Bill Viola

Place: Queens

Born: 1951

Biography:

Bill Viola is a contemporary video artist whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
Viola grew up in Queens, New York, and Westbury, New York. He attended P.S. 20, in Flushing, where he was captain of the TV Squad. On vacation in the mountains with his family, he nearly drowned in a lake, an experience he describes as "… the most beautiful world I've ever seen in my life" and "without fear," and "peaceful."
In 1973 Viola graduated from Syracuse University with a BFA in experimental studies. He studied in the College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the Synapse experimental program, which evolved into CitrusTV.
Viola's first job after graduation was as a video technician at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse.[citation needed] From 1973 to 1980, he studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the new music group "Rainforest" (later named "Composers Inside Electronics" ). From 1974 to 1976, Viola worked as technical director at Art/tapes/22 (it), a pioneering video studio led by Maria Gloria Conti Bicocchi, in Florence, Italy where he encountered video artists Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. From 1976 to 1983, he was artist-in-residence at WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory in New York. In 1976 and 1977, he traveled to the Solomon Islands, Java, and Indonesia to record traditional performing arts.
Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) in 1977, by cultural arts director Kira Perov. Viola and Perov later married, beginning an important lifelong collaboration in working and traveling together. In 1980, they lived in Japan for a year and a half on a Japan/U.S. cultural exchange fellowship where they studied Buddhism with Zen Master Daien Tanaka. During this time, Viola was also an artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi Laboratories.
In 1983, he became an instructor in Advanced Video at the California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, California. He represented the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale in 1995 for which he produced a series of works called Buried Secrets, including one of his best known works The Greeting, a contemporary interpretation of Pontormo's The Visitation. In 1997, the Whitney Museum of American Art organized and toured internationally a major 25-year retrospective of Viola's work.
Viola was the 1998, Getty Scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles . Later, in 2000, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2002, he completed Going Forth By Day, a digital "fresco" cycle in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York.
In 2003,The Passions was exhibited in Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Canberra. This was a major collection of Viola's emotionally charged, slow-motion works inspired by traditions within Renaissance devotional painting.
The first biography of Viola, entitled "Viola on Vídeo", was written by Federico Utrera (King Juan Carlos University) and published in Spain in 2011.
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.[citation needed]
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.[citation needed] 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.
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.[citation needed] 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.[citation needed]

More...