, whose work ranges from a tape of an exploding television set to a recording of a primal scream, is used to taking his audience by surprise.

But he was the one caught off guard when a telephone call dragged him away from his tiny Long Beach workroom last week. That was the day the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation called to award him a $245,000 grant with no strings attached.

“It’s like an angel came down from heaven,� Viola said. “It has given us a level of security I have never known before--I know I’ll be able to feed my family and keep a roof over their heads. That’s pretty incredible.�

Viola, 38, is one of 29 Americans to receive a MacArthur Fellowship this year. The fellows, who receive tax-free stipends ranging from $150,000 to $375,000 over five years, are chosen by a secret committee of more than 100 people in various professions around the country.

For Viola, the award will enable him to continue his life’s work--recording images and sounds of the real world on tape--without having to worry about paying the bills. “Some people who get a lot of freedom don’t know what to do with it--that’s not me,� Viola said in an interview Tuesday. “My whole life is a source of raw material for my work.�

Viola’s newest exhibit, scheduled to open in a San Francisco warehouse in early October, is just one example.

The exhibit, called “Sanctuary,� will feature a living pine forest in which a video of a woman giving birth is shown on a television monitor. The recent birth of his son, Blake, was the source of inspiration for the exhibit, Viola said.

Experiment in Tape

The artist, whose work has been displayed in major museums throughout the world, began experimenting with a videotape recorder while an undergraduate at Syracuse University. There, he made “Information,� a 30-minute tape of a television set self-destructing.

“It’s like sticking a vacuum cleaner from your mouth into your ear and screaming at the top of your lungs,� Viola said of the film. “It is a tape a lot of people find disturbing, but there’s a brutal beauty to it.�

That idea was also inspired by a life experience--the time Viola broke a television monitor by inadvertently plugging an input wire into the output plug. “The electric system was perturbed,� Viola explained.

These days, Viola is working on a project that combines the concept of sleep with natural images filmed on a recent trip to the Southwestern United States.

“The relationship we have to the wilderness is the same relationship we have between our waking life and our unconscious that comes out in sleep,� Viola said.

Two in California

Viola is one of two Californians to receive a MacArthur Fellowship this year. The other, Oakland engineer Ralf David Hotchkiss, received a $260,000 stipend from the foundation for his design of wheelchairs. Hotchkiss, a paraplegic, designs wheelchairs that can be built inexpensively from local resources in developing countries.

The MacArthur Foundation is the legacy of John D. MacArthur, multimillionaire founder of Bankers Life & Casualty Co., who died in 1978, and his wife Catherine, who died in 1981.

Other winners named by the foundation were:

Anthony G. Amsterdam, 53, a New York law professor known for his scholarship in the areas of civil rights and criminal procedure; Byllye Avery, 51, an Atlanta-based founder and director of the National Black Woman’s Health Project; Alvin J. Bronstein, 61, a Washington, D.C., lawyer specializing in prison rights; Leo William Buss, 35, a Middlefield, Conn., biologist who studies contemporary evolutionary history; Jay Cantor, 40, a Cambridge, Mass., writer and literary theorist.

George D. Davis, 46, a Wadhams, N.Y., ecologist specializing in public-private land use; Allen Grossman, 57, a Lexington, Mass., poet and literary critic; John Harbison, 50, a Cambridge, Mass., composer and performer of contemporary music; W. Keith Hefner, 34, a New York publisher who encourages minority youth to pursue news writing careers; John Rice Irwin, 58, a Norris, Tenn., collector of southern Appalachian folk art; Ellendea Proffer, 44, an Ann Arbor, Mich., publisher of Soviet literature.

Martin Puryear, 48, a Chicago sculptor; Bernice Reagon, 46, a Washington, D.C., director of a women’s a capella quintet and Smithsonian Institution curator; Theodore Rosengarten, 44, a McClellanville, S.C., historian whose work focuses on the black American experience; Margaret Rossiter, 45, an Ithaca, N.Y., historian of women scientists; George Russell, 66, a Cambridge, Mass., jazz musician; Daniel Janzen, 50, a Philadelphia biology professor.

Aaron Lansky, 34, a Holyoke, Mass., director of the National Yiddish Book Center; Jennifer Alice Moody, 36, a Cypress, Tex., prehistoric archeologist; Errol Morris, 41, a New York documentary film maker; Vivian Paley, 60, a Chicago elementary school teacher; Richard Powers, 32, a writer living in Heerlen, Netherlands; Pam Solo, 45, a Cambridge, Mass., co-director of the Institute for Peace and International Security; Claire Van Vliet, 55, a West Burke, Vt., graphic artist; Baldemar Velasquez, 42, a Toledo labor organizer; Eliot Wiggington, 46, a Rabun Gap, Ga., high school English teacher and Patricia Chapple Wright, 44, a Durham, N.C., anthropologist.

RELATED STORY in Calendar