Bill Viola (b.1951) is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of today’s leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way...






In Quintet of Remembrance, five men and women seem to react to some unspecified common memory or experience, though in diverse ways. The grouping suggests the bystanders in one of those biblical scenes of pity and terror that are a staple of old-master painting, while here again the visual quality of the images--their color, light, and chiaroscuro, and also their realism (for these are, of course, real people)--recalls Caravaggio. Viola has captured the seriousness of traditional Western religious painting via the simple tactic of decelerating our most demotic art forms, film and video. But to remark on the neatness of the strategy is to shortchange the emotional impact he wrings from it. And to serve old wine in new vessels is in any case no cheap trick but the stuff of art, from Picasso's transformations of Velazquez to the backlit photographs of Jeff Wall, which rework painterly precedents more literally than Viola's videos do.