2024-07-22 08:16:22
Among the pioneers of the genre of video art and so-called new media was Bill Viola, who died this Friday. He was 73 years old, AFP reported. The American artist working with digital technologies and electronic music died at home in California after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease, the Los Angeles Times reported.
According to AFP, Bill Viola was able to spread works of extraordinary depth on a small surface. He became famous for video installations processing the most extreme human emotions and borderline experiences, such as birth or death. For example, he dedicated to them the five-part “digital fresco” Day by Day, which he already created on order from the Guggenheim Museum, or the Life, Death, Rebirth project, which in 2019 at London’s Royal Academy connected the works of the Renaissance classic Michelangelo with twelve Viola video installations depicting the cycle of life.
A recipient of the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Award or the Praemium Imperiale award given by the Imperial Family of Japan, he was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was at the height of his fame in the 1990s, when he exhibited at the Documenta show in Kassel, Germany, or represented the USA at the Venice Biennale. There he received the award for the best artist. In the late 1990s, New York’s Whitney Museum prepared a large retrospective exhibition for him, which later traveled abroad.
In 2014, Bill Viola exhibited directly on the high altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. | Photo: EPA / Profimedia.cz
At that time, his works could be seen in the Spanish National Museum of Queen Sofia, the Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum, but also in the Rudolfinum Gallery. In 1996, the institution led by then director Petr Nedoma prepared an exhibition called On the border, which Bill Viola participated with Ann Hamilton, Bruce Nauman and Francesco Torres. In the Czech capital, he then showed the installation Science of the Heart, capturing the beating human heart in an open chest. Again in 2012, he participated in the group show Faces at the same place, where he was represented by the intimate installation Memoria.
His works were shown twice in Brno, first at the exhibition Mind Images in the Moravian Gallery and most recently in 2020 at the House of Arts of the City of Brno thanks to a project called Art of Reduced Difference. A retrospective of Viola’s films was prepared in 2011 by the Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival. The people of Prague first encountered a pair of his works in the early 1990s at the Archetypes exhibition in Mánes.
The New York native grew up at a time when video technology was still developing, so he was one of the first to work with a portable video camera or computer video editing programs, for example.
Pictured in 2019 is a video installation by Bill Viola at London’s Royal Academy. | Photo: EPA / Profimedia.cz
“While experimenting with them, I realized that watching something itself is a form of knowledge in itself, that when I hold a camera and a microphone, I actually hold a whole philosophical system in my hand, not just an instrument that records images and sound,” Viola is quoted as saying on his website .
He studied art at the American Syracuse University, where he met other creators working with video such as Peter Campus or Nam June Paik. When he visited Florence in the 1970s with a group of young avant-garde artists, where he admired the works of Renaissance masters, he noted how ubiquitous art is in Italy at every turn – in contrast to his native New York borough of Queens, where he most often encountered it in museums.
During another trip, specifically to Australia, he met his future wife Kira Perova, with whom he later visited Canada, Tunisia, Tibet and Japan. Everywhere Viola took shots, which he then worked with in his installations. He also began studying Zen Buddhism in Japan, where he and his wife lived for a year and a half.
In 2011, his book biography was published, written by Federico Utrera. Three years later, he attracted attention when London’s Tate Gallery allowed him to exhibit a work called Martyrs directly on the high altar of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. The installation depicted martyrdom through the action of the four elements that take a person’s life.
Bill Viola has worked with the video format for decades “so persistently that it has helped equalize its position in contemporary art,” states Artnews.com. When he exhibited in Florence’s Strozzi Palace in 2017, its director called Viola “one of the fathers of video art”. Today, his works are part of the collections of London’s Tate Gallery, New York’s Museum of Modern Art or the Art Institute of Chicago.