Bill Viola

Bill Viola Studio is run by his wife, Kira Perov, who is the executive director. She has worked with Viola since 1978 managing and assisting Viola with his videotapes and installations. She documents their work in progress on location. All publications from the studio are edited by Perov.

Viola's art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience - birth, death, love, emotion, and a kind of humanist spirituality. Throughout his career he has drawn meaning and inspiration from his deep interest in mystical traditions, especially Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism and Islamic Sufism, often evident in the transcendental quality of some of his works. Equally, the subject matter and manner of western medieval and renaissance devotional art have informed his aesthetic.

An ongoing theme that he constantly explores is dualism, or the idea that comprehension of a subject is impossible unless its opposite is known. For example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, stressed and calm, or loud and quiet.

His work can be divided into three types, conceptual, visual, and a unique combination of the two. According to art critic James Gardner of the National Review, Viola's conceptual work is forgettable just like most video art. However, others have different opinions. On the other hand, Gardner feels that Viola's visual work such as "The Veiling", and his combination of both the conceptual and visual such as "The Crossing" are impressive and memorable.[7]

Viola's work often exhibits a painterly quality, his use of ultra-slow motion video encouraging the viewer to sink into the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. This quality makes his work perhaps unusually accessible within a contemporary art context. As a consequence, his work often receives mixed reviews from critics, some of whom have noted a tendency toward grandiosity and obviousness in some of his work. Yet it is this very ambitiousness, his striving toward meaning, and attempts to deal with the big themes of human life, that also make his work so clearly appreciated by other critics, his audiences and collectors.

His early work established his fascination with issues that continue to inform his work today. In particular, Viola's obsession with capturing the essence of emotion through recording of its extreme display began at least as early as his 1976 work, The Space Between the Teeth, a video of himself screaming, and continues to this day with such works as the 45-second Silent Mountain (2001), which shows two actors in states of anguish.

If Viola's depictions of emotional states with no objective correlative — emotional states for which the viewer has no external object or event to understand them by—are one feature of many of his works, another, which has come to the forefront, is his reference to medieval and classical depictions of emotion. Most immediately, his subdued Catherine's Room 2001, has many scene by scene parallels with Andrea di Bartolo's 1393 St. Catherine of Siena Praying.

Viola's work has received critical accolades. Critic Marjorie Perloff singles him out for praise. Writing at length about the necessity of poetic works responding to and taking advantage of contemporary computer technologies, Perloff sees Viola as an example of how new technology—in his case, the video camera—can create entirely new aesthetic criteria and possibilities that did not exist in previous incarnations of the genre — in this case, theater.[8]

Reverse Television 1983 is a 15-minute montage of people watching video cameras as though they were televisions.

The Quintet Series 2000 is one such piece (actually a set of four separate videos), that shows the unfolding expressions of five actors in such slow motion that every minute detail of their changing expressions can be detected. The series is a challenging one for the viewer, because the concentration required to follow the facial expressions over time must last for minutes or more. In general, the distortion of time, along with the lack of sound or voice over, form the most immediately ""new"" aspects of Viola's work for the first-time viewer.

In 2000, Bill Viola collaborated with the industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, and its lead singer Trent Reznor to create a video suite for the band's tour. The triptych mainly is focused on water imagery and was supposed to be integral with the songs that were played.[9]

In 2007, Viola was invited back to the 52nd Venice Biennale to present an installation called "Ocean without a Shore," which was seen by over 60,000 viewers throughout its duration. In this piece, exposed in the little but perfectly fitted Church of San Gallo, Viola is exploring life and death. The experiment consists of people standing in the foreground with nothing but black behind them. Each of them seem to produce gallons of water from themselves as if they were waterfalls. The water comes gushing out of their bodies as if they are being reborn. The very last individual is an elderly man who actually glows a supernatural green while dozens of gallons of water erupts from his body. There are 2 individuals in the middle of the piece who only seem to trickle water, while all the others produce a waterfall of water (Sal 2008). Viola says that this piece is about how the dead are undead; that once they get through the water they are conscious again.

Observance 2002, is a work which may be taken partly as a response to the September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attacks. Observance places the camera at eye level facing the head of a line of people of a wide variety of ages. As Observance unfolds, the line slowly advances, with each person pausing at the front of the line in a state of intense—though quiet—grief, before ceding their place to the next person in line.

In 2004, Viola embarked on The Tristan Project. At the invitation of opera director Peter Sellars, he created video sequences to be shown as a backdrop to the action on stage during the performance of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde. Using his trademark extreme slow motion, Viola's pieces used actors to portray the metaphorical story behind Wagner's story, seeing for example the first act as an extended ritual of purification in which the characters disrobe and wash themselves before finally plunging headlong into water together (in Wagner's story, the two characters maintain the facade of being indifferent to each other (necessary because Isolde is betrothed to Tristan's uncle) before, mistakenly believing they are going to die anyway, and reveal their true feelings). Viola trademarks such as fire and water are much in evidence here. The piece was first performed in Los Angeles at Disney Hall on 3 separate evenings in 2004, one act at a time, then given complete performances at the Bastille Opera in Paris in April and in November 2005.[10] The video pieces were later shown in London without Wagner's music in June to September 2006, at the Haunch of Venison Gallery and St Olave's College, London. The Tristan project returned, both in music and video, to the Disney Hall in Los Angeles in April 2007, with further performances at New York City's Lincoln Center in May 2007 and at the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam, The Netherlands, in September 2007. It will be seen at the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto in February 2013.

In 2005, he began working with Tracy Fullerton and the Game Innovation Lab at USC on the art game, The Night Journey, a project based on the universal story of an individual's mystic journey toward enlightenment.[11] The game has presented at a number of exhibits worldwide as a work in progress.[12] It was awarded Sublime Experience at Indiecade 2008.[13]

In October 2009, Viola's solo exhibition entitled "Bodies of Light" appeared at the James Cohan Gallery in New York. Featured in the exhibition was Pneuma (1994), a projection of alternating images evoking the concept of fleeting memories. Also on view were several pieces from the Viola's ongoing "Transfiguration" series, which he evolved from his 2007 installation Ocean Without a Shore.[14]