That depends (of course) on what you mean by “religious”. I’m asking myself this question as a result of my visit last week to St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, in order to see the two pieces by the American video-artist Bill Viola, recently installed in chapels there. Also I have managed to watch the video of the development of the project, which not only follows the emergence and crystallisation of his ideas but also contains several interview sequences with the artist in which he talks about the thinking behind these two works.
The pieces in question occupy two chapels situated at each side of the main altar in the cathedral, and these locations make clear the importance that is attached to them. Historically these chapels were dedicated to Mary the mother of Jesus, and to the Christian martyrs, and Viola has taken up these traditional themes in his own site-specific work.
The Mary chapel offers the viewer three screens depicting episodes from her life as recorded in the Bible, extending from “The Annunciation” to a final image based upon traditional Christian iconography, usually known as a “pieta”. In this she is shown seated, cradling the body of Jesus after he has been taken down from the cross. This latter is done with deliberate realism, whereas other images are often more metaphorical and refer more indirectly to the biblical account.
The Martyrs chapel presents the viewer with a “predella” of four identical screens, depicting martyrs approaching and through the moment of death. The four are named after the traditional four elements (earth, air, fire and water) and each of these provides an image suggesting how the individual concerned met his or her death. These are symbolic rather than literal in their depiction.
Both of these compositions are engaging, challenging and (as we have come to expect from Bill Viola) exhibit enormous technical competence. They must surely rank among his best artistic achievements to date, and whatever your views about religious questions they are worth seeing for that reason. For me, however, the state of mind with which I left the cathedral was primarily one of puzzlement rather than spiritual uplift. Exactly what Viola thinks he is communicating is far from clear, and his ambivalence is made even more evident in the interview material relating to the project. If he has anything that could be called a “theology” it is rather ad hoc and inconsistent. On occasions his meaning is unclear, and with the pieta I’m afraid to say that he descends into visual and iconographic cliche. Nevertheless, I am certain that Viola is deeply serious about his work, and that it reflects the result of prolonged personal engagement with the issues.
A theme running throughout the entire corpus of Bill Viola’s art is his preoccupation with life and death and (as I noted in an earlier post) the question of “what it means to be alive”. It becomes noteworthy, however, in a specifically Christian context, that he doesn’t have any concept of the resurrection. He appears to have a consistent commitment to the idea of a soul, but equally this appears to be rooted in a fundamentally platonist dualism (body/soul).
The clearest expression of this is in the pieta scene, in which Mary contemplates in sorrow the death of her son. There is no trace here of awareness of the cosmic significance of his death. It is never suggested to us that what we witness the self-sacrificial death of God, or that a consequence of this is the possibility of the redemption of creation. We observe the suffering of Mary, but can not help asking at the end to what purpose she might have suffered. Similarly with the martyrs, we observe their endurance, and the moment at which they finally surmount their suffering and find release from it. Their suffering belongs within no narrative, however, and whereas it might possess some spiritual significance, cannot be said to have served any religious purpose.