Bill Viola
William John Viola Jr. was an American video artist whose artistic expression depended upon electronic, sound, and image technology in new media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death, and aspects of consciousness.
Early life and education
William John Viola Jr. was born on January 25, 1951, in Flushing, Queens, New York, and grew up in Queens and Westbury. He attended P.S. 20, in Flushing, where he was captain of the TV Squad. On vacation in the mountains with his family, he nearly drowned in a lake, an experience he described as "… the most beautiful world I've ever seen in my life" and "without fear," and "peaceful."In 1973, Viola graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts in experimental studies. Viola described the school as traditional and considered himself to be "one of the worst painters in the class." He studied in Syracuse University's College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the Synapse experimental program, which evolved into CitrusTV.
Career
From 1973 to 1980, Viola studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the new music group "Rainforest". From 1974 to 1976, Viola worked as technical director at, a pioneering video studio led by Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi, in Florence, Italy where he encountered video artists Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci, before he became artist-in-residence at WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory in New York until 1983. In 1976 and 1977, he travelled to the Solomon Islands, Java, and Indonesia to record traditional performing arts.Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University in 1977, by cultural arts director Kira Perov. Viola and Perov later married, beginning an important lifelong collaboration in working and traveling together. In 1980, they lived in Japan for a year and a half on a Japan/U.S. cultural exchange fellowship where they studied Buddhism with Zen Master Daien Tanaka. During this time, Viola was also an artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi Laboratories.
In 1983, he became an instructor in Advanced Video at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, California. Viola received a Guggenheim Fellowship for fine arts in 1985. Since the early Seventies he had exhibited his works regularly in group and solo exhibitions at Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, at The Kitchen, and the Museum of Modern Art, where Barbara London directed the exhibition series "Projects", where works by Viola were shown 17 times and featured in two solo exhibitions until 1991. He represented the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 for which he produced a series of works called Buried Secrets, including one of his best known works The Greeting, a contemporary interpretation of Pontormo's The Visitation. In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized and toured internationally a major 25-year retrospective of Viola's work.
Viola was the 1998, Getty Scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Later, in 2000, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002, he completed Going Forth By Day, a digital "fresco" cycle in high-definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
In 2003, The Passions was exhibited in Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Canberra. This was a major collection of Viola's emotionally charged, slow-motion works inspired by traditions within Renaissance devotional painting.
The first biography of Viola, entitled Viola on Vídeo, was written by Federico Utrera and published in Spain in 2011.
Bill Viola studio
Bill Viola studio is run by his wife, Kira Perov, who is the executive director. She worked with Viola from 1978 managing and assisting him with his videotapes and installations. She documents their work in progress on location. All publications from the studio are edited by Perov.Death
Viola's wife and longtime creative collaborator was Kira Perov. He had two sons.Viola died from complications of Alzheimer's disease at home in Long Beach, California, on July 12, 2024, at the age of 73.
Artwork
Style
Viola's art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience – birth, death, love, emotion, and a kind of humanist spirituality. Throughout his career he drew meaning and inspiration from his deep interest in mystical traditions, especially Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Islamic Sufism, often evident in the transcendental quality of some of his works. Equally, the subject matter and manner of western medieval and renaissance devotional art informed his aesthetic.He often explored dualism, or the idea that comprehension of a subject is impossible unless its opposite is known. For example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, fire and water, stressed and calm, or loud and quiet.
His work can be divided into three types, conceptual, visual, and a unique combination of the two. Gardner feels that Viola's visual work, such as "The Veiling", and his combination of both the conceptual and visual, such as "The Crossing," are impressive and memorable.
Viola's work often exhibits a painterly quality, with his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the viewer to sink into the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. This quality makes his work perhaps unusually accessible within a contemporary art context. As a consequence, his work often receives mixed reviews from critics, some of whom have noted a tendency toward grandiosity and obviousness in some of his work.
Viola's interest in capturing the essence of emotion through recording of its extreme display began at least as early as his 1976 work, The Space Between the Teeth, a video of himself screaming, and continued with such works as the 45-second Silent Mountain, which shows two actors in states of anguish, which Viola described as "probably the loudest scream I've recorded."
If Viola's depictions of emotional states with no objective correlative — emotional states for which the viewer has no external object or event to understand them by—are one feature of many of his works, another, which has come to the forefront, is his reference to medieval and classical depictions of emotion. His subdued Catherine's Room 2001, has many scene by scene parallels with Andrea di Bartolo's 1393 St. Catherine of Siena Praying.
Viola's work has received critical accolades. Critic Marjorie Perloff singles him out for praise. Writing at length about the necessity of poetic works responding to and taking advantage of contemporary computer technologies, Perloff sees Viola as an example of how new technology—in his case, the video camera—can create entirely new aesthetic criteria and possibilities that did not exist in previous incarnations of the genre — in this case, theater.
Video art projects
While many video artists have been quick to adopt new technologies to their medium, Viola relied little on digital editing. Perhaps the most technically challenging part of his work, and that which has benefited most from the advances since his earliest pieces, is his use of extreme slow motion.His early works include The Reflecting Pool, inspired by a lake drowning he experienced underwater before being saved by his uncle while on a family vacation that left a mark on his life and work.