Bill Viola (1951–2024)

Pathbreaking artist Bill Viola, who was instrumental in expanding the genre of video art into the mainstream, died at his home in Long Beach, California, on July 12. He was seventy-three. Viola had been diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s in 2012. Over a career lasting more than five decades, during which he voraciously adopted new technologies as quickly as they arrived, he created works of intense emotional resonance that touched on such universal themes as birth, death, love, grief, and elements of human consciousness. Often monumental in size and typically featuring the use of slow motion, his time-bending video installations powerfully affected viewers, drawing them in with their expressive subjects, rich tones, and languorous movements and releasing them gasping to the surface with a sense of having been submerged in unknown depths. “There’s another dimension that you just know is there, that can be a source of real knowledge,” said Viola, “and the quest for connecting with that and identifying that is the whole impetus for me to cultivate these experiences and to make my work.”

Bill Viola was born on January 25, 1951, in Flushing, Queens, the middle of three children. His father worked for Pan Am Airways as a manager; his mother taught him to draw. After being publicly lauded by his kindergarten teacher for a finger-painting of a tornado, he set his sights on becoming an artist. A year later, his chances of attaining this goal nearly vanished when he almost drowned after falling into a lake while vacationing with his family. Fished out by an uncle, Viola would credit the near-death experience with shaping his practice. “It was like paradise,” he later recalled. “I didn’t even know that I was drowning. . . . For a moment there was absolute bliss.”

By the age of nine, having demonstrated an early interest in and aptitude for new technologies, Viola was captain of the television squad at his elementary school. On finishing high school, he enrolled at Syracuse University, which was at the vanguard of new media studies. Viola worked nights as a janitor in the school’s technology center in order to gain unfettered access to its new color video system, which he quickly mastered. He produced his first work, a video of his own mirrored reflection titledTape I, in 1972; in 1973, on his graduation, he showed his latest work at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. The following year, Viola was invited by Maria Gloria Bicocchi to serve as technical director of her studio ART/TAPES/22, in Florence, Italy. He spent two years working for the concern, which produced videos for Arte Povera artists, working alongside artists including Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Joan Jonas, Jannis Kounellis, and Mario Merz.

Keeping pace with the rapidly evolving technology of the time, Viola continued to explore the burgeoning field of video art through experimental video and sound installations, electronic music performances, and broadcast-television pieces. In 1977, he was invited by Kira Perov, then the director of cultural events at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, to show his work at the Australian institution. The pair married shortly thereafter, settling in Long Beach in 1981; Viola would later credit her a close collaborator and the director of his studio. His works of the ’70s and ’80s saw him focusing on Eastern art as well as spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Among his well-known works of the time are “The Reflecting Pool,” 1977–80, a five-part series meditating on the various stages of life and drawing from his own near drowning in a video showing a naked man freezing in midair as he jumps into a pool before fading from view entirely and then emerging, dripping from said pool; andReverse Television, 1983, a fifteen-minute video showing people in their living rooms silently watching video cameras as though they were TV sets.

In the 1990s, after the death of his mother, which he not only witnessed but filmed, Viola began to incorporate Western art into his canon. Chief among his works that follow areThe Nantes Triptych, 1992, in which a man suspended under water is flanked one either side by the artist’s dying mother and a woman giving birth;The Crossing, 1996, a room-size two-channel video installation in which a man is consumed by flames beginning at his feet on one screen and subsumed by water pouring from above in the other; andThe Greeting, 1995, a slo-mo video update of Renaissance painter Jacopo Pontormo’s 1528 canvasThe Visitation, which shows a pregnant Mary hailing her cousin Elizabeth, who is pregnant with John the Baptist, as recounted in the Gospel of Luke. In Viola’s version, a forty-five-second single shot slowed down to ten minutes, two women are chatting when a third enters the frame, greeting only one of them, the molasses-like motion allowing the viewer to apprehend details and fleeting emotions typically invisible to the naked eye and imparting tremendous gravitas to an otherwise mundane set of actions.

Later works even more frequently saw Viola looking to Western art, among themCatherine’s Room, 2001, which harks back to Andrea di Bartolo’sCatherine of Siena with Four Blessed Dominicans, ca. 1394–98; andThe Raft, 2004, which recalls Théodore Géricault’s 1819The Raft of the Medusa. Though derided by some critics as bombastic, his work reverberated with audiences around the globe, making him one of the world’s most popular and well-known video artists. Among the collaborations he engaged in were those with industrial band Nine Inch Nails, for whom he created a video suite that served as a backdrop during a tour; and director Peter Sellars, on a production of Wagner’sTristan und Isoldeat the Paris Opera, for which he created an installation and sets. Too, he produced commissions for institutions outside the art world, among them London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral, where his 2014Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire and Water)has pride of place as the first video created for contemplative display in a major church.

Viola represented the US at the Venice Biennale in 1995. Two years later, he was the subject of a major midcareer survey at New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art that traveled to five other institutions in the US and Europe. The Guggenheim Bilbao presented a retrospective of his work in 2017. Among the many museums holding his works are the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Art Institute of Chicago; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Gallery, London. Much decorated, he was the recipient of Japan’s Praemium Imperiale and was made a Commandeur of France’s Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He is survived by Perov and the couple’s two sons.

“I would say that life after death is exactly that right there,” he told Apollo magazine in 2014, pointing to a reproduction of Nantes Triptych. “That’s someone dying, that’s someone being born, and somewhere in between you have this space—I don’t know what to call it even—life-death? It’s a space that is both physical and spiritual, and that’s where you exist for a short period of time. Then your molecules get scrambled,” he concluded, “and you come back as something else.”