Bill Viola, a pioneer in the fields of new media, video and installation art, has died at the age of 73 at his home in Long Beach, California.
For five decades, his installations have found new uses for cutting-edge audio and visual technology, and his work draws on spiritual and philosophical traditions from both the East and the West to explore the human experience of birth, death and consciousness. “I see media technologies not as being in opposition to our inner selves, but rather as reflecting them,” he said in a 2007 lecture.
of Observerart critic Laura Cumming said of the 2001 exhibition: Five Angels of the Millennium“The most powerful show by a living artist currently on view in the UK…Viola has become the Rembrandt of the video age, an artist who has advanced the emotional and aesthetic content of the medium more than any of his contemporaries.”
While video was his primary medium, Viola produced many acclaimed works on videotape and always pushed the boundaries of the practice. His first high-definition video works were Going out at noonwas commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Berlin and New York in 2002 as a five-part fresco depicting the cycle of life from birth to death.
He frequently collaborated with musicians, including with the Ensemble Modern in Frankfurt in 1994 and the industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails in 2000, and with director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on a new production of Richard Wagner’s opera Ensemble Modern. Tristan and IsoldeSince 2004, they have toured internationally.
Two special orders St Paul’s Cathedral video production – 2014 Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) And in 2016 Mary – The first permanent exhibition of video art in a Church of England cathedral. In his later years he continued to experiment with new technologies, completing a video game in 2018. Night JourneyAbout seeking enlightenment.
Viola was born in Queens, New York in 1951. His work has reached audiences around the world, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Venice Biennale, the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens. He received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in Experimental Studio from Syracuse University in 1973 and began his career at a time when video technology was rapidly developing. After graduating, Viola moved to Florence, Italy, where he worked at art/tapes/22, an early video art studio.
His later works show the clear influence of the Old Masters, especially Michelangelo, and his works have been exhibited alongside those of Michelangelo in numerous venues, from the Cathedral in Florence to the Royal Academy of Arts in London. Bill Viola/Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth Fourteen drawings by Michelangelo from the museum’s collection were exhibited alongside 12 of Viola’s video installations.
In 1977, Viola was invited by cultural and artistic director Kira Perov to travel to Melbourne, Australia, and the following year she joined him in New York, where they married and began a lifelong creative collaboration.
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The impact of Viola’s work has been recognised with awards and retrospectives: in 2017, the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao exhibited Viola’s work from 1976 to 2014, attracting more than 700,000 visitors.
Viola wrote in 1989: “I realized that the most important place where my work could exist was not in the museum gallery, nor in the screening room, nor on the television or video screen itself, but in the minds of the spectators who saw it.”
