This summer the art world lost one of its brightest luminaries with the passing of Bill Viola. The new media artist died at the age of seventy-three in his Long Beach home. His death marks the end of an era of technological experimentation which helped establish the contemporary art world as we know it today. Despite the cutting-edge technology employed in his work, he was preoccupied with themes of spiritual experience, transcendence, and mortality. Video became a means of conveyance. The extreme high-resolution footage and hyper slow-motion creates the effect of a genuinely profound experience. 

        While studying a Syracuse University in the 1970’s, Viola was exposed to the burgeoning field of video art. After his graduation, he apprenticed at some of the most experimental video studios. Working under pioneering video artists Nam Jun Paik and Peter Campus, Viola fine-tuned his skills with the new digital medium. He continued to pursue opportunities working at prestigious workshops in Italy, Japan, and the United States. His youthful world adventuring from studio to studio allowed Viola to discover the limits of video while developing his own personal approach to the emerging art form.

        During the course of Viola’s rapid experimentation, he would become inspired by fellow video savant Gene Youngblood. With his concept of expanded cinema, Youngblood theorized that the technical nature of video provided an underlying aesthetic partial to the medium.¹ His theoretical text pushed Viola to experiment with new approaches to presenting video works—specifically, incorporating tactics of installation art to elaborate on his meditative images. Viola’s initial devices of slow motion and high-quality recording would take on more complex dimensions as the flow of images were embedded in specially built environments. He created new worlds to erase the line between the flattened video reality and our lived reality. 

        This new attitude was reflected in pieces like 1975’s Il Vapore, which incorporated the scent of eucalyptus as a major feature of the artwork. A bowl of water sits in front of a video showing Viola pouring water into a participant’s mouth. The sound of water being poured is played, alluding to the performative action. The extra-sensorial elements of the scent and the sound elaborate on the act of meditation which Viola suggests in the video and the object tableau. Taken as one singular work, Il Vapore conveys the interior experience of meditation to the viewer. 

        For Chott el-Djerid (A Portrait in Light and Heat), Viola traveled out to document mirages in the Tunisian Sahara Desert as well as snowy landscapes in the deep winters of Illinois and Saskatchewan. In order to capture each phenomenon properly, Viola used unique lenses that could both withstand the weather and document the effects the climate had on the natural light. The brutal ecological conditions of each location abstracted recognizable forms into a vibrant collage. The images which unfold call into question the stability of perceptual reality. Viola’s specialty lens pushes perception past the limits of the human eye, giving the video a scientific quality. However, the juxtaposition of the two phenomena that Viola invokes opens up questions about how our interior consciousness interacts with the exterior environment. 

        A piece like The Crossing strips away everything except for sensation. A male figure in separate videos slowly becomes obscured by a torrent of water and a roaring fire. The paired videos are displayed facing away from each other. The mirroring of fire and water, much like the environmental conditions of Chott el-Djerid, reveals how diametrically opposite conditions can produce a similar result. This idea epitomizes Viola’s belief about spiritual experience—spiritual transcendence is not found in one place or through one avenue but appears to those who have the will to seek it. The Crossing associates extremity with spiritual transcendence: One must pass through the limits of human sensation to achieve enlightenment. The viewer is asked to imagine themselves experiencing these extreme events.

        Viola would transform once again at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Study for Emergence was directly inspired by Renaissance painting, a period of art history that Viola had first encountered while working in Italy as a young man. This piece entrenches the distant past in the present moment. The set and costumes suggest Renaissance imagery while letting glimpses of the present-day shine through in the manipulation of the video recording. The piece echoes familiar themes and motifs which Viola considered across his entire career. The deathly white figure emerging from the water seems to shift between life and death, calling back to works like The Crossing. Viola utilized water as a metaphorical material across his entire career. However, a piece like Study for Emergence is the culmination of this metaphorical engagement—water represents the membrane between existence and nothingness.

        Viola’s passing announces the end of an era of pure technological experimentation. The exploration Viola undertook set the stage for our current understanding and approach to viewing video art as a medium with its own formal and theoretical concerns distinct from performance, film, installation, or photography. While his contemporaries used video to explore ideas of the present and future, Viola dug back into artistic and spiritual history. In undertaking this journey, he sought to unveil universal tendencies embedded in our experience of living life. Our desire to understand our position in the universe, our need for spiritual connection, our unique human perception of reality—Viola captured all these themes through his camera. He leaves behind an immense legacy and the world appears more dim without him illuminating the way forward.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives. 

Footnote

1. London, Babara. “Bill Viola: Poetics of Light and Time.” Bill Viola: Installations and Video Tapes. (New York City, NY: MOMA, 1987. 10.)