by In 1957, on a family vacation, Bill Viola fell into a lake. He was six years old. Sixty years later, Viola, who died at the age of 73, recalled the event. “I didn’t hold on to my float when I went into the water, and I went straight to the bottom,” he said. “I experienced weightlessness and a deep visual sense that I have never forgotten. It was like a dream and blue and light, and I thought I was in heaven because it was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.” And then … “My uncle pulled me out.”
It was an unexpected start to an artistic career. However, in 1977 Viola began a series of five works called The Reflecting Pool. Four years out of university, this was his first multi-part artwork, his joint films held by their maker for three years. In the title piece, a shirtless man – Viola – emerges from a wood, walks towards a pond, makes as if to jump into it and freezes in mid-air. The pool registers to enter anyway, its rippling surface as though turbulent; the man flies away slowly; and, after seven long minutes, Viola comes up, dripping, out of the water and walks back into the woods. The Reflecting Pool drew on his own six-year-old near-drowning. It was also a classical viola, its most prominent features – curse, water, extreme spirituality – which reappear again and again in his work over the next half century.
It was the subaqueous blue glow of a Sony Portapak video camera screen, donated to her high school in Flushing, New York, that first attracted Viola to the medium. He was raised in the nearby middle-class suburb of Queens. He was not, Viola recalls, a well-to-do family, but his mother, Wynne (Lee), had some ability and some sort of “taught me how to draw, so when I was three years old I could make a good motorboat”. A year before he died from drowning, a kindergarten finger painting of a tornado won a public praise from his teacher. It was then, Viola said, that he decided to become an artist.
His father, a Pan Am flight attendant turned service manager, had other ideas. Fearing that an art school education would leave his son unemployable, Viola senior insisted that he study for a liberal arts degree at Syracuse, a respected New York university. “Having said that,” Viola would admit, “he saved me.”
As luck would have it, Syracuse, in 1970, was one of the first universities to promote experimentation in new media. Another student had set up a studio where projects could be done with a video camera. Signing for him, Viola was an immediate convert: “Something in my brain said I’d be doing this for the rest of my life,” he recalled. He spent the following summer wiring the university’s new cable television system, taking a job as a plumber in its technology center so he could spend his nights mastering the new color videotape system. In 1972, he produced his first work of art, Tape I, a study of his own reflection in a mirror. This would also be a trademark of Viola, being caused by the ability to see and see videos at the same time, but also by its own image. The title I in the title of the work was not a Roman numeral but a personal pronoun.
Tape I and works like it were enough to attract the attention of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, her pioneering studio in Florence, ART/TAPES/22, which made videos for Arte Povera artists. When Viola took a job there in 1974, he found himself working alongside giants such as Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis. By 1977, his own reputation in the growing small world of video art led to an invitation to exhibit his work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, which accepted because of the offer of free Pan Am flights. from his father.
The invitation came from La Trobe’s director of culture, Kira Perov. The following year, Perov moved to New York to be with Viola, and they married in 1978. They would remain in the house in Long Beach, California, which they moved into three years later, for the rest of their married life. In 1980-81, the couple spent 18 months in Japan, Viola simultaneously working as the first resident artist at the Atsugi Sony Corporation laboratories and studying Zen Buddhism.
This fusion of the sacred and the technological would inform Viola’s work over the next four decades. Viola listed “eastern and western spiritual traditions including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism” as influences on his art, although the latter of these was the most obvious. At university, he said, he “hated” the old masters, and his proximity to them in Florence did not change that attitude. It was only with the death of his mother in 1991 that he began to feel the weight of western art history, and to acknowledge it in his own work.
After struggling with a creative block since the late 1980s, he found that the grief of his mother’s death set him free. Called her father, Viola first filmed the dying woman and then her body lying in an open coffin. This footage would be used in a 54-minute work called The Passing, and then again the following year in the Nantes Triptych, its three screens showing a woman giving birth, Viola’s mother dying and, between them, a man submerged in say. water tank.
The first of Viola and Perov’s two sons was born in 1988. Nantes Triptych was, or seemed to be, a meditation on birth, death and rebirth through baptism. If the subject matter was traditional, so was Viola’s use of the triptych form. His references to the old masters would soon become even more direct. In 1995, Viola was selected to represent the USA at the Venice Biennale. One part of the work, Buried Secrets, which he exhibited in the American pavilion openly drew on a painting by Jacopo da Pontormo of the visit of the Virgin Mary to her elderly cousin, Elizabeth.
Not surprisingly in these secular times, Viola’s subject matter was generally unpopular. The art world was particularly divided. When his videos were shown among the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London in an exhibition called The Passions in 2003, one scathing critic called Viola “a master of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing hocus-pocus, and who went away with tears and beliefs”.
The pairing of his work at the Royal Academy in 2019 with drawings by Michelangelo from the Royal Collection drew the pointed comment from the Guardian critic that “Viola’s art is so much of its time that it is already dated, dead in the water”.
Apparently, it was very popular with the general public, a survey conducted by Viola retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris showed that visitors spent an average of two and a half hours at the exhibition. Viola’s work, especially that of the Church of England, was also a triumph for churchmen. In 1996, the artist was invited to make a video piece, The Messenger, for Durham Cathedral. In 2014, the first part of a two-part commission called Martyrs and Mary was installed at St. Paul’s, followed by the second two years later. The project, thanks to ecclesiastical wrangling, was ten years in the making. “The church works slowly,” Viola said softly. “But then I also work slowly.”
Perhaps that gentleness, and the beliefs of his subjects, led the critics to underestimate the severity of his work. Like Viola’s art or not, he was a master of it. He appreciated the promise – and the threat – of technology. Viola went against the primitiveness of the video early on, seeing every development in the medium as an opportunity to seize. The close-up portraits of The Passions series, for example, used flatscreen technology almost as intended.
In contrast, he was disturbed by the binary nature of the modern world. “The age of computers is very dangerous because they work on ‘yes or no’, ‘1 or 0’,” said Viola. “No chance, maybe or both. And I think this is affecting our awareness.” The spread of video as an art form was not like the spread of oil painting by the Van Eyck brothers 500 years earlier, he said, where video could be seen everywhere and instantly. True to these beliefs, Viola saw no contradiction in dealing with Renaissance materials, and the Renaissance belief system, with Sony’s latest inventions. “The two are really close,” he said. “I see the digital age as the merging of the material and the spiritual into a yet-to-be-determined whole.”
In 2012, Viola was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease. More of his work was later done with the help of Perov, which gave new prominence to the themes of memory and loss that often ran through him.
Viola is survived by his wife and sons, Blake and Andrei, and his brothers, Andrea and Robert.
• Bill (William John) Viola, visual artist, born 25 January 1951; died 12 July 2024
