In London, the American video artist Bill Viola (b. 1951) is showing an exceptionally powerful group of new works at the Haunch of Venison Gallery and the former St Olave’s College, in Tooley Street, near Tower Bridge. Viola’s last exhibition in Britain, which took place at the National Gallery, revealed among other things the unlikely strength and depth of his preoccupation with the European Old Master traditions. His new work, which was originally born out of a collaboration with the opera director Peter Sellars on a production of Wagner’s opera
Tristan und Isolde, is collectively entitled
Love/Death. Viola, who has long been fascinated by ideas of metamorphosis and self-transcendence, finds rich possibilities in the Wagnerian territory of the
Liebestod. Simple images incarnate the idea of annihilating love.
A man and a woman twine, embracing, as they dive, startlingly, towards the artist’s underwater camera. The same pair, penumbrally illuminated, carry lights into a forest. The prone figure of a man rises miraculously through torrents of water towards his hidden apotheosis, while his female alter-ego is consumed by a wall of flames. This is video art conceived on the monumental scale of Renaissance or Baroque altarpieces. Although Viola’s own faith is a matter of some ambiguity – he cites the influence of Zen Buddhism, as well as of Christian legend – these works are permeated by an unfashionably powerful sense of spiritual aspiration and yearning. The artist uses the most modern technology to embody the ancient idea of ecstasy – the state, literally, of being outside oneself. This is a thrilling, strange, mysterious exhibition of work by unquestionably one of the leading artists in the world today.
