Upon hearing of his passing on July 12, 2024.
I once asked Bill Viola, after a performance of the Peter Sellars production of TRISTAN UND ISOLDE featuring his video, which I had by then seen a dozen of times with different casts and conductors, if he had preferences in musical interpretation – how his work reacted to different takes on the piece. He answered: “It needs the appropriate gravitas from the conductor.”
This left me a little puzzled, because well for starters how much extra gravitas can you bring to Wagner, and also because his choice of words zeroed on something I had been struggling with myself in regards to how his own work was framed in that specific context. Viola’s TRISTAN video is not a backdrop projection participating in a show’s visuals: it’s the centerpiece, an autonomous work of art around which the other visual components are articulated, and it could also be said to be Bill’s own magnum opus: 4 hours worth of images recapitulating his entire life’s work. I could relate more strongly with the posture of Peter Sellars’ staging and James F. Ingalls’ lighting, that reacted to the other elements on stage and in the pit to magnify them and comment on them, with some amount of flexibility and dare I say humility.
I wondered whether Viola, acting like a painter with his canvas (a wide projection screen floating above the singers, safe from the slightest human shadow or light pollution), was embodying an appropriate posture, being the venerable artist dumping his grand oeuvre next to Wagner’s – in short, whether this was all a kind of strange 19th-century backflow.
All while admiring what he did in his considerable career for the emancipation of his medium through that medium’s own means, making video an art of time with its glitches and dilations, and against cinema the art of the moving image on the scale of the human body, I asked myself whether this whole master-of-his-medium thing was not by itself over the top and antiquated, especially in the light of his latest work that absorbed so much Medieval and Renaissance imagery. As if video had to try so hard to prove it could continue a tradition, be something equal to painting, instead of just doing its own thing.
His talk of ‘gravitas’ helped me formulate what disturbed me: maybe this was all just about taking oneself too seriously? Maybe an art form doesn’t need to be a closed form, obsessed with its own internal perfection and tradition?
But revisiting his work over the years, something else struck me: devotion. Taking one single idea and exploring different ways of executing it, trying different approaches, different literal lenses, and trying to make it into a finished piece that someone else can relate to. The extreme, obsessive, earnest devotion of the artist, that doesn’t emerge from an attempt to emulate some artist-paradigm from the past, but that really just is a recognizable trait of great artists in different times and places.
Of course it’s serious business, and requires gravitas. Not ostentatiousness, not self-absorption, but simply going to work to create the best possible image, which is not always the neatest or the most impressive, but one that scratches behind the surface of the big white screen of Isis on which our realities are projected.
Those images then lie open to discussion, and there is much to discuss indeed. But Bill Viola has left a body of work of great integrity, that earnestly tried to look for images behind our known mythologies, in which he put a lot of healthy gravitas. My thoughts remain with this memory and his great contributions to the history of images, and go to his wife Kira and those closest to him.
>marginalia* 