Bill Viola

Artist

• Born: January 25, 1951
• Place of Birth: New York, New York
• Died: July 12, 2024
• Place of Death: Long Beach, California

Significance: Bill Viola was an American video artist whose work popularized video as a means of artistic expression. He used a variety of advanced technologies to create specific visual and aural effects. His projects often feature themes of common human experience, such as birth, death, and consciousness. They were also inspired by historical Western and Eastern art and elements of religion and spirituality. His videos have been displayed in numerous art galleries around the world.

Education: Syracuse University

Background

Bill Viola was born on January 25, 1951, in New York City. In the late 1960s, he enrolled in the new media program at Syracuse University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts. There, he studied electronic music, video art, and painting. He also worked in the university’s Synapse Video Center, where students create experimental media. Viola graduated from Syracuse in 1973 with a bachelor of fine arts degree.

Viola next traveled to Florence, Italy, to serve as technical production director of Art/Tapes/22, one of the only video-art studios in Europe at the time. During the next year and a half, he lived in Florence and met video artists from around the world.

In 1976, Viola began traveling to various Pacific island nations—including the Solomon Islands, Bali, Java, and Japan—to study and document the diverse performing arts of those countries’ peoples. Throughout his travels, Viola created and distributed his own works of video art, which were gradually becoming known in the United States and around the world. Also in 1976, he was invited to become artist-in-residence at New York City’s WNET/Channel 13 Television Laboratory. WNET/Channel 13 is an educational, public television station. He held this position for the next four years while continuing to study and produce his own international video and performance art.

Professional Career

By 1977, Viola had created a number of video artworks that premiered on WNET/Channel 13. This attention earned him an invitation by Kira Perov to display his work at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia. Perov was the cultural arts director of the university. The two struck up a romantic relationship on the visit before Viola returned to New York.

Viola became especially productive around this time, creating a number of well-received art videos in the period from 1977 to 1980. For instance, The Reflecting Pool, released in 1981, was a collection of five video pieces he had made over the previous four years. The Reflecting Pool shows a man approaching a pool of water from the forest. The only sounds that can be heard are the water rippling and the tree branches rustling. The man then begins to jump into the water but freezes at the top of the jump. His image slowly fades as the water in the pool continues rippling. After some minutes, the man emerges naked from the pool and returns to the forest. Some critics compare the video’s imagery to a kind of Christian baptism.

Perov moved to New York to be with Viola in 1978, and the two married later that year. This began what would become a decades-long collaboration, as Perov became a vital partner to Viola in his travels, art production, and studio management. In 1979, they traveled to the Sahara Desert in Tunisia, where they filmed mirages for a new video piece. The following year, Viola was granted a U.S./Japan Creative Artist Fellowship, which allowed him and Perov to move to Japan to study Japanese art and culture. The couple ultimately lived there for a year and a half, during which time they studied Zen Buddhism and Viola became artist-in-residence at Sony’s Atsugi research laboratories.

Viola and Perov returned to the United States in 1981 and then moved to Long Beach, California, where Viola established a new art studio. He then produced a variety of new video-art pieces—his subjects included medical imaging of the human body, animals from the San Diego Zoo, and the fire-walking ceremonies of the people of Fiji.

In 1987, Viola and Perov spent five months photographing American Indian rock art and nighttime desert terrain in the American Southwest for video projects. Viola later planned to attend the 1995 Venice Biennale, an annual art exhibition, but had no new work to display. He eventually devised a video called The Greeting, a modern version of a 1500s painting by the Italian painter Jacopo Pontormo. He returned to the Venice Biennale in 1998 to represent the United States, creating five different video and sound setups for display in the United States’ pavilion at the event.

Viola continued producing a wealth of video pieces into the twenty-first century. In 2002, he created Going Forth by Day, a series of five videos in a fresco style. His Bill Viola: The Passions, a series of videos drawing from medieval and Renaissance art, premiered in Los Angeles in 2003 before the series was displayed in Europe and Australia. In 2014, twenty of Viola’s videos were displayed at a Paris exhibition, his largest to that date. After introducing his first commissioned, long-term video installation, titled Martyrs, to overall praise at London's St. Paul's Cathedral in 2014, he added a second, Mary, in 2016. The year 2017, meanwhile, saw Spain's Guggenheim Museum Bilbao put on a large retrospective exhibit of his work. He then partnered with the London-based Royal Academy of Arts to create an exhibit hosted in 2019 at the academy that showcased some of his installations alongside pieces drawn by Renaissance artist Michelangelo; reception of this particular project proved mixed.

In 2024, Viola died at the age of seventy-three from complications of Alzheimer's disease at his home in Long Beach, California.

Impact

Viola won numerous awards and honorary degrees from various universities. His works continued to be exhibited in galleries around the world. His most well-known art videos included The Crossing, The Passing, The Reflecting Pool, The Greeting, and Nantes Triptych. Because of these and many other creations, Viola is generally regarded as a pioneer of modern video art.

Personal Life

Viola married Perov in 1978. They later had two sons together. They lived and worked in Long Beach, California.

Bibliography

"Bill Viola." Artnet, www.artnet.com/artists/bill-viola/. Accessed 16 July 2024.

"Bill Viola." Electronic Arts Intermix, www.eai.org/artists/bill-viola/biography. Accessed 16 July 2024.

"Bill Viola." Getty, www.getty.edu/art/collection/person/103M4C. Accessed 16 July 2024.

"Bill Viola 1951–2024." Bill Viola, www.billviola.com. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Darwent, Charles. "Bill Viola Obituary." The Guardian, 14 July 2024, www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/jul/14/bill-viola-obituary. Accessed 16 July 2024.

Finkel, Jori. "Bill Viola, Celebrated Video Artist Who Played with Time, Dies at 73." The New York Times, 13 July 2024. Accessed 16 July 2024.