Biography

Bill Viola is internationally recognized as one of the leading video artists of our time. Since the early 1970s, he has employed state-of-the-art technologies to create videotapes, architectural video installations, and sound environments that explore the phenomena of sense perception and its relation to the human condition. Unlike many of his contemporaries, whose postmodern video projects assert a cool and detached cynicism, Viola’s works remain focused on universal experiences and are often inspired by a wide range of spiritual and religious traditions.

Viola was born in New York in 1951 and first began experimenting with video technology as a student in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University in upstate New York. After completing his B.F.A. in experimental studios in 1973, he became acquainted with video artists Nam June Paik and Peter Campus, as well as musician David Tudor, who were influential to his artistic development. In 1998, Viola was selected as a scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, where he began researching literary and art historical representations of the passions. Over the next few years, Viola developed a series of video works that he titled The Passions, all of which focused on extreme expressions of human emotion.

A significant work from The Passions series is Memoria (2000), a slow-speed video projection that Viola shows in a small, dark gallery space that envelops the viewer. Viola concisely articulated the goals of the piece in his recent book The Passions:

Memoria is a portrait of the human condition of suffering. At times barely perceptible, a grainy image of a man’s face expresses anguish, sorrow, and distress in slowly building and evolving waves of emotion. Gradually the face becomes clearer; at other times it returns to grainy darkness. Projected onto silk, the image has a silvery, luminous quality, underscoring its fragile nature and endowing its presence with an immaterial, visionary quality. Literally and metaphorically it exists at the threshold of visibility, functioning less as a photographic document and more like an image from the world of dreams and memory. The source of the man’s suffering is never revealed. Slow motion playback suspends the unfolding emotions in the malleable time of subjective experience. What is normally a fleeting condition in the course of human life now flows within the larger stream of eternal time.1

Memoria, like many of Viola’s Passions, is heir to a rich tradition of Eastern and Western imagery devoted to intense human emotion. This iconography appears often in medieval and Renaissance paintings of tearful saints, sorrowful Madonnas, and depictions of the passion of Christ, while in the East it is manifested in the compassion of Buddha, the Indian rasas or emotions, and the emotional states of Sufism. Although Viola’s Memoria could be read as the contemporary version of any number of historical works—Francisco de Zurbaran’s 16th-century image of St. Veronica depicted on a billowing veil, for example, or the legendary Shroud of Turin, the centuries-old linen burial cloth that is said to reveal an image of Jesus—its meaning is not dependent on any specific religious doctrine. Rather, the strength of Viola’s work lies in its universality. As art critic Michael Duncan has pointed out, “sensory perception for Viola is a spiritual activity, one that leads to a heightened awareness of both nature and culture.”2

Over a span of thirty minutes, Memoria’s viewers enter an imaginary, irrational landscape, where the realities of daily life fall away to reveal glimpses of another world. “Like a petroglyph, a face on a rock,” theater director Peter Sellars has remarked, “Memoria records the presence of a sacred being visiting and departing this world, and caught between worlds, piercing the broken surface of the world, the continuous erosion of layered consciousness, both incised and worn away by time.”3 In an age when so many new media artists are concerned with the self-reflexive theories of Jean Baudrillard and Michel Foucault, Viola’s art instead examines a timeless philosophical question: What, exactly, does it mean to be human? —A.W.

1. Bill Viola: The Passions (Los Angeles: The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in association with The National Gallery, London, 2003), 96.
2. Michael Duncan, “Bill Viola: Altered Perceptions,” Art in America, March 1998, 63.
3. Peter Sellars, “Bodies of Light,” Bill Viola: The Passions, 174.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Bill Viola lives and works in New York, New York.

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