Bill Viola

Hanhardt, former curator at the Whitney and Guggenheim museums in New York, brings to life the compelling and enigmatic video works of Bill Viola (b. 1951). As a student at Syracuse University in 1969, Viola was seduced by video as visual expression. The medium then featured poor reproduction quality, expensive and clumsy equipment, and a general "poor cousin" relationship to film. Following the lead of artist Nam June Paik in the Seventies, Viola benefited from the rapid advancement in equipment standards and portability and established himself as a radical innovator in the recording, distorting, and representation of light imagery as a mirror of reality. The philosophical underpinnings of Viola's output are discussed, and a history of his marriage to collaborator Perov and their time in Japan and California is presented. As his eyesight degrades, the artist has turned to color film for its greater resolving power. It is in descriptions of these creations that the still illustrations fall furthest from conveying the lush intensity of moving images.