Before being installed in the Vasari Corridor, a recent addition to the Uffizi’s unrivalled collection of artists’ self-portraits is about to go on view at San Pier Scheraggio, the former church enclosed within Palazzo Vecchio. The subject of the work is American video artist Bill Viola, and its arrival has a particular relevance for Florence.
Bill Viola’s video installations have achieved global renown for portraying individuals or groups in extreme situations. The camera, often fixed in one position, typically follows the movements with which Viola’s subjects react to elemental forces that either are released emotionally within or physically overwhelm them from without.
Water is a common feature in these dramatic and unsettling encounters and seems to symbolise characters’ changing states of awareness. Figures might emerge from a pool or be suspended in one, or walk through a curtain of water as if crossing significant thresholds in life between birth and death. So it is not surprising that Viola has chosen to show himself underwater in his new video self-portrait.
It is an unusual setting but the artist portrays himself at ease in this element. Viola, who has been working with video for more than 40 years, has likened the medium to ‘electric water,’ with its constant flow of electrons. As a way of depicting people, Viola regards the technique he helped pioneer as an art form as especially appropriate since brain and body, like film, transmit impulses in order to connect with others through effects on a variety of levels.
Moreover, water has a profound personal significance for the artist because at the age of six, he fell into a lake. Saved from drowning by his uncle, he later realised that he had discovered that images were important to him.
He had felt peaceful and without fear, he recalled, since below the surface was ‘the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life.’ Perhaps he relives this experience in the portrait, which, in spite of its careful staging, creates the impression of immediacy associated with video.
Viola’s images frequently employ devices from cinema, such as slowing motion to emphasise time, space and gesture. Tonal sounds underscore the carefully shaped movement of each work, and lighting induces a contemplative atmosphere similar to mystical immersion. Indeed, Viola has studied Zen Buddhism and allusions to Christian iconography open his work to spiritual interpretation, although his narratives invariably remain ambiguous.
Memories of great paintings often shape his compositions: seeing three women greet each other in an American street led him, memorably, to update Pontormo’s Visitation at Carmignano.
When he lived in Florence in the mid-1970s, Viola absorbed the atmosphere of the region’s historic churches, especially the sounds punctuating the spaces and the forms and colours of paintings piercing the dark interiors. These features later informed the content of his large-scale projections and their installation, like cinematic frescoes, in the world’s leading galleries.
Get more!
Read The Florentine’s interview with Bill Viola at http://theflr.net/1o4e5x
Self Portrait – Submerged will be on at San Pier Scheraggio, December 17-22. See www.polomuseale.firenze.it.