A spiritual journey in Bill Viola's art

Abstract

From 5 March to 21 July 2014 the Grand Palais in Paris presented the largest retrospective ever dedicated to the American artist Bill Viola in France. Viola is one of the most important pioneers of video art, whose work has been showcased in many of the world’s most important museums. This was also the first exhibition dedicated to video art in the history of the Galerie nationales du Grand Palais, a huge site for cultural commemoration, preservation, and canonised art that on this occasion became a spectacular context for showing what the medium of video is. Almost 40 years of Viola’s work was presented, from 1977 to 2013 – a span that, apart from the 1960s, represents the historical development of video art. From single-channel videos, video sculptures, video installations, video projections, and sound environments, the retrospective depicted what may be called Viola’s spiritual journey through the electronic medium. The exhibition itinerary was conceived as an emotional path itself; the public was meant to step into a contemporary version of Plato’s cave, a dark and silent space with a hushed atmosphere that recalled a house of prayer where the visitor was invited to establish a deep visual and spiritual connection with each work of art. As Jérôme Neutres, curator of the exhibition, writes: ‘[t]he artist’s intention is to create conditions that enable the public to immerse itself in the image – a symbol expressed by the recurrant metaphor of a body plunging into water.’ In fact, as Valentina Valentini says, in Viola’s exhibitions the visitor is not only a mere spectator . . . , because his works are not just containers for different things. At the Grand Palais the invitation to a personal and intimate journey was marked at the beginning with a quotation by the soufi Ibn Arabi: ‘[i]f you engage the travel, you will arrive.’ Divided into three ideal chapters connected to three metaphysical questions, the retrospective asked the public to confront some common and fundamental issues about the human condition, questions that have been investigated in Viola’s research: Who am I? Where am I? Where am I going? In this perspective the artist’s desire was to trigger an aesthetic experience and a spiritual confrontation. The cycle of life from birth to death, the practice of introspection, the relationship between landscape and mankind, the ideas of transcendence and transfiguration – these are the great themes that Viola offered in this exhibition.