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Bill Viola, 1951–2024
By Camilla Alvarez-Chow
Portrait of BILL VIOLA. Courtesy Bill Viola Studio.
American video artist Bill Viola, a pioneer in his field, died at his home in Long Beach, California, of complications related to Alzheimer’s disease on July 12. He was 73 years old.
Viola’s prolific career spanned five decades. He was renowned for his massive video installations that explored central aspects of human existence such as birth, death, love, redemption, and rebirth. Utilizing slow motion, high-definition video, and elements such as water and fire, his works contemplate the spiritual and take inspiration from diverse beliefs including Zen Buddhism, Sufism, and Christianity.
Born in Queens, New York, in 1951, Viola achieved a bachelor of fine arts in experimental studios from Syracuse University. Alongside his studies, Viola worked as an audio-visual assistant for the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, where he assisted the video artist Nam June Paik with various projects. At the age of 23 he moved to Florence, Italy to work at art/tapes/22, an early video art studio founded by María Gloria Bicocchi during a time when moving image technologies were rapidly developing in the 1970s.
His time spent in Italy cultivated his love for artists from the Renaissance period. In 1995 he created his five-video installation work Buried Secrets for the United States Pavilion at the 46th Venice Biennale. The series featured one of his most iconic works The Greeting (1995), that was based on Italian mannerist painter Jacopo da Pontormo’s (1494–1557) The Visitation, painted in 1528. In Viola’s video art, he captures three women in saturated colors with dresses flowing in the breeze, the scene appearing almost surrealistic in its dream-like quality.
Viola always aimed to push the boundaries of media through his experimental works, and frequently collaborated with musicians such as American industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails in 2000, providing visuals on three vertical LCD screens for their Fragility v2.0 concert, as well as with theater director Peter Sellars and Finnish conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen on a new production of the German opera Tristan und Isolde (1865) by Richard Wagner. The Tristan Project toured internationally from 2004 and included performances at the Art Gallery of New South Wales and St Saviour’s Church in Sydney in 2008. The video installation and theater set featured imagery played in reverse of bodies emerging from water, a symbolic reference to rebirth.
Viola had a long involvement with Asia. In 1980–81, on a fellowship from Sony, Viola and Kira Perov—his wife, creative collaborator, and director of the Bill Viola Studio—spent a year and a half studying Zen Buddhism in Japan. In 2006, “Bill Viola: Hatsu-Yume (First Dream)” was showcased at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, and was one of the largest exhibitions of Viola’s installations to date, bringing in more than 340,000 visitors. His first large exhibition in China, “Bill Viola: Selected Works 1977–2014” (2017), was held at Guangzhou’s Redtory Museum of Contemporary Art. Most recently, “Bill Viola, Encounter” (2020) was exhibited at the Busan Museum of Art in South Korea.
Viola was the recipient of numerous awards, including the US’s Skowhegan Medal for the video installation category (1993), the Praemium Imperiale from the Japan Art Association (2011), and made an Honorary Royal Academician at London’s Royal Academy of Arts (2017), among others.
Bill Viola is survived by Perov and their sons Blake and Andrei Viola.
Camilla Alvarez-Chow is an editorial assistant at ArtAsiaPacific.
