Bill Viola drowned at the age of six, and underwater views and the cycle of life were the main themes of his art even in the top projects brought to Finland.
World famous video and installation artist Bill Viola has died at the age of 73.
The New York Timesin the cause of death was complications related to Alzheimer’s disease.
Viola was known as an early pioneer of video art.
“My generation was lucky when we entered the industry at the same time as a new media, video, was born. It’s important to be there when something changes,” he said In an interview with Helsingin Sanomat in 2012.
Even in Finland, the well-known artist drew from religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, and often used slow motions and either concretely or figuratively “underwater” moods in his videos.
Bill Viola was born in Queens, New York in 1951.
Viola was already close to death in her childhood at the age of 6.
He was drowned but, according to his words, not scared, but fell in love with the underwater sights: slowly swaying plants, fish swimming nearby and the glimmer of light.
His uncle brought the child back to the surface, but the key experience influenced art.
Water, death and reflection on the possibility of rebirth were his central themes.
BIll Viola’s Inner Journey puts people under different colored waterfalls. Image of the video work at the Amos Rex museum in 2021.
Bill Viola’s Night Mass was part of the artist’s exhibition at Amos Rex in Helsinki in 2022.
The cycle of life was a topic, for example In the Nantes Trilogy in 1992, when he used three video panels to film a woman giving birth, his own mother on her deathbed, and a man floating in the water as if “between birth and death”.
In the same years, an international breakthrough took place. Viola was the first artist to have a large video art exhibition in several prestigious museums.
World famous theater and opera director Peter Sellars fell in love with Viola’s art, curated her exhibitions from New York to Amsterdam and eventually joined her as well Esa-Pekka Salonen with.
The trio made Produktion by Richard Wagner Tristan and Isolde -opera first to Los Angeles and then to the Paris Opera.
Read more: The video show took Salonen’s Tristan
Viola, Sellars and Salonen later also brought the piece to the Helsinki festival weeks in 2012, so it was closer to a concert and video performance.
“It might be good that the singers are allowed to focus on singing and leave the acting to less,” Viola said to HS at the time.
The pieces had fallen into place much better than the Paris premiere.
Read more: The ecstasy and pain of love
Viola also responded to the criticism he received in the HS interview: for him, Wagner’s opera itself was the most important element of the performance, but he also wanted to “disrupt, offer people something that they haven’t been able to think of or describe”.
In the following years, Viola was ill. He was able to participate in the planning of Amos Rex’s exhibition remotely, but left the practical arrangements to his spouse and artistic partner, who had traveled to Finland Kira Peroville.
The exhibition focused on Viola’s later period and her basic idea was more and more clearly present.
Viola believed in the endless cycle of life, where birth does not mark the beginning and death does not end.
Bill Viola’s Tulinainen developed into an independent work from the video part of the Tristan und Isolde opera.
Bill Viola: The Resurrection of Tristan. Still image of the 2005 video and music work. The subject was first part of the video part of the Tristan und Isolde opera and later grew into an independent work.