A Slow, Sad Remembrance of Video Master Bill Viola

Some twenty years ago, I was looking at Baroque religious paintings at Chicago’s Art Institute when my eye was caught by something strange. One of the paintings was life-sized, and when I studied the female figures it depicted, I realized they seemed to be moving toward one another . . .  very, very slowly. Surely, I thought, there was no such thing as a movie back in the 16^th century. This work, despite its long-ago style, had to have been created in my own era.

 And so it was. This moving painting was made by Bill Viola, a pioneering video artist. I later learned it is called “The Greeting,” and was inspired by Italian master Pontormo’s work depicting Mary approaching her cousin Elizabeth to confide that she is with child. I have since sought out Viola’s strikingly mystical videos in other venues, like L.A.’s Getty Center. One of the great evenings of my life was spent at the Los Angeles Music Center, watching an act of Wagner’s opera Tristan and Isolde, as directed by the always-innovative Peter Sellars. As part of the so-called Tristan Project, Sellars invited Viola to contribute semi-abstract video sequences that—again in ultra-slow motion—backed the on-stage singers, contributing an otherworldly dimension to the famous love story. Other Viola work pops up in surprising places: two so-called video altarpieces are on permanent display in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral.

 I was recently shocked to learn that Viola has passed away, at age 73. Alas, he had succumbed to a long struggle with Alzheimer’s Disease. A very sad and ironic end for someone who was once so life-affirming.  I know, because back in 2008, I had a long, fascinating conversation with Viola at his home in Long Beach, California. Reasoning that a man who had devoted his life to video art would have some interest in movies, I approached him on behalf of a project I was working on about the films of the late Sixties and early Seventies. In that era he had been at art school in Syracuse, New York, studying the work of avant-garde filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Maya Deren. For him and his classmates, Hollywood was a kind of enemy, and narrative film a limitation on what they were trying to achieve. And, in any case, “the big boys had all the money.”

 Still, commercial movies made a strong impression on him, beginning with his childhood viewing of King Kong. Then in 1968 Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had a profound impact: “My brain didn’t understand it, but my being totally got it. And years and years later I was still living on images from that movie and the pacing of that movie.” What he describes as “the sound of emptiness” in Kubrick’s film connected nicely with his own later Zen studies. And he never forgot 2001’s “image of the guy floating untethered out in space, and . . .  what fills the theatre, fills your mind, is the sound of his breathing. Like the breathing’s inside your head, and he’s in the largest, most infinite space that is known to exist.”

 Describing himself as someone who lives and breathes images, Viola reminisced about what he’d taken from Andy Warhol’s cinematic experiments regarding the passage of time. But he also learned from commercial films like The Graduate (“I remember being aware of camera movement in that film”), Days of Heaven ( “Those long shots of those prairies, the vast emptiness of the space”) and A Hard Day’s Night (“A mainstream experimental film.”) 

 I’ll never forget my conversation with this fascinating man. Farewell!