Bill Viola, a pioneer in the fields of new media, video and installation art, has died at his home in Long Beach, California, aged 73.
Across five decades, his installations found new uses for state-of-the-art audio and visual technology and interrogated the human experience – birth, death, consciousness – in works that drew on eastern and western spiritual and philosophical traditions. He said in a 2007 lecture: “I see that media technology is not at odds with our inner selves, but in fact a reflection of it.”
The Observer’s art critic Laura Cumming said of his 2001 exhibition Five Angels For The Millennium: “The most powerful show by a living artist to be seen in Britain today… Viola has become the Rembrandt of the video age, an artist who has done more than any of his contemporaries to advance the emotional and aesthetic content of his medium.”
While video was his primary medium, with Viola creating many acclaimed works on videotape, he continually pushed the limits of his practice. His first work in high-definition video, Going Forth By Day, was commissioned in 2002 by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and Guggenheim Museum, New York, and resulted in a five-part fresco representing the cycle of life, from birth to death.
He frequently collaborated with musicians – from Frankfurt’s Ensemble Modern in 1994 and industrial rock group Nine Inch Nails in 2000, to director Peter Sellars and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on a new production of Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which toured internationally from 2004.
Two bespoke video works for St Paul’s Cathedral – 2014’s Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water) and 2016’s Mary – became the first permanent installations of video art in a Church of England cathedral. Even in later life, he continued to experiment with new technologies and in 2018 completed a video game, The Night Journey, about the search for enlightenment.
Viola, whose works reached audiences across the globe, from the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Venice Biennale to Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum and the 2004 Athens Olympics, was born in Queens, New York, in 1951. He received a bachelor of fine arts degree in experimental studios from Syracuse University in 1973, and began his career as video technology was rapidly developing. After graduation, Viola moved to Florence, Italy, where he worked at art/tapes/22, an early video art studio.
Influences of the great masters, particularly Michelangelo, were evident in his later works, and his art was presented with Michelangelo’s on numerous occasions – from Florence’s Duomo Museum to London’s Royal Academy, where Bill Viola/Michelangelo: Life, Death, Rebirth placed 14 Michelangelo drawings from the institution’s collection alongside 12 of Viola’s video installations.
In 1977, Viola was invited to Melbourne, Australia, by cultural arts director Kira Perov. She joined him in New York the following year, and the pair married and began a lifelong creative collaboration.
The influence of Viola’s work was recognised with awards and retrospectives. In 2017, Guggenheim Bilbao Museum presented Viola’s works from 1976 to 2014, attracting more than 700,000 visitors.
Viola wrote in 1989: “I have come to realise that the most important place where my work exists is not in the museum gallery, or in the screening room, or on television, and not even on the video screen itself, but in the mind of the viewer who has seen it.”
