In 1957, while on a family vacation, Bill Viola fell into a lake. He was six years old. Sixty years later, Viola, who has died at age 73, recalled the event. “I wasn’t holding on to my float when I got in the water, and I went all the way to the bottom,” he said. “I had this weightlessness and a profound visual sensation that I’ve never forgotten. It was like a dream and blue and light, and I thought I was in heaven because it was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” And then … “my uncle pulled me out.”
It seemed an unpromising beginning to an artistic career. In 1977, however, Viola began work on a series of five works called The Reflecting Pool . Four years after graduating, this was his first multi-part artwork, the films of which occupied its creator for three years. In the title piece, a shirtless man—Viola—emerges from a forest, approaches a pond, pretends to jump in, and freezes in midair. The pond registers his arrival nonetheless, its surface rippling as if disturbed; the flying man slowly disappears; and after seven long minutes, Viola emerges dripping from the water and walks back into the forest. The Reflecting Pool was based on the near-drowning of his six-year-old self. It was also classic Viola, whose most striking features—inertia, water, a numinous spirituality—would recur in his work for the next half century.
It was the underwater blue glow of the screen of a Sony Portapak video camera, donated to his high school in Flushing, New York, that first attracted Viola to the medium. He was raised in the neighboring, lower-middle-class suburb of Queens. It was not, Viola recalls, a refined home, but his mother, Wynne (née Lee) “had some talent and taught me to draw, so by the age of three I could draw motorboats pretty well.” A year before his near-death by drowning, a finger-painting of a tornado in kindergarten had earned public praise from his teacher. It was then, Viola says, that he decided to become an artist.
His father, a Pan Am steward turned service manager, had other ideas. Fearing that an art education would put his son out of work, Viola Sr. insisted that he get a liberal arts degree from Syracuse, a respected university in upstate New York. “And by saying that,” Viola would admit, “he saved me.”
As luck would have it, Syracuse was one of the first universities to promote experimentation with new media in 1970. A fellow student had set up a studio where projects could be made with a video camera. When Viola signed up, he was immediately convinced: “Something in my head said I would do this my whole life,” he recalled. He spent the following summer hooking up the university’s new cable television system and took a job as a janitor in the technology center so he could spend his nights learning the ropes of the new color video system. In 1972, he created his first work, Tape I, a study of his own reflection in a mirror. This too would become Viola’s trademark, enchanted by video’s ability to simultaneously see and be seen, as well as its own image. The I in the work’s title was not a Roman numeral but a personal pronoun.
Tape I and works like it were enough to attract the attention of Maria Gloria Bicocchi, whose pioneering Florence studio, ART/TAPES/22, made videos for Arte Povera artists. When Viola took a job there in 1974, he worked with giants like Mario Merz and Jannis Kounellis. In 1977, his own reputation in the small but growing world of video art led to an invitation to show his work at Melbourne’s La Trobe University. His acceptance was spurred on by his father’s offer of free Pan Am flights.
The invitation came from La Trobe’s director of culture, Kira Perov. The following year, Perov moved to New York to be with Viola, and they were married in 1978. They would live in the Long Beach, California, home they moved into three years later for the rest of their married life. In 1980–81, the couple spent 18 months in Japan, while Viola simultaneously worked as the first artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation’s Atsugi Laboratories and studied Zen Buddhism.
This fusion of the sacred and the technologically profane would characterize Viola’s work for the next four decades. Viola cited “Eastern and Western spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism” as influences on his art, though the latter was the most obvious. At university, he said, he had “hated” the Old Masters, and being close to the greatest of them in Florence had not changed that opinion. It was only after his mother’s death in 1991 that he began to feel the weight of Western art history and to acknowledge it in his own work.
He had been struggling with a creative block since the late 1980s, but found that the grief over his mother’s death liberated him. Viola was summoned to her by his father, and filmed first the dying woman and then her body lying in an open coffin. This footage would be used in a 54-minute work called The Passing, and again the following year in the Nantes Triptych, whose three screens simultaneously showed a woman giving birth, Viola’s dying mother and, between them, a man submerged in a tank of water.
The first of Viola and Perov’s two sons was born in 1988. Nantes Triptych was, or seemed to be, a meditation on birth, death, and rebirth through baptism. If the subject was traditional, so was Viola’s use of the triptych form. His allusions to the old masters would soon become even more direct. In 1995, Viola was chosen to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. A section of work, Buried Secrets, which he exhibited in the American pavilion, was openly based on a painting by Jacopo da Pontormo of the Virgin Mary visiting her elderly cousin, Elizabeth.
Not surprisingly, Viola’s subjects were not universally popular in these secular times. The art world was particularly divided. When his videos were shown in the permanent collection of the National Gallery in London in 2003 in an exhibition called The Passions, one outraged critic called Viola “a master of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity.”
The pairing of his work with drawings by Michelangelo from the Royal Academy in 2019 prompted the Guardian critic to make the pointed observation that “Viola’s art is so much of its own time that it is already dated and dead”.
As expected, he was more popular with the general public: a survey of a Viola retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris found that visitors spent an average of two and a half hours in the exhibition. Clergy were also taken with Viola’s work, particularly those from the Church of England. In 1996, the artist was invited to make a video work, The Messenger, for Durham Cathedral. In 2014, the first of a two-part commission called Martyrs and Mary was installed at St Paul’s, with the second following two years later. The project had been in the making for a decade, thanks to ecclesiastical wrangling. “The church works rather slowly,” Viola noted mildly. “But I work rather slowly too.”
That gentleness, and the religiosity of his subjects, may have led critics to underestimate the rigor of his work. Whether he liked Viola’s art or not, he was a master of it. His appreciation for the promise—and threat—of technology was profound. Viola chafed at the primitiveness of early video, and saw every development in the medium as an opportunity to be seized. The close-up portraits of The Passions series, for example, used flatscreen technology almost as it had been invented.
By contrast, the binary nature of the modern world bothered him. “The age of computers is very dangerous because they work on ‘yes or no,’ ‘1 or 0,’” Viola mourned. “There is no maybe, perhaps, or both. And I think that affects our consciousness.” The spread of video as an art form was not comparable to the spread of oil paintings by the Van Eyck brothers 500 years earlier, he said; video was everywhere and all at once. True to these beliefs, Viola saw no contradiction in treating Renaissance subjects and a Renaissance belief system with the latest Sony inventions. “The two are actually very close together,” he said. “I see the digital age as the merging of the material and the spiritual into a yet-to-be-determined whole.”
In 2012, Viola was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s. His subsequent work was increasingly created with Perov’s help, a fact that gave a new edge to the themes of memory and loss that often ran through it.
Viola is survived by his wife and their sons, Blake and Andrei, and his siblings, Andrea and Robert.
• Bill (William John) Viola, video artist, born January 25, 1951; died July 12, 2024