Remembering Bill Viola (1951–2024)

One of the world’s leading video artists, Bill Viola, passed away in his home in Long Beach, California on 12 July at the age of 73. Born in Queens, New York, Viola was a pioneer in the field of new media, known for his dramatic room-sized video and sound installations, which often utilized extreme slow motion to shift his viewers’ sense of perception and awareness. In a 2007 Tanner Lecture on Human Values he told the audience, ‘I see that media technology is not at odds with our inner selves, but in fact a reflection of it.’ Here, Viola is remembered by curators, writers and artists he collaborated with or were inspired by his work.

Mark Tribe, artist and founder of Rhizome 

Sometimes we’re influenced by others in ways that only become evident well after the fact. It was one of Bill Viola’s early works, The Reflecting Pool (1977–79) that became, in retrospect, my secret sharer, whispering in my ship’s cabin, hidden from view. Unlike Viola’s later installations, which reached heights of drama and spectacle, The Reflecting Pool is subtle, humble and restrained: over the course of seven minutes, a lone figure (Viola) appears out of a verdant woodland, steps up to the edge of a stone-rimmed pool and jumps, fully clothed, out over the water. He starts to do a cannonball, then freezes in mid-air. Over the next few minutes, Viola’s motionless figure gradually dissolves while the surface of the pool continues to move, reflecting trees, ghostly figures, a darkening sky. Time fractures, becomes (to paraphrase Viola) a sculptural material. Eventually the artist rises naked from the pool, climbs out and walks back into the woods. Hopefully one day I’ll meet him there.

Lucia Agirre, curator

Bill Viola was an incredible artist and person, and it is an honour to have known him. I’ll always remember his work at the 1995 Venice Biennale, where he presented Buried Secrets at the US pavilion, a group of five works installed in different environments. I lost count of the number of times I reentered the pavilion to contemplate The Greeting (1995), a piece that two decades later continued to absorb all my attention, when, in 2017 at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, we had the gift and opportunity to stage a Bill Viola retrospective. The exhibition was a stunning communion between Frank Gehry’s building and Bill’s artworks, from the most intimate to the most monumental.

A crystalline artist, Bill drew on the histories of art, literature, music, philosophy and religion. His art focuses on the simplest questions, which are, at the same time, the most complex. Bill approached those questions with a resounding, perfectionist and thunderous beauty. With this, and his expert use of technology, he encouraged his audiences to stop for a moment and to look, perceive, think and, above all, to live. His is the art of making the complicated simple, something which only an artist and person as wise and sensitive as Bill could do. 

Isaac Chong Wai, artist

Bill Viola is one of the artists I most respect and admire. Like many others, I have been deeply touched by his works. My first encounter with Viola’s work was on my library desk in Hong Kong when I was 18, flipping through books about video art. My first reaction was, ‘That’s the kind of art that changes lives.’ It may sound naive, but he was my hero.

Viola’s works are unforgettable, beautiful and timeless. They transcend the ordinary and portray the intricacies of human conditions, emotions and spirituality, often slowing down moments overlooked in the speed dictated by society. He challenges the boundaries of video, reshaping our perceptions of time and the body. I am captivated by his portrayal of the body, which is often subtracted and slowed down through the language of video. Viola’s dedication to examining the concepts of birth, death and spirituality made me realize the potential for art to connect varied human experiences. His works changed my world. 

Bill Viola will always be remembered, and his art will continue to inspire the artistic journeys of many, just as it has inspired mine. 

Barbara London, curator and writer

As a young curator at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, I first met Bill Viola in 1975 when he returned to New York after spending two years in Italy. He stopped by my office and effused about the religious frescoes of Giotto that he had seen for the first time in Padua, and about the poetry of the 13th-century Persian Sufi mystic Jalal al-Din Rumi, whom he had just started to read. 

We began meeting regularly to share information, often near Columbus Circle at the Cosmic Coffee Shop, its name well suited to Bill’s interests in the metaphysical implications of consciousness. Over a slice of pie, he would describe his efforts to begin each video with a mental image, assiduously matched to the perfect setting and precise time of day. A Million Other Things (1975), for instance, captures the changes in light and sound at the edge of a pond during an eight-hour period, from day to night. When the sun sets towards the end of the four-minute work, an individual standing in the distance remains the only visible object, illuminated by a single electric lamp suspended overhead.

I organized many exhibitions of Bill’s work over the years, including his 1987 retrospective at the MoMA. I learned a lot from him: how video is as much sound as image; that an installation is a finely tuned environment; and the ways in which an artist’s aesthetics determines how an installation exists in the present and lives on in the future. Bill was a master of his craft who helped raise the status of video art to new heights. He is sorely missed by me and so many others.

^{Main image: Bill Viola, Fire Woman (detail), 2005, film still. Courtesy: Bill Viola Studio, © Bill Viola; photograph: Kira Perov}