One of the primary reasons for my visit to London last week was to see the current exhibition of the work of Bill Viola at the Royal Academy. I also took in his recently inaugurated installations at St. Paul’s Cathedral, but I’ll defer that discussion until a later post.
I have taken an interest in Viola’s work over many years, even ‘though his video installations are a long way from my own painting. I have enormous respect for his formidable tachnical competence as well as being drawn to the evident seriousness with which he treats big questions.
I saw his earlier show on “The Passions” as well as an earlier retrospective. I guess that the idea that draws me to him is what I perceive to be his underlying question: “What is it to be alive?” This he seems to treat with serious attention to the belief that hamanity has to be understood from a spiritual as well as simply a biological standpoint.
I thought that it was a pity that the curators of the event had thought fit to combine Viola’s work with that of Michelangelo. (There were also on display drawings from the Royal Collection at Windsor.). The rationale for this is suggested by the show’s subtitle, “Life, death and rebirth”, but the juxtaposition of Viola,s immense displays, with powerful sound tracks, tended to marginalise the delicate drawings alongside them.
Not all of Viola’s pieces work equally well. Some suffering from the hi-jacking of their visual focus by the technology.
The most memorable item was without a doubt the triptych in which one screen depicts the birth of a child, another offers film of the death of Viola’s elderly mother, and between them. third screen dwells upon a recurrent image in his work, namely, that of a human figure suspended in water. (This we know refers to a childhood experience of near-drowning, in which the artist confronted for himself the real possibility of death.)
Technical problems with my software at the moment make it difficult to sustain a long piece, but I expect that I will be c9ntinuing my reflections on Viola through the remainder of this week.