A solitary man embarks on a psychoactive journey across Southern California’s mind-expanding Mojave Desert in this excerpt from Bill Viola’s “Inner Passage,” a video homage to the British land artist Richard Long. This week saw the opening of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures at Blain|Southern gallery in London, featuring two storeys of new work. “In this landscape, the physical body confronts extremes of endurance in the form of scorching heat, numbing cold, blinding light, impenetrable darkness, infinite distance and forced confinement,” the Queens-born, Long Beach-based artist explains in his catalog statement. “It is also where the metaphysical extremes of loneliness, isolation, stress, anxiety and fear meet the forces of overwhelming beauty, mystery, wonder and ecstasy. Between these two states lies the present moment, with all its uncertainty and promise.” Viola’s early 1970s video works were genre-defining and in the past 40 years his oeuvre has continued to evolve the impact and scope of the medium, engaging with new technologies while remaining steeped in a spiritual investigation of a shared human condition, influenced by both Eastern and Western mysticism. Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1995, and large solo exhibitions of his work have since been held at such major international venues as the Whitney Museum of Art in New York and the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome.