In interviews, the artist has often spoken about a near-death experience he had at age six, when he nearly drowned while swimming in a lake in upstate New York. “There was actually no fear,” he recalled in 2013. As he submerged, he clearly saw the water, the fish, and the light, and felt a deep, transcendent peace. “It was the most beautiful experience… I felt it was an incredible gift.”
Water is a recurring theme in his work, sometimes as a raging torrent, other as a trickle. In his 1976 work I Cry for You, water falls slowly onto the head of an amplified drum, a dramatic scene captured on live video as the droplets slowly expand under gravity, then drop downwards for a time before disappearing with a soft thud on the drum’s surface. In the video Raft, made for the 2004 Athens Olympics, a crowd of 19 people stand together, men and women of all ages and races, seemingly unrelated to one another, but as the deluge rolls in, Water will drench them, knock them down, soak them, scare them, confuse them.
The violent scenes in “The Raft” unfold in slow motion, and like many of Viola’s works, are based on a classic: Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting, “The Raft of the Medusa,” which depicts the horrific aftermath of a shipwreck. Where Géricault captured the moment of suffering and death, Viola’s video stretches the moment of suffering into a longer narrative. The people are drenched, but they do not scatter. They are together as a group, and by the end of the 10-minute video, they show signs of becoming more than unrelated strangers. They begin to care for one another, reaching out to touch, embrace, hold one another. Like Viola’s near-drowning experience as a boy, danger gives birth to beauty, and death gives way to birth.
I have known and admired Viola’s work for decades, but only really appreciated it when I reached an age where death felt more like a constant presence than an occasional visitor. Death takes away parents and friends, aunts and uncles, classmates and colleagues, and sometimes even knocks on my window. If you live without God, as I strive with my faith, the most important art is the art of death — and transcendence. Deeply interested in the spiritual practices of Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Islamic Sufism, Viola explored these subjects with remarkable poetry and tenderness.
Kindness may seem a strange word, but Viola bestowed upon us a vision of peace, just as she bestowed it upon him after his near-fatal experience on a New York lake. I never met him, so I don’t know if he was a kind man. Given what we know about Alice Munro, the beloved author whose death in May brought dark secrets to light, it’s best not to assume the character of seemingly decent people.
But a gift is a gift, and for that I am grateful to Viola. I was particularly struck by a work I spent time looking at in the 2016 exhibition Man in Search of Immortality/Woman in Search of Eternity at the National Portrait Gallery. It showed two beautiful, elderly nudes, using a flashlight to illuminate their bodies. In her notes for the exhibition, Viola wrote that her subjects They seek death, and when it is over, each one will turn out the light, giving thanks for life.
Viola died from complications of Alzheimer’s disease. Viola is a victim not only of life but of death; of the fading of light and of the philosophies we gather in the face of our final moments of existence. I wish he had lived longer and had more to say. But he gave us a symbol of indelible hope in the video he made for his production of Wagner’s death-filled opera Tristan und Isolde. It appears on a screen behind Isolde in the musical scene known as Liebesdeath, near the ecstatic conclusion of the nearly five-hour work. As she sings Wagner’s madness poem “Drown, sink, become unconscious, supreme bliss!”, the lifeless figure of Tristan is bathed in a waterfall, slowly emerging and transforming in light and water. Life seems to pour out of him. In death, he brings life back to the world.
In an interview about his design for Tristan, Viola spoke of “these subterranean rivers” in Wagner’s music: he might have been speaking about life itself.
To live without God is a kindness to the world, but discovering these underground rivers is the only way to give form and dimension to existence, and no one has navigated those waters more skillfully than Bill Viola.