Bilbao, Spain
PIONEERING VIDEO artist Bill Viola is concerned with nothing less than life and death, evident in the titles of his pieces: Heaven and Earth, Man in Nature, Chapel of
Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures. Such ambition can yield pretension, but at its best, his unique fusion of the conceptual and visual is truly transcendent. Yet despite countless solo shows and numerous awards, Viola’s work has never been laid out in full—until now. Beginning June 30, Spain’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao will present a major retrospective, “really the peak of our exhibition experience,” says his wife and longtime collaborator, Kira Perov.
The retrospective covers a period just before Viola and Perov first met, in 1977—when video was still a primitive novelty—up to the present, illustrating just how much the 66-year-old artist’s career is intertwined with the evolution of video art. As the medium became more complex, so did his work: Projections give way to flat screens and video to highspeed film and digital editing.
By the early 2000s, short videos had morphed into feature-length productions, with dozens of crew members and extras. (In a rare commercial moment, Viola collaborated with Nine Inch Nails on a video for the industrial rock band’s 2000 tour.) At a certain point, Perov says, “Bill had become a director, and not just an artist creating his own work.”
Viola’s themes, however, remained constant. His emotive approach—while visually lush and painterly—has a primal quality, incorporating elements like fire and water. Standing in a dark room, surrounded by his extremely slow-motion images, is both meditative and mesmerizing, as if the artist were trying to capture consciousness itself. One piece at Bilbao, entitled Man Searching for
Immortality/woman Searching for Eternity, from 2013, might be perceived as a coda to his work. Projections of an older man and woman—both naked—walk slowly toward the viewer, seeming to emerge from two 7-foot-high slabs of granite. “They turn on a flashlight and very slowly begin searching their bodies,” says Perov. “And we all know what that means—they’re searching for death.” Eventually, the figures finish, turn off their lights and dissolve back into the granite.
“Bill’s been looking at death and rebirth his whole life,” Perov says. “His whole artistic life. But I think this is a very mature and wonderful expression of that.” In other words, as she puts it, “we’re all gonna go away.” — “Bill Viola: A Retrospective” runs at Guggenheim Bilbao from June 30 to Nov. 9; GUGGENHEIM-BILBAO.EUS