Vale Bill Viola

Vale Bill Viola

American video artist Bill Viola passed away on 12 July 2024, aged 73. Writing about his 2001 exhibition Five Angels for the Millennium at Tate, the Observer’s art critic Laura Cumming described Viola as ‘the Rembrandt of the video age’. In 2021 curator Juliana Engberg included his work Observance, 2002 in the Gallery’s exhibition All That Was Solid Melts. The catalogue entry on Observance is reproduced below. 

Observance (2002)

Many artists are unforthcoming, even coy, about the biography attached to their themes and work. Bill Viola, by contrast, has been open about the links between his personal grieving, first for his mother and later his father, as well as his own moment of encountering mortality in a near-death drowning incident as a child. These experiences have driven his practice. 

Viola’s sense of loss, sadness and fatalism has led him to contemplate and depict sorrow, mourning and catharsis. Interested for some years in Eastern mysticisms, philosophies and religions, and their pathways to self-improvement through meditation and acceptance, he produced several series of video works exploring the body in states of ecstatic release, disappearance and transformation. 

In 1998 he was invited to be a visiting scholar at the Getty Research Institute. The Getty, with its amazing holdings of medieval religious art, provided a new aspect of insight. Looking at devotional paintings and altarpieces brought Viola’s attention to the way emotion and human expression were individuated in the rigid formulas of iconic framing and formally strict bodies and figures in works of trecento masters such as Bernardo Daddi. Medieval artists worked to convey sentiment and feeling through attention to the countenance of a face, upturned eyes, downturned mouth, expressions of surprise or serenity which delivered an unexpected liveliness to otherwise stoical presentations.

In 2000 Viola embarked on a series – The Passions – which allowed him to fully explore Christian iconographies and somewhat directly, the images and lessons learned from looking at the Getty artworks and others. He created a number of video works that update devotional painting through film technology which permits slow, slight movement and extra narrative action to be perceived. In scenes reminiscent of Masolino da Panicale’s Pietà, 1421, Viola made Emergence, 2002, in which a number of actions and scene-within-the-scenes encompass a catalogue of the Pietà and Deposition formats in art history.

As The Passions developed, Viola explored more art with a particular concentration on emotions. To this he added knowledge from the studies of Charles Darwin and the artist Charles Le Brun. From this research he developed works such as the Quintet of the Astonished, 2000, inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ Mocked (The Crowning with Thorns), circa 1510. In Viola’s Quintet, actors cluster horizontally and perform expressions of horror, disgust, pity and more. Viola’s slow film process permits the audience to watch and travel through these emotional states. 

Observance, made in 2002, extends this more abstract emotional encounter and takes on an additional load. Made directly after, although not specifically about, the events of 9/11, when the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked and the world bore witness to the dreadfulness of thousands of deaths in the inferno and collapse of the buildings, Observance provides a vision of horror, fear, grieving and anxiety through the expressions of a group of people who move towards the viewer gazing upon an unseen thing that exists between them and us. Dislodged from Christian iconography and removed from any specific occurrence, Observance is free to attach to the viewer’s inner psyche and find company with any and all experiences of unsighted, unknowable, unthinkable distress.