As announced on his website, artist Bill Viola passed away peacefully at home on Friday, July 12, following a long period of suffering from Alzheimer’s Disease. His lengthy career was marked by explorations of the new opportunities offered by digital video when the technology was in its infancy, and Viola contributed to establishing it as a legitimate medium for art, pushing its expressive possibilities further than they ever had been before. Adopting an experiential and spiritual approach, Viola created some of the most immersive and philosophically dense video installations, posing questions related to human existence in the material world. He kept at it for decades, creating videos and soundscapes with powerful symbolic metaphors of some of the most fundamental experiences: birth, death, consciousness and subconsciousness.
As the artist once explained in a statement, he wanted to examine the “unfolding of consciousness, the revelation of beauty, present even after death, the moment of awe, the space without words, the emptiness that builds mountains, the joy of loving, the sorrow of loss, the gift of leaving something behind for the next traveler.”
Viola’s art was often characterized by a ritualistic, almost mythical tone: slowing down the images, he wanted to encourage viewers to have an enhanced experience of their sense of perception, to exercise a better awareness of their inner world and its innate potential. Diving into notions of transcendence and transformation, his art is characterized by a fluid blending of different religions and spiritualities, combining references to Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism.
“I want to look so close at things that their intensity burns through your retina and onto the surface of your mind. The video camera is well suited to looking closely at things, elevating the commonplace to higher levels of awareness,” said Viola in a statement he gave in 1980. His artworks represent this attempt to inspire sensory and spiritual reawakening and renewal. Instead of being an instrument of detached and passive inurement, the video was, for him, the perfect tool to train a deeper sense of perception and as an avenue to self-knowledge. Slowness, repetition and rhythm allow space for suspension: those were the main elements that turned his video into a contemporary experience of rituals.
Born in 1951 in Queens, New York, Viola had a very early interest in and predisposition to new technologies, and at age 9, he was already the captain of the TV squad at PS 20. Viola received a BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 where encounters with teacher and mentor Jack Nelson, fellow student David Ross (who would become the first video art curator) and artists Peter Campus and Nam June Paik, all helped open his eyes to new possibilities in art making with the new technologies available. After graduation, Viola moved to Florence, Italy, where he absorbed the work of Renaissance masters such as Michelangelo and worked at Art/tapes/22, an early video art studio where he encountered Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Vito Acconci and Joan Jonas. Viola’s first exhibition of major installation work in Europe took place in 1975—”Il Vapore” at Zona in Florence, Italy.
Returning to the States, from 1976 to 1980, Viola worked at New York’s WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory as an artist-in-residence. In 1977, his installation He Weeps for You was presented at Documenta 6 and in 1977, he had his debut at MoMA. In 1985, Viola was invited to participate in the Whitney Biennial by curator John Hanhardt, an early supporter of Viola’s work: he commissioned his Theater of Memory, the first time-based media work to be installed at a biennial. In 1995, Viola represented the U.S. at the 46th Venice Biennale with an ensemble of five complex new installation works titled Buried Secrets. Notably, in the last room of the pavilion, Viola also presented what then became one of his most iconic works, The Greeting, based on Mannerist painter Jacopo da Pontormo’s painting Visitation and which led the way into new expressive and narrative territory for him.
In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized “Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey,” curated by David A. Ross and Peter Sellars with Kira Perov. Featuring sixteen installation works, the survey traveled for two years to six museums in the U.S. and Europe including LACMA, SFMOMA, Art Institute of Chicago, the Stedelijk Museum, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Schirn Kunsthalle and Karmeliterkloster in Frankfurt.
In 2002, his first work on high-definition video, Going Forth By Day, was commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim in New York. This ambitious five-part “fresco” represents the cycle of life, from birth to death, with moments of joy and sorrow, providing an essential existential metaphor, commentary and visual guide. Notably, the work was completed, almost presciently, just before the traumatic events in the United States on September 11, 2001.
Over the years, Viola’s work was the subject of many record-breaking exhibitions around the world. In 2007, he presented Ocean without a Shore at the 52nd Venice Biennale, seen by over 60,000 viewers. In 2006, his exhibition “Hatsu-Yume (First Dream)” at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum attracted over 340,000 visitors. In 2008, “Bill Viola: Visioni interiori” was the largest exhibition of Viola’s work in Italy, with sixteen video installations curated by Perov at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome. And in 2017, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum presented a retrospective of works ranging from 1976 to 2014. It was the largest show to date, with 710,995 visitors. More recent large solo exhibitions coordinated by Perov include “Bill Viola, Encounter” at the Busan Museum of Art in South Korea and “Bill Viola: The Journey of the Soul” at the Pushkin Museum of Art in Moscow, both in 2021.
Viola’s popularity gradually extended beyond the art world. He was commissioned Raft for the 2004 Olympics in Greece; another big commission came in 2012 by the Qatar Museums Authority, with an 82-foot wide installation for Hamad International Airport; and in 2014 and 2016 his two video commissions Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and Mary were installed at St. Paul’s, as the first permanent video artworks in a Church of England cathedral.
Viola is survived by his wife and longtime creative collaborator, Kira Perov, Director of Bill Viola Studio. Together, the pair adventured the globe in search of inspiration, from the winter prairie landscape in Saskatchewan, Canada to the Sahara Desert in Tunisia or rituals in Tibetan Buddhist Monasteries in the Himalayas, all the while recording images that would feature in his artworks. With his mastery of the possibilities of emergent technology and deep knowledge of philosophical, mystical, spiritual and art historical traditions, Viola never stopped pushing the technical limits of his video and artistic practice, creating powerful poetic and spiritual metaphors for our current time.
