In 1957, on a household vacation, Invoice Viola fell in a lake. He was six years outdated. Sixty years later, Viola, who has died aged 73, recalled the occasion. “I didn’t maintain on to my float once I went into the water, and I went proper to the underside,” he mentioned. “I skilled weightlessness and a profound visible sense that I by no means forgot. It was like a dream and blue and light-weight, and I assumed I used to be in heaven because it was essentially the most stunning factor I had seen.” After which … “my uncle pulled me out.”
It appeared an unpromising begin to a creative profession. Nevertheless, in 1977 Viola started a sequence of 5 works known as The Reflecting Pool. 4 years out of college, this was his first multipart paintings, its constituent movies occupying their maker for 3 years. Within the title piece, a shirtless man – Viola – emerges from a wooden, walks towards a pond, makes as if to leap into it and freezes in mid-air. The pool registers his entry nonetheless, its floor rippling as if disturbed; the flying man fades slowly away; and, after seven lengthy minutes, Viola emerges, dripping, from the water and walks again into the woods. The Reflecting Pool drew on the near-drowning of his six-year-old self. It was additionally traditional Viola, its most notable options – slowness, water, a numinous spirituality – recurring in his work of the following half century.
It was the subaqueous blue glow of the display of a Sony Portapak video digital camera, donated to his highschool in Flushing, New York, that first attracted Viola to the medium. He was raised within the neighbouring lower-middle-class suburb of Queens. It was not, recalled Viola, a cultured family, however his mom, Wynne (nee Lee) “had some skill and form of taught me how to attract, so once I was three years outdated I may do fairly good motorboats”. A yr earlier than his close to dying by drowning, a kindergarten finger-painting of a twister received public reward from his instructor. It was then, Viola mentioned, that he determined to be an artist.
His father, a Pan Am flight attendant turned service supervisor, had different concepts. Fearing that an artwork college training would go away his son unemployable, Viola senior insisted that he research for a liberal arts diploma at Syracuse, a revered college in upstate New York. “And in saying that,” Viola would admit, “he saved me.”
As luck would have it, Syracuse, in 1970, was among the many first universities to advertise experimentation in new media. A fellow pupil had arrange a studio the place tasks may very well be made utilizing a video digital camera. Signing up for it, Viola was immediately transformed: “One thing in my mind mentioned I’d be doing this all my life,” he remembered. He spent the next summer time wiring up the college’s new cable TV system, taking a job as a janitor in its expertise centre in order that he may spend his nights mastering the newfangled color video system. In 1972, he made his first paintings, Tape I, a research of his personal reflection in a mirror. This, too, could be trademark Viola, bewitched by video’s skill concurrently to see and be seen, but additionally by his personal picture. The I within the work’s title was not a Roman numeral however a private pronoun.
Tape I and works prefer it have been sufficient to catch the attention of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, whose pioneering Florence studio, ART/TAPES/22, made movies for Arte Povera artists. When Viola took a job there in 1974, he discovered himself working alongside such giants as Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis. By 1977, his personal status within the small however rising world of video artwork led to his being invited to indicate his work at La Trobe College in Melbourne, his acceptance inspired by the supply of free Pan Am flights from his father.
The invitation had come from La Trobe’s director of tradition, Kira Perov. The next yr, Perov moved to New York to be with Viola, and so they married in 1978. They might keep in the home in Lengthy Seashore, California, that they moved into three years later, for the remainder of their married lives. In 1980-81, the couple spent 18 months in Japan, Viola concurrently working as the primary artist-in-residence at Sony Company’s Atsugi laboratories and learning Zen Buddhism.
This melding of the sacred and technologically profane would mark Viola’s work of the following 4 many years. Viola listed “japanese and western non secular traditions together with Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism” as influences on his artwork, though it was the final of those that was essentially the most obvious. At college, he mentioned, he had “hated” the outdated masters, and proximity to the best of them in Florence had not modified that view. It was solely with the dying of his mom in 1991 that he started to really feel the load of western artwork historical past, and to acknowledge it in his personal work.
Having struggled with a inventive block for the reason that late Nineteen Eighties, he discovered that the grief of his mom’s dying freed him. Summoned to her aspect by his father, Viola filmed first the dying girl after which her physique mendacity in an open coffin. This footage could be utilized in a 54-minute work known as The Passing, after which once more the next yr within the Nantes Triptych, its three screens concurrently displaying a girl giving beginning, Viola’s dying mom and, in between them, a person submerged in a tank of water.
The primary of Viola and Perov’s two sons had been born in 1988. Nantes Triptych was, or gave the impression to be, a meditation on beginning, dying and rebirth via baptism. If the topic was conventional, so too was Viola’s use of the triptych kind. His references to the outdated masters would quickly grow to be extra direct nonetheless. In 1995, Viola was chosen to signify the US on the Venice Biennale. One a part of the work, Buried Secrets and techniques, that he confirmed within the American pavilion drew brazenly on a portray by Jacopo da Pontormo of the visitation of the Virgin Mary to her aged cousin, Elizabeth.
Not surprisingly in these secular occasions, Viola’s material was not universally fashionable. The artwork world was notably divided. When his movies have been proven among the many everlasting assortment of the Nationwide Gallery in London in an exhibition known as The Passions in 2003, one outraged critic dubbed Viola “a grasp of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity”.
The pairing on the Royal Academy in 2019 of his work with drawings by Michelangelo from the Royal Assortment drew the barbed remark from the Guardian critic that “Viola’s artwork is a lot of its personal time that it’s already dated, useless within the water”.
Predictably, he was extra fashionable with the general public at giant, a survey at a Viola retrospective on the Grand Palais in Paris displaying that guests had spent a median of two-and-a-half hours on the exhibition. Churchmen, too, have been received over by Viola’s work, notably these of the Church of England. In 1996, the artist was invited to make a video piece, The Messenger, for Durham Cathedral. In 2014, the primary a part of a two-part fee known as Martyrs and Mary was put in at St Paul’s, the second becoming a member of it two years later. The challenge, due to ecclesiastical wrangling, had been a decade within the making. “The church works form of sluggish,” remarked Viola, mildly. “However then I additionally work form of sluggish.”
That mildness, and the religiosity of his topics, could have led critics to underestimate the rigour of his work. Like Viola’s artwork or not, he was a grasp of it. His appreciation of the promise – and the risk – of expertise was profound. Viola chafed in opposition to the primitiveness of early video, seeing every growth within the medium as a chance to be grasped. The close-up portraits of The Passions sequence, for instance, made use of flatscreen expertise nearly because it was invented.
In contrast, the binary nature of the trendy world bothered him. “The age of computer systems is a really harmful one as a result of they work on ‘sure or no’, ‘1 or 0’,” Viola mourned. “There’s no possibly, maybe or each. And I feel that is affecting our consciousness.” The dissemination of video as an artwork kind had not been just like the unfold of oil portray by the Van Eyck brothers 500 years earlier than, he mentioned, video having appeared in every single place and directly. True to those beliefs, Viola noticed no contradiction in treating Renaissance topics, and a Renaissance perception system, with the most recent innovations from Sony. “The 2 are literally very shut,” he mentioned. “I see the digital age because the becoming a member of of the fabric and the non secular right into a yet-to-be-determined entire.”
In 2012, Viola was identified with early onset Alzheimer’s illness. His work after this was more and more made with the assistance of Perov, a proven fact that lent a brand new poignancy to the themes of reminiscence and loss that always ran via it.
Viola is survived by his spouse and their sons, Blake and Andrei, and by his siblings, Andrea and Robert .
