Bill Viola (1951-2024) will go down in history for having become the creator who made video one of the Fine Arts. Last Friday, time stopped at his home in Long Beach, California, and after spending the last time affected by problems derived from his life with Alzheimer’s, Bill Viola passed away, leaving behind a whole series of jobs in which time , spirituality and emotions made him a classic artist of the 20th century.
New directions for video art
Although silence has been one of the fundamental elements in Viola’s work, his artistic beginnings arose in the field of music, as a drummer for a rock band. He would soon become interested in advertising and the world of new media, which is why He entered an experimental studies program at Syracuse University, where he discovered the potential of video and founded the group Synapse..
In the laboratory of forms and languages that were the seventies in the North American context, Bill Viola—as an assistant to Nam June Paik and alongside other names such as Peter Campus and David Tudor—began to be struck by the ability of the moving image to construct sensations and challenge the viewer.. Not from the coldness of the conceptual, but from the warmth of feelings and affections.
Like other generation colleagues such as Bruce Nauman, Dara Birnbaum or Gary Hill, Viola’s work involved interrogating the language of video itself about its limitations and competencies when it came to building new imaginaries for art.. Already in classic pieces like Silent life (1979), Viola puts this discipline at the service of life and makes the passage of time one of the backbones of her entire career.
Bill Viola. The Caravaggio of video art
Dilating and immobilizing, slowing and expanding, overlapping and inverting. Precisely time has been the great theme around which the American’s production has revolved, which ensured that video art could leave the exclusive walls of the galleries. In this way he turned his exhibitions into mass phenomena, as we were able to see recently in our country in two retrospectives: the one dedicated to him by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao in 2017 or the exhibition Bill Viola. Mirrors of the invisible (2021) at the Telefónica Space in Madrid. The latter focused on the last four decades of her career, where twenty of her significant works challenged the public about the way in which Viola had dealt with emotions.
In the eighties, exercises like Anthem (1983) were proposed as a visual poem that tried to represent the power and role of the human being in the configuration of a post-industrial reality. But it was in the nineties when Viola took a step further in her maturity and classicism, which led her to compare herself with the great masters of painting. and being called in some press headlines as the Caravaggio of video art.
And, just as in the Milanese painter’s canvases, In Viola’s projects there is a whole series of chiaroscuros, games that trick the eye, experiments with slow motion and loop editing.. Actions that make those frozen faces, that instant of a second stolen from eternity, turn many of his video installations into authentic galleries of paintings in motion.
From birth to death
From fundamental titles such as Nantes Triptych (1992) —a seminal vision on the reflections on birth and death— to others where the aquatic acquires a meaning that is not only plastic, but also spiritual, such as Self portrait submerged (2013) or Ablutions (2015). But Viola becomes more familiar with certain techniques to get closer to classical painting, as happens in Martyrs (2014): a four-screen video installation in London’s Saint Paul’s Cathedral where he explained how people face the four elements – earth, air, fire and water – to accept the end of life.
And that’s what we’re talking about here, the end of life. It appears that the video has been put on pause. There is no more fast forward neither slow motion. Time has stopped and we can only look back to remember what we felt the first time we saw it live. The Greetings (1995), fire woman (2005), water martyr (2014) or The Ascension of Tristan (2005). Images of our era, masterpieces that made the viewer of the painting be seduced by the chiaroscuro of the frame; as happened to Viola himself when on his first trip to Spain he visited the Prado Museum and was stunned by the Apparition of Saint Peter the Apostle to Saint Peter Nolasco by Zurbarán.
New martyrs and other passions. Time, spirituality and video tapes. The disappearance of one of the great artists of our century.
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