Bill Viola (b.1951) first came to public attention during the 1970s as a leading figure among a generation of young experimental artists who redefined the function of video as an artistic medium to replace film. As a student at Syracuse University, Viola had been able to use the freedom of the art school curriculum to attend a wide variety of classes that nurtured his interests from religion to electrical engineering to human perception, and it was in this environment that he began to explore and experiment with video and sound. Encountering artists like Nam June Paik, Yoko Ono, Bruce Nauman, and Peter Campus, Viola began to develop a new sensibility that employed his technical mastery of this new art medium with a deepening interest in the subject of cognition. Focusing the camera on himself as subject matter, Viola’s early professional life sought to fathom the properties and scope of video, recognizing the medium's ability to realize intimacy and distance simultaneously.
In the late 70s Viola moved on from employing images of himself, concentrating instead on the outside world. Developing an interest in the relationship of the immaterial and the experiential, he developed works like Chott-el-Djerid (1979), where he recorded the visual transformations that occur in the desert caused by air shimmering in the heat, and The Reflecting Pool (1979) andHatsu Yume (First Dream) (1981), which focus on metamorphosis and transcendence. In turn, this interest in transcendence led Viola to address the idea of passage and, in a personal response to the spiritual extremes experienced through birth and death in the family, in 1992 he created one of the most important works of his career, The Nantes Triptych. A large scale projection based on the classical western art form of the triptych altarpiece, the side panels of this work respectively show an image of a woman in the process of giving birth and an image of a woman in the process of dying. Both are documents of actual events slowed in time to give them a subjective tone. The central panel shows an image of a figure moving underwater through alternate stages of turbulence and stillness, as if suspended in a void and illuminated in a stark light. A work that presents a large scale experience whose mystical quality is enhanced by the grain of black and white video, The Nantes Triptych also points to Viola’s developing expertise in incorporating the most profound subject matter into accessible works that captivate the senses of his audience.
While Viola was immersed, as a young artist, in the developments of Conceptual and Performance art—where the concern with concepts and ideas, visual form, language and texts predominated—he was also deeply interested in the work of the Renaissance masters. In particular, a sojourn in Florence during the mid 1970s fed this interest, informing his understanding of the way narratives unfold in images and the ambient effect that architecture has upon them. Visiting Siena in 1977, he spent much time in the Pinacoteca Nazionale engrossed in the work of the Sienese Masters, a fascination that was to have a transforming effect on his work over the next decades. This concern with art history became clearly focused in The Greeting (1995), a video and sound installation inspired by the Italian Mannerist painting Visitation (1528-29) by Jacomo Pontormo (1494-1557). Here, he employed a fixed camera position to develop a visual narrative where two women talking are interrupted by a third. It is a meeting that is presented in extreme slow motion so that this forty-five second event is transformed into a ten minute film, expanding time and drawing the viewer's attention to subtleties that might otherwise go unnoticed. By slowing down his videos in this way, Viola shifts the viewer's attention away from the pressure for speed and change to the demand for a contemplative mode of seeing, echoing the concentration needed to fully embrace the richness of painting.
With a vision that encompasses not only the emotive power of imagery but also formal possibilities of technology, Bill Viola’s works have to be experienced firsthand, and central to his major installations is the viewer’s physical relationship to the video projection or monitor. For instance, in The Crossing (1996) he employs two large double sided projection screens that face each other in an open space, allowing the viewer to wander around and between them. In the darkness, each image simultaneously shows a figure slowly approaching from the distance, becoming more distinct as they get closer. As they reach a certain boundary, one hits a veil of water that gradually turns into a torrent, while the other stands before a votive flame that eventually develops into an all consuming, roaring fire. Accompanied by the sound of water and flames that grows to a crescendo, this conflagration then stops in silence and darkness. The viewer is transported into a moment of transformation and purification that suggests transcendence and liberation.
Water appears and reappears in Viola’s major works and is a medium that allows him to create a vibration in visual certainty and to employ perceptual ambiguity as a metaphor of transcendence and transformation. The monumental installation Five Angels for the Millenium (2001) employs sequences of a clothed man plunging into water, shown as descending or ascending images that immerse the viewer in a translucent world of light. In Going Forth by Day (2002), one section of this video fresco shows a series of social interactions in and around a large building that is then overwhelmed by a deluge of water from within, a drama that overpowers the everyday. And in the diptych Surrender (2001),two figures gradually dip their faces into a dark plane of water, creating ripples across its mirror-like surface so that, over time, one perceives that these ripples are seen from below. This latter video belongs to a body of works that Viola began in 2000, entitled The Passions, which finds its inspiration in the representations of emotions in art history. Employing facial and bodily gestures, again displayed in extreme slow motion, these pieces insert Viola’s work directly into the traditions of Western realism as expressions of the most profound questions about material existence and spiritual being.
Continuing this engagement with the significant themes of art history, Ocean Without a Shore is a work that further investigates concepts of passage, specifically the cycle of life, while surrounding viewers in an environment that captivates their senses and encourages self-reflection.