Pioneer

Even today, in the eyes of the general public, what is known as video art (which in fact takes many forms) still seems like the poor relation compared to sculpture and painting. But if there is one video artist who has managed to gain acceptance in the most closed of art circles, it is the pioneer of the moving image, the American Bill Viola. He died on Saturday 13 July aged 73 from Alzheimer’s disease.

This great pioneer of the discipline, along with another American, Gary Hill (born 1951), invented large-format, grandiose videos that often operate in slow motion to speak of the fundamentals of existence, such as grief and attachment, and the key elements of human survival, such as water and fire.

Frightening experience

His childhood was marked by an event that would later guide him in his creative work: when he was six years old, he drowned and his uncle rescued him in extremis. From this frightening experience, he retained a momentous vision, a feeling of floating weightlessness, suspended time and a celestial radiant blue light.

I was born with video

Bill Viola liked to say: “I was born with video” (1951). The artist was an unprecedented blend of mysticism – although he claimed not to believe in God – literary and philosophical tastes, references to the old masters and, of course, high technology – video oblige -. He lived in Long Beach, California, and had not been able to move around properly since his illness was diagnosed, according to the Los Angeles Times in 2012.

Kira Perov

It was his wife Kira Perov who masterfully curated exhibitions such as the retrospective organised in Paris at the Grand Palais in 2014. Over time, Viola’s language had moved towards Hollywood-style silent cinema with big effects. For example, the aesthetic of his 2000 “Quintet of the Astonished”with  is a striking catalogue of slow-motion expression has much in common with Mervyn LeRoy’s 1951 film Quo Vadis.

Old masters

Bill Viola liked to work alongside old paintings, placing his large screens in the midst of the masters of the past. It was the United Kingdom that pioneered this practice at the National Gallery in London in 2003, and again in an extraordinary exhibition in 2019, when Martin Clayton, head of drawings in the Queen of England’s collection, exhibited 15 leaves by Michelangelo alongside twelve monumental works by Bill Viola. The result was grandiose (See here the report about the exhibition).

Peter Sellars

In France, Viola’s work last appeared at the Paris Opera in 2023, when the American director Peter Sellars revived Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde for the sixth time under the baton of Gustave Dudamel. On stage, an 11.7×6.7 metre screen narrated Bill Viola’s interpretation of Wagner at the same time as the singers (See here the report about the opera).

Peter Sellars told us: “He financed the production of these 5 hours of images by selling videos to private collectors or museums. Because no institution can finance 5 hours of a work by Bill Viola. It involved Hollywood-style resources, aircraft hangars, huge crews, a wall of fire and, by contrast, a camera shot facing the sea in Long Beach. Of course, because it’s Viola, the sunset is magnificent, mythical. Bill takes you to cosmic places”.

Greatness through and through.