Bill Viola | Sedition | Digital Art for Sale & Exhibitions FollowFollowingUn-follow American artist Bill Viola (b. 1951) is internationally recognised as one of today’s leading artists. Since the 1970s, he has created ground-breaking video artworks and in doing so has been instrumental in establishing this as a vital form of contemporary art practice. Utilising state of the art technologies, Viola has produced videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat-panel video pieces and works for television broadcast. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. Exploring fundamental human experiences including birth, death and changing states of consciousness, the artist engages with Eastern and Western art traditions, as well as proposing religious or spiritual ideas deriving from Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism. Viola’s art has led to him travel the world, and in 1979 both he and his wife and long-time collaborator Kira Perov travelled to the Sahara desert, Tunisia, to record mirages. The following year Viola was awarded a US and Japan Creative Artist Fellowship and they lived in Japan for over a year where they studied Zen Buddhism.

Viola also became the first artist in residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi research laboratories. Viola and Perov returned to the US at the end of 1981 and settled in Long Beach, California. In 1987 they travelled for five months throughout the American Southwest photographing Native American rock art sites, and recording nocturnal desert landscapes. More recently, at the end of 2005, they journeyed with their two sons to Dharamsala, India, to record a prayer blessing with the Dalai Lama. Music has always been an important part of Viola's life and work, and in 2000, he created a three-song video suite for the rock group Nine Inch Nails' world tour. Among Viola’s numerous solo exhibitions since 1973 are Projects, the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1979); Bill Viola: Survey of a Decade, Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, Texas (1988); Bill Viola, Fukui Fine Arts Museum, Fukui, Japan (1989); Bill Viola: Unseen Images, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany (1993-4).

Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1995. In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York organised a major 25-year survey of his work, which travelled to six museums in Europe and the United States. In 2002, Viola presented his most ambitious work to date, the digital ‘fresco’ cycle Going Forth By Day, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Since then, major exhibitions of Viola’s work have been organised by the J. Paul Getty Museum (2003) and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2006), and Blain Southern in London (2011 and 2013). In 2011 he was awarded the Praemium Imperiale in the category of painting, a prestigious global art prize awarded annually by the Japan Art Association. Bill Viola lives and works in Long Beach, California.

American Video Artist Bill Viola Has Been Reinventing Reality For The Past 40 Years American Video Artist Bill Viola Has Been Reinventing Reality For The Past 40 Years {{article.article.images.featured.caption}} Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Full Bio The author is a Forbes contributor. The opinions expressed are those of the writer. Loading ... Loading ... This story appears in the {{article.article.magazine.pretty_date}} issue of {{article.article.magazine.pubName}}. Subscribe “Time makes my art possible,” insists Bill Viola . He defines his art as “sculpting time”, where time is the basic material of film and video as the artist goes about creating events or experiences that will unfold, captured on a strip of tape or celluloid. In his hands, time may be stretched, condensed, repeated, interlinked, layered, reversed, accelerated or decelerated to reveal to us all its facets, his signature being the slow motion technique that obliges us to look attentively at the image to fully grasp its evolution. The camera becomes a kind of second eye that zooms in on a subject to perceive it more precisely, re-teaches us how to see and addresses the world beyond appearances.

He forces us to see directly what we couldn’t or didn’t want to see, to look below the surface, to penetrate the image and risk entering unknown territory. Painting with technological and digital color of his own invention, he creates moving pictures forming a body of work that takes its rightful place in art history. Going Forth By Day (detail), "The Deluge" (Panel 3), 2002, video/sound installation, a five-part projected image cycle, 36 minutes (Photo Kira Perov) Born at the same time as video, Viola’s career is also the story of the development of a new medium – video art – which is now omnipresent in contemporary art.

His work has proven that video could be a creative tool, contributing to opening new perspectives in art, and he is one of the rare artists to have worked principally with the moving image since 1972, testing a vast range of equipment: the “portapak” portable black-and-white video recorder commercialized in the 1960s, the first audio and video synthesizers, infrared cameras, military surveillance cameras for filming under moonlight in the desert, miniature telescopic cameras for exploring inaccessible zones, devices for filming underwater, digital cameras, high definition, new types of plasma and LCD screens. “Video and I grew up together,” he says. “As the equipment improved over the years, I was able to see some of my pieces finally shown the way that I had envisioned them. And new tools, especially projectors and flat screens, gave me new inspiration, and constantly expanded my palette.” For the past four decades, Viola has kept a personal journal that he writes in every morning, which now comprises 40 volumes filled with his thoughts, projects and drawings.

His mind is chaotic and jumps from subject to subject, but this reflects an extreme openness of spirit, influenced by wide-ranging references, whether mystical (fromSaint Jean de la Croix to Jalal al-Din Rumi), philosophical (from the Greeks to the American Indian Seneca Chief), poetic (from Japanese Zen monks to William Blake) or artistic (from the Buddhist frescoes of Alchi to the Italian Renaissance painters). Believing that art is a spiritual exercise, Viola’s works are like a meditation on life, death, transcendence, rebirth, time and space. Proposing a new way of seeing while painfully aware of the brevity of life, his digital images give insight into these fundamental questions of human existence and demonstrate the universality of his work, which transcends all art movements and styles. His radical engagement in the exploration of human beings’ multiple dimensions is expressed through a sharp conscience and a mastery of the possibilities of technology. His videos are always conceived as inner metaphysical experiences for him and for the viewer.

There is no conclusion or resolution – it’s all about the journey, where walkers who come from nowhere pass by without stopping, sleepers rest, alive or dead, under a thin shroud of water and light unveils obscure landscapes where mystery reigns. Four Hands (detail), 2001, black-and-white video polyptych on four LCD flat panels mounted on shelf, 23 minutes, performers: Blake Viola, Kira Perov, Bill Viola, Lois Stark (Photo Kira Perov) “Humanity consists of three things: the unborn, the dead and the living,” Viola remarks. “The human condition is so powerful and so necessary. The most important thing human beings can do in their lives is to leave something behind. People who came before have left behind something that gives us knowledge. Creativity exists in all human beings; it transcends time and place and it arises from the practice of making something new from something old. Art is the universal language of mankind. I firmly believe that it is especially needed in this day and age of conflict, strife and misunderstanding. It is kept alive by the human presence within all material creations, including video and computers. All art is contemporary art and is born in radical new ideas.

And right now for artists out there, we are living in an extraordinary time unprecedented in the history of art. Right now you have the widest range of media styles, techniques and languages to express your inner vision that has ever existed in the history of art-making on this planet. But you still have to tear down something to build something up. It’s what you risk, what you put in to, what you sacrifice from yourself to get that deep. And all the great artists go to that edge.” There’s undeniable power in Viola’s videos that evoke an intensity of emotion – we are inexplicably drawn into his universe that envelopes us. It is an extremely visceral experience that we feel with our entire body. His works have a deep familiarity and bring us to a place that is normally hidden and secret. We don’t need an explanation like with other contemporary art, as there is an immediate connection that bypasses the mind and speaks to the heart. People tend to intellectualize artworks and over-analyze, but most of Viola’s work is based on intuition, not intellect. He believes that there’s too much thinking in today’s society.

Rina Arya, 'Bill Viola and the Sublime' (The Art of the Sublime) | Tate Bill Viola and the Sublime Rina Arya The new media art of the 1970s and 1980s offered new possibilities for expressing the sublime. Rina Arya discusses selected works by the video artist Bill Viola in light of romantic notions of the sublime. Bill Viola born 1951 Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 Video, 5 projections, colour and sound (stereo) Tate T11805 Purchased jointly by Tate, London courtesy of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York courtesy of Leonard Lauder, and the Centre Pompidou, Paris courtesy of Lily Safra, 2003 © Bill Viola Studio Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 Tate T11805 duration: 29 min., 46 sec.

Tate T06854 Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the Art Fund 1994 © Bill Viola Studio Tate T06854 © Bill Viola Studio As is well documented elsewhere on these pages, the sublime was a key theme for the theory of the visual arts in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and interest in it has revived in recent times. To summarise the contemporary position, as a category of aesthetic experience, the sublime gives artists the opportunity to define their relationship to a host of different subjects including nature, religion, sexuality and identity. The main shifts that have occurred in conceptualising the sublime in the modern era are twofold. First, the sublime started to be regarded less as an attribute of nature than as a mode of consciousness. The Enlightenment philosopher Edmund Burke having shifted the focus towards the ‘experience’ of the viewer or beholder of the sublime, the perceptual qualities of the sublime experience were categorised further by the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Secondly, attitudes towards and presentation of the sublime changed.

In Romanticism, two main types of response are discernible: the theological – where nature was viewed as a reflection of the sublime – and the imaginative – where the sublime was seen as a source of creative inspiration for the artist. In the twentieth century, the key question raised by the sublime in critical discourse and the arts lay in the presentation of what was beyond representation. In The Postmodern Condition (1979), the philosopher and literary theorist Jean-François Lyotard showed how the sublime articulates ‘the incommensurability of reality to concept’. 1 It cannot be expressed positively (in figurative terms) and relies on the language of abstraction to give it form. It is expressed in negative terms, such as through the dissolution of form or through the presence of voids. For example, the painting White on White (MoMA, New York) 1918 by the Russian pioneer of abstract art, Kazimir Malevich, is widely regarded as the apotheosis of absolute emptiness, conveying a feeling of infinite space as it strives to render that which is beyond representation.

The abstract expressionist artist Barnett Newman was intent on aligning the sublime with contemporary aesthetic concerns, writing a theoretical text, ‘The Sublime is Now’ in 1948 for the avant-garde magazine Tiger’s Eye. His canvases – often extraordinarily large – show fields of flat colour with vertical strips of a different colour breaking up the homogeneity of the surface. The relationship between these ‘zips’ (Newman’s term) and the background colour fields can be posited as a relational difference between immanence and transcendence. As the philosopher Paul Crowther writes, ‘The implied analogy is that just as the zip is properly defined and comprehensible only through its opposition to the colour-field, so humanity can only define and express its own finite rational nature in opposition to the infinite and unknown’. 2 Discussing Newman’s Onement I 1948, Crowther argues that ‘here Newman could express humanity’s relation to the unknown not simply by destroying form in the standard manner of sublime art but by creating an artefact that embodies this relation through a subtle kind of non-representational symbolism’. 3 The sublime was activated in the relation between the viewer and the painting. The theologian Mark C.

Taylor observes how Newman ‘translated the Kantian dynamic sublime from nature to culture by reinscribing the power of formlessness in the sensation of paint as such’. 4 Instead of being deflected into an other-worldly realm, Newman feels that ‘the sublime is here, is now’, leading the art historian Robert Rosenblum to make a characteristically quirky observation: ‘what used to be pantheism has now become a kind of “paint-theism”’. 5 One could argue that if Newman and other abstract expressionist artists encapsulated the ethos of the contemporary sublime so aptly, then there could be no possible further pictorial development from the abstract expressionist position. 6 If geometrical abstraction is able to convey the radical immanence of the sublime, which is in the here-and-now, then how can the sublime be further developed in the visual arts? Within the remit of painting (and arguably sculpture) Newman appeared to have developed a persuasive thesis – not a total and unproblematic thesis, but one that gained critical acclaim, nonetheless, and one that self-evidently stimulated further thought.

However, a shift in thinking about the sublime was brought about by the intervention of technologies in new media art of the 1970s and 1980s. 7 The art historian Simon Morley has described how in the 1980s ‘a new wave of postmodern sublimity swept over the art world’. 8 Technology widened the possibilities for creating transformative environments that were totally immersive especially in the combination of the relationship between space and light (such as in the work of James Turrell) and in the exciting possibilities for the interaction of the senses from the visual to the aural to the tactile. The video screen was a radically different interface and created possibilities of thinking about virtuality, hyperreality and cyberspace. The American artist Bill Viola embraced the potential of video art while a student at Syracuse University in the 1970s, and has since been central in expanding the possibilities of this medium through his innovative explorations of content and form. 9 Compared to the more traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, video has the power to engulf the viewer entirely. 10 It has an immediacy and directness that commands the attention of the viewer in a much more sensory way.

The art theorist Cynthia Freeland describes Viola’s work as ‘“excessive”: not only does its scale of presentation increasingly tend towards the grandiose, but the effects of encountering it may exceed our capacity to contain our responses’. 11 Viola varies his choice of format, work by work, and his mode of delivery has varied over time but the outcome is always that he creates art that is absorbing and contemplative. Five Angels for the Millennium Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 consists of five video sequences: Ascending Angel; Creation Angel; Fire Angel; Birth Angel;and Departing Angel. Each video is projected directly onto a wall in a dark room and shows a male figure submerging in or remerging from water, at times diving into the water’s surface, and at other times hovering over it. These actions occur in a continuous loop, which are enhanced by a soundtrack of underwater noises, including the crashing of waves and colour changes (from blood red to grey blue). The action of the figure seems fairly simple, in that we are looking at the rise and fall of a figure above or below a body of water. However, it soon becomes clear that the trajectory of the figure is not straightforward.

Viola runs the sequences in slow motion. He also varies the direction of events, so that the sequences run backwards as well as forwards, upside down as well as the right way up. An additional factor is the soundtrack of crashing waves, which does not correspond with the instant that the figure hits the surface of the water. Although there is a buildup to the climax, the timing of the crash remains unpredictable and, as a result, is entirely arresting. The combination of factors – the life-size scale of the figures and the speed, order and sensation of these sequences – is disorienting and contributes to the overriding sense of the sublime. In the Critique of Judgment (1790) Kant describes the sublime as referring to things which are formless or which ‘have form but, for reasons of size, exceed our ability to perceive such form’. 12 Viola’s Five Angels are life-size but their scattered placements, as well as the sensory effects that accompany the movement of the figures, make the overall image formless: the viewer simply cannot take it all in and is completely overwhelmed. The work evokes the duality of the sublime.

It plays on our primal fear of drowning while also introducing passages of wonder, namely when the figure emerges from the surface of the water and hovers in mid-air, which defies all expectations. The shift of all aspects of the video (from the direction of movement of the figure, to the sound, to the alteration of colour) contributes to the sensory overload. Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) lists certain qualities that give rise to the experience of the sublime. These include vastness, infinity, magnificence, succession and uniformity, all of which, Five Angels exhibits.. The scale is vast, the projections of the figures create the perspective of infinity, they display magnificence, and the rise and fall demonstrates succession and uniformity (and infinity, as the cycle never ends). Burke also includes obscurity, which is also applicable in this context. With Five Angels the darkness of the room, the unpredictability of the sequence of events, including the movements of the figures, and accompanying colour and sounds is obfuscating. Burke states how: To make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary.

When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes. Every one will be sensible of this, who considers how greatly night adds to our dread, in all cases of danger. 13 The action of Viola’s figures (their rise and submersion in water), coupled with the religious reference in the title, encourages comparison with the Christian sacrament of baptism. Viola takes the core ritualised action of baptism and distorts it to dramatic effect – so that re-emergence does not necessarily follow on from submersion. In a baptism the surface of the water operates as a threshold between the old (not saved) and the new (saved). The symbolism does not apply in this context: we have only the experience of the limit, whether this be when the figure has plummeted into the depths of the water and lies still as if drowning, or when the figure has been raised up into the air. Both these trajectories create fear in the viewer and the ascended figure creates exhilaration. When analysing the meaning of the work it is worth questioning the significance of the title of the work, Five Angels.

Although it appears as if we are looking at ordinary men they do not behave as if they are ordinary. It appears as if they have been invested with supernatural forces, which enable them to defy the laws of nature, or else these are ordinary men suspended in a universe that runs contrary to the laws of science. In Five Angels we experience conflicting emotions: despair, exhilaration and uncertainty. We feel despair at the seeming immobility of the still figure at the bottom of the water. This is counterbalanced by the exhilaration of the ascension. And, the unpredictability of the sequence gives way to a general feeling of uncertainty. Viola invites the viewer to consider the importance of ritual as an ordered activity that structures behaviour and responses so that we equate the period of submersion with representing reflection, inactivity and quiet. This is accompanied by the rising above the water, which indicates new life, new beginning and is energising. But here we have a distortion of the conventional pattern of activity in baptism . The paradox is that, through distortion, the conventional cycle of baptism is reconfigured in the mind of the viewer, in the following way.

The familiarity of viewing a baptism (or viewing any ritual or repeated activity for that matter) can generate thoughtlessness, where the viewer is not properly paying attention to the activity or, because they expect a particular sequence of events, they may be thinking about the unfolding of the sequence rather than actually looking at what is going on. The solution to this problem is to disrupt the pattern, which Viola has done, and this prompts reflection and hence the fresh recognition of a familiar phenomenon. From a cognitive standpoint Viola is making an interesting point about the function of a particular ritualised episode. From the experiential sense, however, the viewer experiences the uncertainty and discontinuity of the sequences, where our anxiety when the figure submerges is challenged by the sublimity of the surge of the figure as he is lifted high up above the surface of the water. The slow motion freezes the sequences as the viewer feels suspended in this state of animation. Ritual in in fact a key term that is resonant within Five Angels and within Viola’s work in general. A ritual is a practice with strong conventional (often socialised) elements to it that is routinely performed. Rituals can be individual or collective, personal or general.

Religions use rituals to organise and structure behaviour, particularly around the sacred. Rituals are an indispensable part of life and have a multiplicity of sociological functions. They define the social by bringing people together through collective action, and they also give structure to individual identity. A recurring motif within the ritual is the threshold or the boundary. This can be visible or invisible (and psychological) but what is paramount is that the crossing of this boundary indicates a shift of state or mentality. And so, effectively, we have a ‘before’ and ‘after’ and we feel the force in the crossing from one to the other. In Five Angels the water represents the boundary, the submersion and ascension represent two opposing states and the point of submersion and ascension is the threshold. Viola annihilates the straightforward simplicity of this pattern by introducing colour changes in the water, which disturb our interpretative framework. Even more distracting are the sounds, which, as mentioned earlier, do not concord with the actions. Hearing a crash or roar at inopportune moments is dislocating. Furthermore, the feature of having to process all these different actions on different screens in a darkened room adds to the sublime confusion of the event.

Nantes Triptych Nantes Triptych 1992 involves the viewer in a different way. Viola chose the form of a triptych, traditionally used in mediaeval, Renaissance and later western art to depict religious subjects. The three panels show video footage, which from left to right are of birth, as represented by a young woman in the last stages of labour culminating in the birth of her baby; a clothed man underwater; and a dying woman. The clothed man in the central panel moves between alternate stages of struggle and stillness, and is held in suspension before an indistinct shadowy space. He signifies the journey of life with its ups and downs, and is literally suspended between birth and death. These three videos mark the various stages in life with a poignant urgency. What is alarming is the range of emotions that this work induces in the viewer. In daily life and in most cultures the activity of childbearing is regarded as joyous and is kept apart from the process of dying.

The potentiality and energy exuded by the first panel is counterbalanced by the stillness of the third panel while the central figure can be seen to be enacting the emotions of both stages – vitality in his movement, and morbidity in his stillness. The first and third panels embody emotions that are simply beyond words. The creation of a new life is inexhaustibly joyous while the final breaths of a dying person are too poignant to capture in words. Scholar of the sublime, Philip Shaw describes sublimity as referring ‘to the moment when the ability to apprehend, to know, and to express a thought a sensation is defeated. Yet through this defeat, the mind gets a feeling for that which lies beyond thought and language.’ 14 This sentiment applies when considering the first and third panels in Viola’s piece. The knowledge that the footage of the third panel is taken from Viola filming his mother during her final illness adds to the emotional pitch. The three scenes are connected by a soundtrack of crying, the movement of water and breathing in a thirty-minute loop.

In A Philosophical Inquiry Burke articulates how experiencing otherwise terrifying phenomena from a position of safety can elicit ‘a sort of delightful horror, a sort of tranquillity tinged with terror; which, as it belongs to self-preservation, is one of the strongest of all the passions’. 15 Viola appeals to this ambivalence of emotions in the set-up of Nantes Triptych. The three screens fill the visual field of the viewer, which makes it difficult to avert our gaze. Furthermore, the sounds vitalise the images and force the viewer to confront the realities that await us both literally (in our visual field) and symbolically, during the course of our lives. Sound both intersects and interjects into each of the frames, which requires the viewer to begin to view the three frames as a coherent whole. Initially, the three panels are viewed as embodying radically different emotions and this causes the viewer to regard them as separate frames. The repetition of the soundtrack helps to synchronise the different sounds of the cries of birth with the last breaths of life. This modulates the differences until we no longer hear them separately and we begin to unify the experiences.

The linear framework of birth, life and death is transcended and the three become entwined in the cycle of existence, where death is not viewed as a state that occurs at the end of life but is inherent within its very condition. The sublime in Viola The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy describes the sublime as being, ‘a feeling, and yet more than a feeling in the banal sense, it is the emotion of the subject at the limit’. 16 This describes the viewer’s experience in the face of both Five Angels and Nantes Triptych. The continuity of movement of the figures in Five Angels from lying in the depths of the water to hovering in mid-air takes the viewer to the edges of their threshold of experience. Indeed, we would not know how to respond to a figure whose actions have taken them beyond the boundaries of normality. Equally, in Nantes Triptych the viewer is forced to confront extreme experiences, such as birth and dying, which takes them to the limits of our emotional, cognitive (we do not know what it is like to die) and linguistic experience (where the only responses to such events are anterior to language, such as the cry).

Five Angels and Nantes Triptych typify Viola’s articulation of the overcoming of limits. The religious connotations of the titles that Viola has given to these works may lead one to believe that the nature of overcoming is religious, where the self is in a transaction with the divine. The religious dimensions of Viola’s work have been increasingly recognised by interpreters of his work. 17 In 1996 he installed The Messenger in Durham Cathedral. In 2007 he was awarded the AAR (the American Academy of Religion) Religion and Arts Award as recognition for his contribution to the field. In 2009 he was commissioned by the Anglican Church to create a work of art for St Paul’s Cathedral in London. Religion is a part of Viola’s background. He was brought up as an Episcopalian but has a varied interest in cultures and spiritualities. He is influenced by the approach of the twentieth-century Indian philosopher Ananda Coomaraswamy, who encouraged a cross-cultural approach to his work, aiming to bridge the gap between eastern and western philosophy.

In particular, Viola is drawn towards mysticism (including the writings of St John of the Cross, Meister Eckhart and Islamic Sufism). He also cites Zen Buddhism, which he practised during his year-long sojourn in Japan in 1980–1, as having a particularly strong influence on his outlook and practice. Zen is central in the reception of his art and in its effect in encouraging mindful reflection on everyday life. Although it is undeniable that the wealth of religious resources spurred on Viola’s aesthetic practice and philosophical reflection this does not, however, make his work religious. It is not religious in the sense that he is not supporting a religious tradition or particular doctrine, nor is he making any claims about the divine. The religious titles of some of Viola’s works – The Arch of Ascent 1992, Stations 1994, The Messenger 1996, Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, The Passions 2003 and 2005, and Transfigurations 2008 – are perhaps misleading in that they do not refer to an alternative or parallel universe but to the real world in which Viola firmly places his work.

Viola’s titles are used poetically where they are meant to be evocative of religion and mythology and the emotions accompanying the experience of that evocation. 18 But any further reference to the religious sacrament of baptism or theme of the Passion of Christ, for instance, is eschewed. Viola’s use of the devotional art of the late middle ages and the early Renaissance, such as the work of Giotto and Piero della Francesca, follows a similar pattern. He was interested in the emotions evoked in these religious images with a view to recreating emotive viewing in a contemporary audience but not with the view of inspiring piety to the divine. If his titles are meant to be poetic allusions and not literal descriptions, what then is the subject of his work? Viola’s primary subject is the human condition. He is interested in the place of the human in the world, the ambivalence of the forces of nature, 19 the life cycle of the human and the impossibility of representing death. All these issues can be encapsulated in the following central theme – the human’s relation to finitude. 20 How do we feel when confronted by our most elemental fears, such as drowning?

Viola’s evocations of the sublime do not induce a sense of transcendence in the religious sense of being united with the divine or of understanding our creaturehood. Rather, the experience of the sublime simply affirms the fact of our immanence, which is an immanence of the bodily. The final breaths of the dying figure in Nantes Triptych do not open up a world of eternal life but are an acute reminder of the shortness of time between birth and death. Shaw describes how, ‘the postmodern sublime is defined not by its intimations of transcendence but rather by its confirmation of immanence’. 21 Simon Morley adds that we are looking at ‘immanent transcendence ... about a transformative experience that is understood as occurring within the here and now’. 22 The sublime effects of the soaring figures in Five Angels and the mesmerising effects of the three figures in Nantes Triptych transport the viewer from being in a mundane state of mind to feeling beside oneself. However, we are not taken to some otherworldly place but rather return to the mundane with a fresh perspective.

Behind the frail exterior of the dying woman is not eternal life but a realisation of the immanence of the flesh and the transience of life. In returning to the inevitability of our mortality Viola is making the everyday sacred. In thinking about experiences of the liminal, David Morgan makes a distinction between ‘transcendence’ and ‘transformation’. He defines the former as that which ‘posits a mystery present in the work of art as an encounter with a metaphysical order beyond or hidden within the ordinary sensuous world’. In contrast, transformation ‘means the rupture of the ordinary domains and patterns of authority’. 23 Both Five Angels and Nantes Triptych rupture our conventional understanding about the world. In addition, Five Angels ruptures the notion of the ritual and our understanding of the laws of science. Equally, Nantes Triptych ruptures our customary and cultural placement of the relationship between life and death. Through rupture we learn. Viola presents ‘allegorical representations of human experience’. 24 Viola’s work is as much about the viewer and our personal and prophetic journey as it is about his inception of the idea and his execution of the work.

The figures that participate in his performances are ordinary people, and the dramas are about life’s processes of growing, ageing, dying, and about reconciling ourselves with the inevitable changes in life. Many of his earlier works require the interaction of the viewer. 25 Nantes Triptych is not solely about the experiences of three anonymous individuals at different stages in their lives but about the viewer integrating themselves into the fabric of life. Viola casts his figures in the role of everyman/everywoman, and this increases the level of empathy that the viewer has with the work. The observation of minutiae and the manipulation of temporal and spatial frames sharpen the intensity of the vision and the coagulation of emotion. We are implicated in the narrative, and it becomes about our life and the paths that we take. His video art holds up a mirror to our lives, where self-perception becomes a path to self-knowledge. Updating the sublime Viola is updating the sublime for a contemporary secular audience. He alludes to religious images and metaphors in his titles and in his art historical references to the past, but then does something radically different by deflecting the focus onto the everyday.

The sublime is then experienced within the context of events that define our humanity, such as childbirth or death. But in all cases there is no beyond. In Five Angels the pattern of rise and fall does not point to a new life but the endless cycle of life with its ups and downs. Viola uses rich and evocative symbols, such as ‘angels’ and ‘messengers’, but the only supernatural aspects are in the connotations that we recognise. In his art Viola is holding a mirror up to the viewer and is showing the full force of the sublime. We are not experiencing the sublime of Romanticism, which is mediated by symbols and metaphors with reference to a higher faculty. Here we see the postmodern sublime wholly as the other which cannot be assimilated and that retains its shock value. Viola has followed in the footsteps of Barnett Newman who cast aside archaic religious symbols in order to devise what he regarded as his own self-evident reality. Newman explains the purpose behind his work in ‘The Sublime is Now’: We are reasserting man’s natural desire for the exalted, for a concern with our relationship to the absolute emotions. We do not need the obsolete props of an outmoded and antiquated legend.

We are creating images whose reality is self-evident ... We are freeing ourselves of the impediments of memory, association, nostalgia, legend, myth, or what have you, that have been the devices of Western European painting. Instead of making cathedrals out of Christ, man, or ‘life,’ we are making it out of ourselves, out of our own feelings. The image we produce is the self-evident one of revelation, real and concrete, that can be understood by anyone who will look at it without the nostalgic glasses of history. 26 Newman wanted the power of the sublime to speak for itself through the intensity of his images. The hallucinatory feelings that viewers experience when seeing his works firsthand are what Newman referred to as ‘man’s natural desire for the exalted’. He regarded figurative symbols of the past as outdated and as not immediate enough for the revelation of the present. Instead, he abstracts (both as a language and as a process) to the point of emptiness. Similarly, Viola casts aside the ‘nostalgic glasses of history’ in his art.

The notable difference is that while Newman wholeheartedly rejects figuration and art historical traditions Viola uses art-historical references only in order to subvert them. He presents Nantes Triptych as if it was a Passion narrative and even utilises the triptych form; but instead of the suffering of Christ we see only three ordinary individuals. In a conventional religious triptych, the central panel is invariably the most significant, being the painted space that remains on show when the side wings of the altarpiece are closed. Moreover, the central panel frequently depicts the crucifixion, which is the climax of the Christian narrative. The comparative bathos of looking at a clothed man struggling under water as the central panel of the Nantes Triptych is sobering. There is nothing beyond this. And death does not lead to eternality but only to the cessation of life. In updating the sublime Viola conveys the ferocity of elemental fears. Nineteenth-century examples of the sublime in painting, such as J.M.W.

Turner’s Snow Storm – Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth 1842 or Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818 demonstrated two things: the overpowering and unpredictable forces of nature and the relative insignificance of the individual in the face of such danger. In their works we see, amongst other things, the magnitude of the elemental forces of the sea and sky. These feelings draw the viewer into the spectacle while also causing sentiments of terror. This irreducible ambiguity of emotions renders the experience sublime. Rosenblum aptly encapsulates the terror in Turner’s Snow Storm: ‘steam, wind, water, snow and fire spin wildly around the pitiful work of man – the ghost of a boat – in vortical rhythms that suck one into a sublime whirlpool before reason can intervene’. 27 Viola’s work represents a development within the history of art. He heightens the pitch of emotions by abstracting the elements: we do not experience water as a topological feature that combines with sky and land but as the totality of the experience.

Furthermore, the advancement of technology means that Viola can use actual water, rather than a representation of it, and this exacerbates the sense of fear that is generated. The technologies at his disposal enable him to create the spatial and temporal conditions of a storm that is more frightening and more encapsulating than Turner’s and Friedrich’s contributions. Our capacity to seek critical distance from Viola is limited and hence the encounter with the sublime more fearful. In both Turner’s and Friedrich’s art the materiality of nature is articulated in quasi-spiritual terms. However, in Viola’s work the materiality is all that there is; there is nothing other than the materiality of the elements. Viola evokes the sublime in order to engage the viewer emotionally and he does this by affecting the sensory aspects of being. He does not have a specific message to impart in his work and considers his work as a meditation on such central questions and issues in life as ‘Why are we here?’ and ‘Where are we going?’ And, he shows us what it feels like to be alive. Viola does not advocate an overtly didactic approach – he simply wants to invite the viewers to respond to his work on an experiential level.

Viola’s work is about the human condition, which is primarily about coming to terms with the fact that we are embodied and encounter suffering, pain, alienation and death. Some viewers may be able to seek solace in his work – the realisation that there is nothing beyond this life might prompt some to seek fellow-feeling or community with others, as a way of overcoming their limited condition. Video art has an immediacy and presence that is entirely appropriate for Viola’s expressions. An indispensable aspect of his work is the medium. ‘Video is a tool of inquiry and wonder’ that enables Viola to attain ‘his goal ... of a close contact with the stream of life’. 28 The reason that the viewer responds so strongly and emotionally to some of his installations is due to the intuitive aspects of video art, which invites the viewer to participate in an open-ended dialogue. 29 The darkness of the room encourages a feeling of complete absorption in the work. One is not distracted by other visitors as one would be in any other museum experience.

In ‘The Elemental Sublime’ (1997) Lisa Jaye Young discusses how, ‘by means of darkness, repetitive imagery, slow motion, sound, and abstraction’, Viola ‘encourages a meditative response from the viewer’. Furthermore, ‘he transforms the art museum into both public viewing space and private meditational space’. 30 In his manipulation of light, space, sound and visual imagery Viola creates a Gesamtkunstwerk (a total art work) that simulates the real. Lori Zippay observes how Viola ‘creates a visual, perceptual and ultimately allegorical language from the raw material’. 31 Viola reminds us what it is to be alive and embodied, conditions we often suspend in the fast-paced hyperreal world of peak experiences. The irony is that in his high-tech microcosms we move further and further back into the body. We do not see representations of the body but experience sensations in the body. We are not simply viewers but undertake a more participatory role: we are witnesses who experience what is being unveiled before us. Viola has revived the sublime for a contemporary audience.

His work is an update and a radical revision of the offerings of Romanticism, for example, Friedrich’s Monk at Sea 1808–10. In this work a diminutive figure stands at the edge of the land mass beside a dark sea and immense sky that seems to envelop him. Clothed in a dark robe, the form of the monk seems to disappear into the black sea. Taylor describes how the monk ‘is both overpowered by the forces of nature and absorbed in a totality that infinitely surpasses the isolated individual’. 32 Rosenblum qualifies this relationship in theological terms. The tiny man in Friedrich’s work represents ‘a poignant contrast between the infinite vastness of a pantheistic God and the infinite smallness of His creatures’. 33 In the dual forces of attraction and repulsion represented in the painting, nature is sublime, or to use a cognate term in a religious sense, numinous. Viola’s update occurs on many levels. First, the power of nature in Viola is distilled. In Monk at Sea nature takes the form of a ‘mystic trinity of sky, water and earth’ and appears ‘to emanate from one unseen source’.

34 By contrast, in Viola we do not see the environs but only experience the force of the elements vis-à-vis the dialogue between the visual and aural, and the combined sensory effects are overwhelming. Young comments on how ‘the sublime, usually associated with an overpowering sensation, is for Viola the abstract force of fire or water, the awesome power of natural forces’. 35 This is crucial – the lack of context makes the natural forces more brutal and potent. They are unbridled. The second main change is the level of interactivity that new media invites. In Friedrich’s work we empathise with the monk, but in Viola’s art we are unable to distance ourselves from the action as we fall victim to the full force of nature. Friedrich commonly used the trope of the Rückenfigur, a person seen from behind contemplating the view. The anonymity of the figure prompted connections to be made between them and the viewer. As in Viola’s work, the figure is an everyman or everywoman, who stands in for the generic experience of humanity. His sophisticated use of technology creates a simulation of the real resulting in a more sustained experience of the sublime.

Finally, there is a difference of intention – Friedrich used the landscape as a vehicle to convey religious mysticism while Viola uses the elemental power of nature to remind us of our humanity. In Viola, the sublime does not have an upward inflection: it is not connected with transcendence or the overcoming of the self. Nor does the artist wish to convey the horror of the abyss – the absence of an afterlife as shown in Nantes Triptych communicates to us the reality of our material flesh-and-blood condition: it just is. In that respect Viola’s sublime is closer to Newman’s sublime, which conveys the impossibility of representation rather than as a way of attempting to create a dialogue between the phenomena and the noumena. Notes Bill Viola: 'People thought I was an idiot and that video would never last' | Art and design | The Guardian Installation Bill Viola: 'People thought I was an idiot and that video would never last' The 'Rembrandt of the video age' tells Nicholas Wroe that he never imagined having work at the Tate and St Paul's, but his chosen artform continues to prove the doubters wrong Detail of Bill Viola's Martyrs (2014).

Click to enlarge Installation Bill Viola: 'People thought I was an idiot and that video would never last' The 'Rembrandt of the video age' tells Nicholas Wroe that he never imagined having work at the Tate and St Paul's, but his chosen artform continues to prove the doubters wrong Friday 23 May 2014 11.54 EDT First published on Friday 23 May 2014 11.54 EDT Share on Messenger Close Bill Viola was a freshman art student in 1970 when he first picked up a video camera. "As a very new piece of technology it was also very clunky and primitive," he recalls. "It was black and white and there was really little more to it than a red button that you pressed to record. But when I did press it, and I saw this blue glow on the screen before the actual image came up, something in my brain said I'd be doing this all my life. Of course, back then that was not a very realistic or practical idea. Video art was not a career option at the time. There was no job doing this.

But it felt amazing to be in the forefront of this new thing that didn't have any rules and involved technological advance that hasn't stopped even today." Video established itself relatively quickly in the art world (three of this year's four Turner prize-shortlisted artists use the form). However, its early reputation as an activity for a coterie of enthusiasts who produced work that tended towards the apparently obscure has somewhat lingered, although many of its technical and artistic advances have been seen by a mass audience in the form of pop videos and, more recently, computer games. Against this backdrop Viola has emerged as one of the relatively few artists to break through to genuinely large mainstream audiences. He engages with the biggest themes of birth, death, suffering and transcendence. His slow-motion, super high-definition images – recently in conversation with old master paintings – have attracted large crowds all over the world. Viola's The Quintet of Remembrance , made in the aftermath of his father's death and exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in the wake of 9/11, provided a focal point for a grieving city. In 2003, his The Passions was displayed in the National Gallery in London alongside some of the works that partly inspired it.

Viola is currently the subject of a large retrospective at the Grand Palais in Paris, where blockbuster shows of Monet and Picasso have recently been held. Not that everyone is convinced. One line of complaint can be boiled down to the assessment of a critic at the time of the National Gallery The Passions that Viola is "a master of overblown, big-budget, crowd-pleasing, tear-jerking hocus-pocus and religiosity". But, equally, he has been described as "the Rembrandt of the video age", and he makes no apology for wanting to be seen by a big audience. "For a time I would despise work that lots of people liked, but at some stage I realised that these things were not just for a small esoteric group. I really did want everyone to get at least something out of it." His latest work, Martyrs, went on display at St Paul's Cathedral this week. The piece is billed as the first moving-image artwork to be installed in a British cathedral or church on a long-term basis and has been more than 10 years in the planning. "We had so many meetings and there have been many changes of personnel at the cathedral," he says.

"But while the church works kind of slow, I also work kind of slow and pieces happen when they are ready." He was given two themes by the cathedral, Martyrs and Mary. "I think in images, and I scribbled the first thing that came out of my brain and it proved a good starting point," he says, producing a sketch of four panels (right), each containing a figure in some distress, which bears a striking resemblance to the finished work now sited behind the high altar and next to the chapel commemorating American casualties of the second world war. The characteristically slow-moving figures of Martyrs are subjected to various elemental manifestations of earth, fire, air and water, and the Reverend Mark Oakley, canon chancellor of St Paul's, describes the work as a "spiritual offering to the cathedral. It is not an explicitly Christian work, but a Christian looking at it will find resonances. There is a man being crucified upside down, as St Peter was. St Peter lived a life on water as a fisherman. But we have hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, some are committed in their Christian faith, some are unsure, some are questioning, some are negative.

And here is a piece of art that cuts across all of that and pierces through to the things that really matter. It leaves hovering the question, 'Is anything worth dying for?', and I can't think of a more important question at the moment. I see it through that Christian framework, but others will see it differently and that is the glory of art." Standing in front of the screens, Viola says: "These people are left for dead and don't expect to live. That's all I'll say." His website describes his work as having roots in "both eastern and western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism". Viola also travelled to northern India with his family to visit the Dalai Lama, but his work is not specifically religious, let alone Christian. "I guess I have been interested in the spiritual side of things since I was very young. But the form it took was me, in a very quiet way, simply looking with great focus at the ordinary things around me that I found wondrous. I still do today." Bill Viola, May 2014 Viola was born in 1951 and brought up in and around New York City.

While his wasn't an arty home – "it was more trips to the Natural History Museum than to art galleries" – he says his mother "had some ability and sort of taught me how to draw, so when I was three years old I could do pretty good motorboats and things like that". When Viola left school his father – a manager at Pan Am – insisted that he attend a university and not art school. "And in saying that he saved me," says Viola, who enrolled at Syracuse Arts Academy where he studied painting and electronic music before concentrating on video. "A lot of my friends were planning to go to art school and had I gone with them I would have been at least five years behind. The university had all the latest electronic equipment, as well as professors who were at the cutting edge of these new technologies. At art school I wouldn't have been able to wire up the whole campus or to work in a department of television." It was as a student that he produced his first video works, most notably Tape I in 1972, which featured Viola in a mirror looking intently down the lens before delivering a blood-curdling cry and then obliterating the image by putting his finger into the tape spool.

"It was a time of intense experimentation in all sorts of ways; technological and also in terms of looking at the self, and the video camera played into that. It was not just a matter of pointing it at something. It was about self-knowledge, and the camera could fracture the self. You realise there are two dimensions: what you see and what you feel, and that was a huge area to explore." He says that conventional film-makers "thought we were idiots and that video would never last", but soon a community of video artists coalesced and, a couple of years later, "we started to get letters from England, France and Asia from people who were working out what this video camera thing could do. We realised that this thing was going on everywhere." After graduating in 1973, Viola worked as a video technician in a Syracuse museum, studied with the modernist composer David Tudor, who had worked with John Cage , travelled to a ground-breaking video studio in Florence, before returning to New York to be the artist-in-residence at the WNET Channel 13 Television Laboratory. "And I had the good fortune to meet and work with established artists.

I was an assistant to Nam June Paik who inspired me greatly – I learned a lot from him. Bruce Nauman was a hero of mine and I worked with Richard Serra ." By 1977, Viola's reputation was big enough to warrant an invitation to show his work in Australia from artistic director Kira Perov – "It helped that my father worked for Pan Am, so the travel was taken care of." They married a few years later, had two children and began to work increasingly closely together. Perov is now executive director of the Bill Viola Studio and an integral part of his work. "In the beginning it was really just me, with Kira doing what I said. But over time she has become like a midwife to the work, checking how the baby is doing, as well as handling all the practicalities of delivery." Viola works in a small study near their home in Long Beach, California. "I have my music and my tea, and I come up with ideas. When I think something is pretty good I will call her up, watch her cross the street and I know it will go one of two ways. Either the project will start, or she'll say 'Not ready' and I'll get cut down.

Both of those responses are incredibly useful." Bill Viola's sketch for St Paul's panels, Martyrs Viola's incorporation of his family into his work took another decisive turn following the death of his mother in 1991. He had shot some images of her as her life moved to a close, but had no intention of using them in his work. "And after she died I spent three months doing nothing. I was spiralling down and didn't even know if I wanted to be an artist any more. Up until then I'd strictly split my work and family life. All my home movies, which were becoming home videos by this time, were kept separate from my work videos. But when my mother died I realised I was an artist and I should do what I was set up to do, so I took all my home movies into the studio and I finished the next piece of work as if I was on fire and asked myself why I hadn't done this before." Nantes Triptych , later bought by the Tate, featured images of his dying mother, a woman in labour and a man under water, and marked an intense emotional departure in his work, which he built upon with an increasing use of actors.

"The early work had been all about me, as, although I didn't realise it at the time, I was probing myself in a medium that is exactly made for that. It takes you, flips you round and shows you yourself. But at a certain point I realised I was constantly hitting some sort of wall and I finally figured out that I should be on the other side of the camera. If I had kept doing just me it would have become more and more knotted and jumbled. I would be tripping over myself, but doing it this way, it became not about one person but about everybody." Although he has had requests from Hollywood stars to appear in his work, he has kept to using less well-known faces, although sometimes ones with specific skills such as members of Cirque du Soleil , and says he is unlikely to go down the Steve McQueen route of a video artist moving into feature films. "I respect those people enormously and their movies are phenomenal. But I'm just not that interested in narrative.

It always seemed old-fashioned to me and I wanted to do something a bit different in a new medium." He says for most of his career he kept up with the breakneck speed of technological advance, but eventually learned that "I didn't have to run with the new thing every single time. For a time the new things helped me, the slow-motion button was invented at just the right time for me, but the work is not dependent on new equipment." Another apparent backwards step came with his embracing of the old masters, artists he had "hated" when a student. "My appreciation of older art had started to grow before my mother passed away, and when my father died at the end of the 90s I felt helpless and was looking for consolation. Although I'd never gone that way before, at that moment it was the most logical thing to do. I had been travelling in this forward direction and so I abruptly turned around and started going the other way. The Passion series was me coming to grips with the loss of my parents and being awakened as to what death really means. And therefore what existence really means.

It's not a game, it's the deepest thing possible for a human being to conquer and try and understand, and I wanted to deal with that." Still from Bill Viola's Tiny Deaths (1993). Courtesy of Tate Modern Martyrs will be joined by Mary in St Paul's next year, with both pieces owned by the Tate but on permanent loan to the cathedral. Martyrs is displayed on a stand specially designed by Norman Foster – "the church wouldn't allow us to put any more holes in the walls, so it sort of hangs in the air in a way that is very delicate and beautiful" – and on the other side of the Foster-designed bridge that runs across the Thames from near St Paul's to Tate Modern, Viola's 1993 work Tiny Deaths , his triple projected study of contrastingly lit figures, is currently on show. "I can't say when I was starting out that I could have imagined having work in both the Tate and St Paul's Cathedral," he laughs. "But there was this sense back then of all these big green pastures filled with different things: painting and sculpture, film, photography.

And then we came along with our videos, which everyone else thought were toys, and we found a pasture that didn't have a lock on the gate and we just walked in. It was empty as far as the eye could see and you could stay for as long as you liked and do whatever you liked. That was our new field, and that was my career." • Tiny Deaths is showing at Tate Modern, London SE1, until spring 2015. Martyrs , a commission for St Paul's Cathedral, was unveiled this week. Bill Viola: The Passions Bill Viola: The Passions Introduction | The Passions | Viola by night – ART-TALKS-FILMS-MUSIC Dolorosa 2000 video diptych on two freestanding hinged LCD flat panels Collection of the artist © Bill Viola, Photograph: Kira Perov more detail The National Gallery of Australia presents Bill Viola: The Passions, a mesmerising exhibition of recent works by the internationally-renowned American video and sound installation artist. Organised by the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles – then shown in London and Madrid – Bill Viola: The Passions is on display in Canberra only, until 6 November.

As well as 12 works from The Passions series, the exhibition includes Five Angels for the Millennium 2001, an all-enveloping environment of sight and sound. Since the 1970s Viola’s videos and installations have dealt with themes of perception, memory and self-awareness. In 1998, during a period of study at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, Viola immersed himself in the artistic conventions of expression. The results of this research – encounters with old master paintings, and with theories of emotional expression – led him to the challenge of depicting ambiguous or mixed emotions. In The Passions, an ongoing series begun in 2000, Viola tackles one of the oldest problems in art: how to convey the power and complexity of human feelings. Using new technology, he examines the manifestations of emotions, through silence, extreme slow-motion, and psychologically-gripping depictions of the faces and bodies of his performers. Viola draws on a wide range of sources including both Eastern and Western art, as well as spiritual traditions such as Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism and Christian mysticism.

At the Getty Viola was drawn to religious works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, to particular paintings in which he perceived a mystical intensity. He looked at an The Annunciation of 1450–55 by Dieric Bouts, and Caspar David Friedrich’s meditative figure in A walk at dusk c.1830–35. 1 Later he considered the style of small, private devotional works intended to focus the viewer’s mediation on Christ’s suffering, 2 and large, multi-panelled altarpieces in which numerous temporal scenes from a single narrative or concurrent events are portrayed, or in which many key figures are compressed within the space. 3 Viola’s background in music, performance and as a studio engineer also informs his practice. Unlike his early work, where he used the first portable video cameras and often served as his own subject, Viola now commissions actors and employs the sort of infrastructure usually associated with major commercial film projects. His use of digital flat-panel plasma screens produces extraordinarily bright, vivid pictures – the references to everyday life invite a range of entry points – while behind the scenes, the works are made possible by a complex infrastructure of technology.

Viola shoots on high-speed 35mmm film: at 210 frames per second, it is almost seven times normal speed, and allows extreme slow motion without fragmentation or loss of continuity. The chosen take is transferred to high-definition digital video and during post-production editing the colour, adjustments to the contrast, textures and other details are completed. Emergence 2002 high-definition video rear projection on a wall-mounted screen This work was commissioned by the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles © Bill Viola, Photograph: Kira Perov more detail Three works indicate the range of formats within Bill Viola: The Passions, from the small LCD panels, through rear-projected videos, culminating in the full ‘environment’ of the installation work. One from the first group of The Passion series, the free-standing diptych Dolorosa 2000, evokes human suffering. A woman and a man, shown side-by-side and slightly larger than life, are in the throes of extreme sorrow: tears stream down their cheeks. They are independent but related, and in the course of the cycle seem to refer to one another, acknowledging their separate but shared grief.

In 2001 he explained: I’ve been looking at the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, when making art drastically changed. You not only had the development of vantage-point perspective, but you also had a population that was becoming increasingly mobile thanks to the money generated by a rising merchant class. People were also hitting the roads, and all of a sudden there was a demand for private, devotional illustrated prayer books. So artists started making little panel paintings that were latched and hinged, that you could open and close and take with you. When you got to your inn, you could open it up and do your prayers; it was like everyone getting their own laptop, basically. Filmed in a golden light – with the type of generic background found in commercial photographic studios – Dolorosa at once suggests meditation on the inevitable fate of Jesus as the saviour of Christians while making reference to domestic family photographs. In extreme slow-motion, and on continuous loop, the female and male figures exist in an eternal and perpetual sorrow, a meditation on the Every Man.

In Emergence 2002, a work commissioned by the J Paul Getty Museum, two women who sit and wait witness an extraordinary event: from the marble cistern the head of a young man appears, his pale body rises up, and water spills out and onto the floor. At full extension the women catch the male figure who then collapses and is gently lowered onto the floor, covered with a cloth. Cradling his head, the older woman breaks down in tears, while the younger woman embraces his body, overcome with emotion. The whole cycle last about 12 minutes. In his most direct quotation from earlier art, Viola has taken inspiration from Masolino’s frescoed Pietà 1424 4 in which the Madonna and St John mourn the dead Christ standing upright in a sarcophagus. However in the twentieth century, a high-definition video rear projection, Viola has staged a scene which is birth, the act of love, an entombment and the resurrection all wrapped into one. Rather than appropriating or restaging, he wanted to ‘get inside’ the pictures – to embody, to inhabit and to feel them breathe – encapsulating a spiritual dimension, rather than the visual form.

Emergence promotes a multiple of readings and of the work Viola comments: ‘To our contemporary eye, it’s a drowning; in my inner eye, midwifery. Images have their life because they're untethered and free-flowing.’ Ascending Angel from 'Five Angels for the Millennium' 2001 (detail) five channel, video projection with stereo sound Collection of the artist© Bill Viola, Photograph: Kira Perov more detail Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 is another form of The Passions, described by the artist as ‘the reservoir from which they come’ or ‘an enveloping emotional experience like that of a church’. Entering a large, dark room the viewer encounters five giant, highly-coloured figures: the Departing, Birth, Fire, Ascending and Creation Angels are suffused with a soundscape of water, washed with escaping air bubbles, and punctuated by drips, insects and other aqueous noise. The underwater footage of each of Viola’s performers plunging into a pool, sinking and then emerging from, or hovering above, the water plays simultaneously and on a loop.

Visitors are surrounded by the five channels, not all of which can be experienced at once, and the sensory overload threatens to overwhelm. Moreover the angel’s appearances are infrequent: they burst in slow-motion, seemingly weightless and without absolute form, into an underwater domain which is, in turn, translated into the cosmos surrounded by an infinity of stars. Five Angels for the Millennium disrupts and exhilarates through Viola’s effective use of scale, pitch and punctuation, his controlled references to archetypes, psychology and spirituality, becoming an allegory for life in the twenty-first century. Viola insists on substantial investments of time: only by adjusting his or her schedule to the pace and subtly of the works will the viewer share the power and complexity that is human emotion – in intimacy and silence, and on a far grander stage. Visually stunning, often highly aesthetic and emotionally intense, The Passions diptychs and polyptychs, projections or installations, offer a new and surprising aspect of Viola’s art, a continuity of his long-term concerns combined with an exceptional use of new media. Bill Viola: The Passions promises to be a ‘must-see’ for anyone interested in art, moving image, performance, technology and the big issues in life.

Lucina Ward This exhibition has been organised by the J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles Proudly sponsored by Notes 1 both collection J Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles 2 see, for example, Mater Dolorosa and Christ crowned with thorns c.1470–75, from the Workshop of Dieric Bouts, from the National Gallery, London 3 refer Hieronymus Bosch’s Christ mocked (The crowning with thorns) c.1490–1500 in the National Gallery, London, as inspiration for The Quintet of the Astonished 2000; Rogier van der Weyden’s Descent from the cross c.1435 (Museo Nacional de Prado, Madrid), Hans Memling’s The Virgin, St John and the holy women c.1475 (Museo de Arte de Sao Paolo) and Albrecht Dürer’s The four apostles 1526 (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) are also important sources.

4 Museo della Collegiata di Sant' Andrea, Empoli Bill Viola: Transformation | Faurschou Foundation | Artsy • Bill Viola: Transformation Faurschou Foundation presents American Bill Viola who through his art explores the power and complexity of human emotions. His installations are about life, death, birth and rebirth, presenting bodies under extreme pressure, ascending and descending, in motion and at rest. Nov 15th, 2014 – Apr 26th, 2015 Beijing, 2 Jiuxianqiao Rd Chaoyang Map "Bill Viola: Transformations" at Faurschou Foundation, Beijing (2014-2015) Press Release Faurschou Foundation is pleased to present the first solo show in Beijing by the American master of video art Bill Viola. In a 40-year career, Bill Viola has been a leading, artistically outstanding figure in this art form. His iconic, large-scale, ultra-slow-motion cinematic videos have been technically innovative and have tran­scended the genre. In his works Viola explores the power and complexity of human emotions.

His installations are about life, death, birth and rebirth, presenting bodies under extreme pressure, ascending and descending, in motion and at rest. Visually his images are strikingly beautiful, composed by the hand of a master in control of a wide range of tools and a rich palette, that above all, create a direct emotional appeal to the heart of the viewer. The Faurschou Foundation is delighted to present the world premiere of Inverted Birth (2014), Viola’s most recent work. Towering to a height of 5 meters, this video and sound installation depicts five stages of awakening through a series of violent transformations. It begins with a man looming forth from the darkness, drenched in black fluid. Gradually the fluid begins to rise. The fluid changes several times; from brown to red to white, and ultimately becoming transparent as water. The fluids represent the essence of human life: earth, blood, milk, water, and air, and the life cycle from birth to death, here dramatically inverted into a transformation from darkness to light.

In addition to Inverted Birth the exhibition presents four individual works derived from Viola’s large-scale permanent video installation Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water), 2014, at St Paul’s Cathedral in London. The four martyrs are tormented by the essential elements of earth, air, fire and water. The Raft (2004), a large video and sound installation, depicts the reactions of a varied group of people after suddenly being struck by a massive onslaught of water. Using his signature slow motion, Viola creates a scene that unfolds gradually to reveal subtle nuances of the light and color in the explosive impact of the water and the individual expressions and gestures of the figures. BILL VIOLA Bill Viola was born in New York in 1951 and graduated from Syracuse University in 1973. A seminal figure in the field of video art, he has been creating installations, video/films, sound environments, flat panel video pieces and works for concerts, opera and sacred spaces for over four decades. Viola represented the US at the Venice Biennale in 1995.

Other key solo exhibitions include; Bill Viola: A 25-Year Survey at The Whitney Museum of American Art (1997); The Passions at the J.Paul Getty Museum (2003); Hatsu-Yume (First Dream) at the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo in 2006; Bill Viola, visioni interiori at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 2008; and Bill Viola, Grand Palais, Paris 2014. KIRA PEROV Kira Perov is executive director of Bill Viola Studio. She has worked closely with Bill Viola since 1978, managing, creatively guiding and assisting with the production of all of his videotapes and installations. She edits all Bill Viola publications and organizes and coordinates exhibitions of the work worldwide. Bill Viola | Nordiska Akvarellmuseet Nordiska Akvarellmuseet A unique meeting place of art Snabblänkar Since the start, world class art has been shown; Salvador Dali, Bill Viola, Louise Bourgeois and Swedish favorites like Elsa Beskow, Anders Zorn and Lars Lerin.

Bill Viola / Photo: Kalle Sanner Bill Viola, The reflecting pool, 1977-79, Colour video projected on screen / Foto: Kira Perov 27.5 – 9.9 2012 Bill Viola Water Life's deepest mystery intrigues the American artist Bill Viola. He was born in 1951 in New York and has developed video as an art form for over 35 years. He has created a number of unforgettable works of art in which the impression of moving images, sound and the exhibition space interacts. Viola uses the latest technology as his tool, inspired by both Renaissance compositions and Zen Buddhism philosophy. Water and movement are essential to both life and watercolour art. The exhibition invites you, with help from moving image, to a series of vivid images - contemporary tableaux vivants - where the water and the transformation of birth, life and death are at the center. Violas works are displayed in museums around the world and he is represented at the Tate Modern in London, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.

Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth Bill Viola The Greeting, 1995 Video / Sound installation. Color video projection on large vertical screen mounted on wall in darkened space; amplified stereo sound. Production still. 168 x 258 x 306 inches Acquired in 1995 Collection of the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Museum purchase Photo: Kira Perov Image copyright:

Question: The American Bill Viola is associated with which art form?
Answer: Video