A spiritual journey in Bill Viola's art. 

by Elena Marcheschi (Università di Pisa) 

 

Exhibition: Bill Viola (Paris, Gran Palais, Galeries nationales, March 5 – July 21, 2014) 

Catalogue: Bill Viola (Paris: Éditions de la Rèunion des musées nationaux, 2014), sous la direction 

de Jérôme Neutres 

http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/bill-viola 

 

 

From March 5 to July 21, 2014, the Grand Palais in Paris presented the largest retrospective ever 

dedicated in France to the American artist Bill Viola, one of the most important pioneers in video art 

creation, whose work has been showcased in many of the world's foremost museums.  

Moreover, that 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 canonized art 

that on this occasion turned into a spectacular context to show what the medium video is through 

the production of one of the greatest contemporary videomakers. Almost forty years of Viola's 

videoproduction have been retraced, from 1977 to 2013: a span that, apart from the Sixties, 

represents the historical development of videoart. From single channel videos, passing through 

videosculptures, videoinstallations, videoprojections, sound enviroments and landing at last on the 

surfaces of plasma displays, the retrospective depicted what may be called the Bill Viola's spiritual 

journey through the electronic medium.  

The exhibition itinerary has been conceived as an emotional path itself: submerged in the dark, the 

public was meant to step into a contemporary version of the 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 Viola's works of art, flowing in a kind of initiatory 

journey. As Jérôme Neutres, curator of the exhibition, writes: 'The 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.'1 

And in fact, as Valentina Valentini says, in Bill Viola's exhibitions the visitor is not only a mere 

spectator, someone wandering distractedly around, because Viola's oeuvres are not just containers 

of multiple and different things.2 His artistic creation aims to arrange perceptive itineraries, 

composed by rythms and movements, which asks the spectator to take the same breath and 

dynamics, falling into a contemplative and estatic empathy.  

At the Grand Palais the invitation to a personal and intimate journey was marked at the beginnnig of 

the visit with an opening quotation by the soufi Ibn Arabi: 'If you engage the travel, you will arrive'. 

Divided into three ideal chapters connected to three metaphysical questions, the retrospective asked 

the public to confront about some common and fundamental issues to the human condition, 

questions that have been largely 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 into the viewer both an aesthetic 

experience and a spiritual confrontation thanks to an intimate encounter with his works of art. 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 

presented in this exhibition, trying to strike the public's intellect as well as the inner emotions.  

Although the retrospective began with the grainy and trembling projection of The Reflecting Pool 

(1977-1979), one of the first Viola's work, and ended with the perfect images of the seven high-

resolution screens of The Dreamers (2013), the twenty works of art presented in between were not 

in chronologically order.  

On the one hand the metaphorical beginning of Viola's videoart, an entrance with a proactive jump 

into the water and all the possible temporal manipulations of that bounce: frozen image, slow 

motion, appearance, disappearance. On the other hand a closure with the apparent stillness and 

peace of seven individuals submerged underwater.  

Water in both cases, as in most of Viola's productions. As Maria Rosa Sossai writes, the presence of 

http://www.grandpalais.fr/en/event/bill-viola


water  

 

 'is an acknowledgement of the crucial role this element plays in the iconography of the great 

 masters of painting, and of its value as a dynamic natural force. In its flowing, water stands 

 in relation to passing time [...] or, as Viola recalls, the flow of electrons. In its complex 

 symbolism, water may be seen as a celebration of the ritual of purification through which 

 ordinary gestures turn into something unprecedented.'3 

 

As the protagonist of Ascension (2000) that suddenly plunges into the water from above as if 

involved in a contemporary and choreographic baptism (another Viola's piece presented in the 

exhibition), in this retrospective the spectator was given the chance to drown into a spiritual 

itinerary, to breathe and to take his time: time to slow down, to stop, to think, to meditate, to 

understand and, at last, to accept or refuse life's great mysteries. As Viola says, 'the artist must 

immerse himself in a world so intimate and private, with the aim to create something that may be 

shared with many and different people.'4 At the Grand Palais, Viola and his public met in this 

common interior immersion. 

Time, however, is another great and crucial issue in the entire artist's production. As a sculptur of 

time, as Viola likes to define himself, his work is totally based on the manipulation of speedness of 

the electronic flux, slowing down the movement, slowing down the gestures, using repetitions, 

always mantaining technical and aesthetic perfection. 'In Viola's tapes we sense that he is 

manipulating the instantaneous – stretching it  or exaggerating its effect of momentariness.'5  

Although there is no stillness in Viola's production, his basic idea of expanded time is meant to calm 

down the spectator in order to purify his capacity to look outside and inside himself and to give him 

the chance to look at the world in a more attentive way, trying to see with a inner light made of 

emotions and feelings. As Valentina Valentini writes, 'what is required is a religious vision, not a 

distracted and fast mass consumption […] to enter the vision of Viola's works of art it's necessary to 

dive into a bath of darkness, to purify our eyes as the ancient incons' makers […].'6 

So, in Paris the visitors have been engaged in a kind of meditation training, pushed to research 

something that was both mental and physical: a hidden place inside themselves where to embrace a 

holy sense of infinite. That was the alchemy created by the second piece presented in the 

retrospective, Heaven and Earth (1992), a videoscuplture formed by two exposed monitors facing 

each other, each one showing a black-and-white video image: the upper monitor presents the image 

of an old woman close to death, the lower screen shows the close-up of a new born baby. The two 

images reflect and blur into each other, because of the glass surface of each monitor. In this Viola's 

touching installation, as in the Buddhist philosophy, the concepts of birth and death melt together, 

since birth is not really a beginning and death is not really an end. 

With Four Hands (2001), a black and white video polyptych on four LCD panels, Viola has offered 

the public the chance for another intimate and symbolic reflection about the mysteries of our origins 

and the cycle of life: in this work, four pair of hands, those of a young boy, those of a middle-aged 

woman and a man, and those of an elderly woman perform a series of gestures, influenced by 

Buddhist mudras and ancient English chirologia tables. 

In Viola's production the idea of passage of time is strictly connected to the important issue of the 

body, which is not only expression of physical and mental decay, but also expression of soul and 

passions. In The Quintet of Astonished (2000) inspired by Bosch's Christ Crowned with Thorns, 

another videoinstallation presented in the exhibition, a group of five people are shown as they are 

afflicted by an intense emotion. The slow motion stretched to the extreme allows the spectators to 

catch the smallest details of facial expression, not knowing the reason of such deep pain. If many of 

Viola's works have been inspired by religious painting realized by Giotto, Pontormo, Durer, etc. it's 

important to understand how much he is not interested in a specific religion or god and how much 

he is fascinated by people's emotions, their surprises, their fears, their pains: feelings that Viola 

wants to represent always in a meticolous and overemphasized way, as Anne-Marie Duguet says 

during an interview included in Jean-Paul Fargier's video Bill Viola, espérience de l'infini, realized 



on the occasion of Viola's retrospective. 

The biggest space of the exhibition was dedicated to the huge installation Going Forth by Day 

(2002). Divided in five parts directly projected onto the walls as in Italian Renaissance frescoes, it 

was the largest and the most technically complex work in the retrospective, with five image 

sequences playing simoultaneously that explore in a narrative way some fundamental themes of 

human existance: the relation between the individual and society, the cycle of birth, death and 

rebirth. Once inside the room the atmosphere was that of a holy, collective ceremony. Overwhelmed 

at the entrance by the light of a huge fire, the public was free to move around looking at each single 

video, or keeping still, trying to catch the subtle links between the complexity of images.  

The final part of the exhibition was dedicated to those works connected to the ideas of rebirth and 

transcendence. Besides the already mentioned Ascension and The Dreamers, the two first works 

opening this section were the haunting and immersive installations extracted from Viola's creation 

for Richard Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde, directed by Peter Sellars: Tristan's Ascension (The 

Sound of a Mountain Under a Waterfall) (2005) and Fire Woman (2005). On the one hand a 

projecton onto a tall, vertically oriented screen where the soul of the literary hero is awakened up 

after his death and raised to the sky through a spectacular waterfall. On the other hand and by 

contrast, a second tall projection presented the vision of a woman standing up against a wall of fire 

and then falling into the water.  

After these two mythical and mystical apparition, the public at the Grand Palais was invited to step 

back into the more concrete and fleshly human body in the diptych Man Searching for 

Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013), where two naked human figures of seniors 

projected on large vertical slabs of black granite, as if they are carved out over their graves, explore 

their skin with a small light, trying to capture diseases or corruptions as in a careful search to escape 

death. At last, the seven submerged bodies of The Dreamers, suspended between life and death, 

closed the exhibition and the public's spiritual journey. 

Inspired by the great masters of painting, and with a deep knowledge of Zen Buddhism, Christian 

Mysticism and Islam Sufism, Bill Viola's art, as Chris Townsend writes, is 'an art of affect rather 

than distanced appraisal […]; an art of duration and absorption rather than an immediate satisfaction 

and revelation'.7 Viola's art it's an art for everyone, that talks to everyone, engaging the public in a 

vision that passes through the eyes, as much as through the heart.  

 

References 

 

Neutres, J., Bill Viola. Album Bilingue de l'exposition.  Paris: Édition de la Réunion des musées 

nationaux, 2014.  

 

Kuspit D., Bill Viola: Deconstructing Presence, in Bill Viola. Installations and videotapes, edited by 

Barbara London, published on the occasion of the exhibition Bill Viola, October 16, 1987 – January 

3, 1988, New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1987. 

 

Sossai, M.R. Reflections beyond the threshold of the visible, in Bill Viola. Reflection., A. Bernardini 

(a cura di),  Catalogo mostra Villa e Collezione Panza 12 maggio – 28 ottobre 2012. Cinisello 

Balsamo (Mi): Silvana Editoriale, 2012. 

 

Townsend C., (edited by) The art of Bill Viola. London: Thames and Hudson, 2004. 
 

Valentini, V. (a cura di), Bill Viola. Vedere con la mente e con il cuore. Roma: Gangemi, 1993. 
 

Viola B., Apprendere la tecnologia degli esseri umani, in Le pratiche del video, V. Valentini (a cura 

                                                 

1  Neutres 2014, p. 5.  
2  Valentini 1993, p. 11. 

3  Sossai 2012, p. 25.  



                                                                                                                                                                  
4  Viola, 165 

5  Kuspit, p. 73 

6  Valentini 1993, p. 11 

7  Townsend 2004, p. 9