Bill Viola - Background

Background

Viola grew up in Queens, New York, and Westbury, New York. He attended P.S. 20 Clinton Hill School, in Flushing, where he was captain of the TV Squad. On vacation in the mountains with his family, he nearly drowned in a lake, an experience he describes as “… the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life” and “without fear,” and “peaceful”

In 1973, Viola graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts. He studied in the Experimental Studios of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the Synapse experimental program, which evolved into CitrusTV.

His first job on graduation was as a video technician at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. From 1973 to 1980, he studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the new music group "Rainforest" (later called "Composers Inside Electronics"). From 1974-1976, Viola worked as technical director at Art/Tapes/22, a pioneering video studio in Florence, Italy where he encountered video artists Nam June Paik, Bruce Nauman, and Vito Acconci. From 1976-1983, he was artist-in-residence at WNET Thirteen Television Laboratory in New York. In 1976 and 1977, he traveled to the Solomon Islands, Java, and Indonesia to record traditional performing arts.

Viola was invited to show work at La Trobe University (Melbourne, Australia) in 1977, by cultural arts director Kira Perov. Viola and Perov later married, beginning an important lifelong collaboration in working and traveling together. In 1980, they lived in Japan for a year and a half on a Japan/U.S. cultural exchange fellowship where they studied Buddhism with Zen Master Daien Tanaka. During this time, Viola was also an artist-in-residence at Sony Corporation's Atsugi Laboratories.

In 1983, he became an instructor in Advanced Video, California Institute of the Arts, in Valencia, California. In 1995, Viola represented the United States at the 46th Venice Biennale, for which he produced a series of works called Buried Secrets, including one of his best known works The Greeting, a contemporary interpretation of Pontormo's The Visitation. In 1997, a major retrospective of 25 years of Bill Viola's work was organized and internationally toured by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

In 1998, Viola was Getty Scholar-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles . Later, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2000. In 2002, he completed Going Forth By Day, a digital “fresco” cycle in High-Definition video, commissioned by the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin and the Guggenheim Museum, New York. In 2003,The Passions was exhibited in Los Angeles, London, Madrid, and Canberra. This was a major collection of Viola's emotionally charged slow motion works inspired by traditions within Renaissance devotional painting.

In 2004, Viola began work on a new production of Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, a collaboration with director Peter Sellars, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen and executive producer Kira Perov. The opera was premiered at the Opéra National de Paris in 2005 and Viola's video work was subsequently shown as LOVE/DEATH The Tristan Project at the Haunch of Venison Gallery and St Olave's School, London, in 2006. During 2007, the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporaneo in Sevilla www.caac.es, organized an exhibition at the Palace of Charles V in la Alhambra- Granada- in which Viola's work dialogues with the Fine Arts Collection of the museum.

In 2009, Bill Viola was awarded the 2009 Catalonia International Prize, known as the XXI Premi Internacional Catalunya 2009 by the Catalonian government of Spain. The award honors an individual "whose creative work has made a significant contribution to the development of cultural, scientific or human values anywhere in the world.". In Spain it has been published his first biography entitled "Viola on Vídeo", written by Federico Utrera (King Juan Carlos University).