MaThe most memorable piece by Bill Viola was a video of a man submerged and slowly resurfacing with the cold North Sea below. I travelled from London to Orkney to see a small retrospective of his work, including Ascension, at a pier gallery. StromnessThe trip was well worth it, especially “Ascension,” an uncompromising embrace of a near-death experience with a hypnotic soundtrack of bubbling water.
One hopes his death from complications of Alzheimer’s was as peaceful as the near-drowning that seemed to occur. Viola’s interest in underwater graves was sparked by a childhood experience of being submerged in a lake, but water is not the only way of death in his work. MartyrsInstalled at St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2014, the work features a man sitting expressionless while flames rise all around him – a truly religious piece.
Viola unashamedly sought to resurrect the oldest and most universal power of art. In doing so, he elevated video art from the ghetto of introspective media criticism and made it into a popular spectacle. Artists who had dabbled in video equipment in the 1970s and ’80s were fascinated by the idea of taking up television and exploring what it means to live in an age saturated with video: a matter of importance, yet of intellect. Viola instead pursued the soul.
He set aside the political questions of the media age and the irony of pop culture, using the technology at his disposal to address the same dilemmas we’ve faced in art since the Stone Age: What does it mean to live, and to die? Is there something after death? Do we have souls? And how do people know and love each other? If these big questions seem too vague to you, you might be one of those who finds Viola a bit of an ardent humanist, saccharinely “spiritual.” But his images were always precise and intensely physical.
He was fascinated by the paintings of the Renaissance painter Pontormo. visitIn it, Mary and Elizabeth greet each other in a ballet-like movement, holding hands, while two other women look on nearby. But when, driving to his California studio, he saw a group of women who looked just like Pontormo’s talking in the street, he decided to recreate the painting for the first time on video, building a Renaissance-style street set and dressing the actors in robes in the pale and vibrant colors of Pontormo.
As a result, in 1995 greetingvideo reproductions of great paintings have increased. Appearance“The figure is based on a 15th-century fresco, depicting a young man rising from a tomb and dripping with water (a signature touch). In these works, Viola was exploring the nature of the moving image as well as spirituality. Renaissance paintings, too, depict moving bodies full of life, undulating, sweeping like a breeze. When Viola dramatized such a painting, he was in a sense reversing the process, using the moving image to capture the stillness of the great painting.
The dialogue between motion and stillness is at the heart of his work. We are immersed in video, streaming, surrounded by screens. What makes a piece of this constant flow of vision “art”? It can’t just be on display in a museum. Viola’s work is uniquely intelligent because he asks questions. By fixating on stark images on a screen – a sinking corpse, women greeting each other – he takes up traditional art themes of meditating on death, martyrdom and resurrection. This forces the viewer to fixate on one object, to look again and again, to separate this moment of mystery and meaning from the hectic stream of electronic images that bombard us. Don’t get swept away by the media noise, Viola says.
Since Viola, video and film have become increasingly common in galleries and museums, but the use of moving images in art, like the world around us, is unfocused, constantly shifting and diverse. Even the term “video art” now seems outdated. Instead, artists use screens as casually as we do, using them so lightly and easily that few think in a disciplined way about how to make screen images stand out as true art, much less try to counter and rework the old masters, as Viola did.
Bill Viola will be remembered as one of the most serious and yet most accessible artists to ever pick up a video camera, and it’s no exaggeration to say that as a video artist, he remains unrivaled.
