The pioneer of visual art Bill Viola gave us some of the highest thrills in modern art, mediated by technology and driven by his experiences: from his near-drowning, to his experience as a papado, to life in Florence, to death his parents. .
This age of ours has its own plan, equivalent to Jericho’s “Medusa Plan”. People fight the waves on a historical wreck, a wreck that is almost “rigged” according to historians and political analysts. The shipwreck of our time is the “Raft” created by the Rembrandt of visual art, Bill Viola, commissioned by the Cultural Olympiad of Athens. Three copies, one forever at EMST.
It is the work, the large-scale video art, that I often came back to late in the decaying building of Zeneto, Fix, when my emotional intensity was high. Inside the large dark room, on the screen, 19 people of different ages, races, lifestyles stand, as if waiting at a bus stop. Speechless, bored, not communicating with others.
Suddenly appeared waters from two directions. First the drops reach the surprised faces and then, in a rush, the waters wash them down, the bodies twist and struggle, like those in the Jericho raft. For at least eight minutes, in slow motion, the whole battle, the terror, the resistance, the attack on humanity is in it. Before our eyes. And when the waters cease, every one near him looks to see if his stranger is well. To lift him up, to support him.
The shock of the wreck
All together grateful and united. Humanity is not extinct. But it takes a strong shock, threatening to lift it out of the water – the opposite of a shipwreck. The great Bill Viola, that low-key, shy, almost Zen-like creator who shaped 70s visual art, died of Alzheimer’s on Saturday. The loss is huge, it is crushing for the art field. But also for humanity that is losing one of its greatest biographers and at the same time saviors of its mental storm.
Viola had a gift as an artist to provide emotions and real conditions, the gift of a confessor and at the same time a prophet of the positive. And he did all this on the screen with high-definition images and slow motion, using as tools the art of the Renaissance, the art that even now we are bewildered to see in the cathedrals of the West. All these aspects of his great work are rooted in what he himself lived through – even the ones that almost killed him and at the same time dazzled him with their beauty.
The close bay revealed its beauty
One of the main aspects of his work is the dominance of water. Often with the transfer of amniotic fluid (I suddenly remembered water as amniotic fluid in Dimitris Papaioannou’s latest work, Ink). He excels not only in Design, but in many of his works. But let’s look at the Ascension that looks like his portrait. Or the point where his life changed.
He was 12 years old when he and his cousin were on a boat. Little Bill drove into the water and reached the bottom. And then, instead of being horrified, he was struck speechless by the beauty of the landscape before him, the plants swaying slowly in the water, the color changing as the sun entered the sky and reached the bottom in distortion. Until his uncle’s hand pulled him to the surface and saved him. Like the doctor’s hand pulling the child from the mother’s womb.
The Papadopaidi and the Dalai Lama
Observer of the world and himself. But also a confessor, as we have mentioned above. This is another umbilical cord. His mother was English and he followed the Episcopal Church, his father an Italian Catholic of the first generation. Bill went to church every Sunday, to catechism and was a papado child. He declared that he did not believe in any religion – although he had studied Buddhism for a year in Japan, he had tried to meet the Dalai Lama – but the rituals and narratives of Christianity had permeated his work. that.
St. Paul’s Cathedral in London commissioned two of the most significant works he created: Martyr and Mary (his black Virgin Mary nursing the baby Jesus was based on the black Virgin Mary he found in churches, mainly in Catalonia with during the research for the baby Jesus). project creation). Both works are gifts to the Tate and are on permanent display in the temple.
However, it was in 1983, when he was 32 years old, when he created the first work with clear references to Christian culture, “Room for St John of the Cross: a dark mank’s room, with recorded recitations, like whispers, of poems by the mysterious Spanish. When the Vatican asked him to represent it at the first Venice Biennale in which he would participate, he politely declined. He did not want to be recorded as the modern decorator of the Christian narrative.
“Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)” by Bill Viola in St. Paul
The high-tech Caravaggio
The Guardian wrote that Viola Caravaggio is the high-tech of our time, redefining religious art. Viola, who studied Zen Hinduism and Islamic Sufism, said he was not a believer in any religion, but was only interested in spirituality – although he knew, he said, how much that word disturbed some of them.
The years he grew up at home in Queens, New York and his mother’s devotion to religion were not the only ones that influenced the direction of his work. It was decisive that, for about a year and a half, immediately after graduating from Syracuse University, he went to Florence to work on the gallery Art/Tapes/22 and explore the world of videos that interested in him since freshman year. Out of school.
He found himself living in a unique location with temples and flag buildings of Renaissance art. Thus the creative codes of the Renaissance, together with the filter of spirituality and its belief in the power of good within man, sculpted its unique creative universe. The cycle of life became the main story, even when it is not obvious at first glance: birth, life, death.
The art of making parents die
In his personal life, more than birth, he trembled with death. He had two sons with his wife of 50 years and his main collaborator (they say she decided on everything, even the final form of the works and of course their finances), Kira Perov, Russian Orthodox Christian, curator and visual artist , with a particular obsession for ecclesiastical iconography. They named their son Blake, after William Blake, and Andrei, after Andrei Tarkovsky.
It was the death of his parents that affected him and changed him as an artist. When his mother died he stopped creating for at least three months, he even questioned his status as an artist. Before encountering family albums for the first time and immersing himself in them for a new project, with material from family life.
In “Nante’s Triptych” from 1992, three screens create a story about the cycle of life. First of all there is a young woman in labor. In the second a man, alone, dressed in a suit, goes into the water. In the third place a woman takes her last breath in the hospital – it is Viola’s own mother who he filmed during the last hours of her life. The circle of life.
Bill Viola. Quintet of the Unseen, 2000, from The Passions project
The man on the doorstep
When his father died, Viola’s need to talk to them became more intense. In 2013, he created the diptych “Man Searching for Immortality / Woman Searching for Eternity”, where an elderly couple examines their bodies with a lens. In Going Forth by Day, a man in a hat sits on a doorstep overlooking the peaceful lake, and behind him, in the room, a couple mourns the death of an old man. “I’m the guy on the doorstep,” said Bill Viola.
Somehow, this man who had a flood of images in his head and created an iconography instantly recognizable to all of us, sank into his own darkness in the last years of his life – he was only 73 years old. Maybe it’s like the half-light darkness of the seabed that attracted him when he was 12 years old. The hand of his uncle who pulled him from the bottom in time, gave us a rare creator and works of moments, which create deep emotions, although they have technology as a tool.