'The two main examples of multiple screens', Bill Viola explained earlier this year in an interview witht the Los Angeles Times, 'are in a video making and in late Medieval-Renaissance altarpieces'. This month, to coincide with the Biennale, Viola combines these two examples in an ambitious installation to be shown inside the church of San Gallo in Venice.
Ocean Without a Shore (2007) is a triptych composed of plasma screens postioned around the three existing stone altars of the fifteenth-century church, once a private chapel for one of the watery city's elite families. Viola (no stranger to mysticism) has said of the piece that 'it is about the presence of the dead in our lives'. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world'.
Viola's work is underscored by a spiritualism that has, in the past, riled a number of critics. But while the triptych is rich in religious iconography - there is something undeniably baptismal about the water dousing his ethereal figures - it is really a showcase for what Viola does best: visualise liminality with a poetry that is hard to resist. Slowed-down footage captures the borderline status of his subjects, whose bodies are poised at a threshold of being and non-being. As in previous works, gushing water is used to delineate flux; the artist's interest in water as a medium through which one passes from one world to the next is founded in a childhood experience in which he nearly drowned.
Ocean Without a Shore isn't the artist's only work to be displayed in a place of worship; next year Viola unveil a specially commissioned work for St Paul's Cathedral in London. And despite his occasionally straying into non denominational self-help aphorising, not many artists can count the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama as admirers.
Ocean Without a Shore (2007) is a triptych composed of plasma screens postioned around the three existing stone altars of the fifteenth-century church, once a private chapel for one of the watery city's elite families. Viola (no stranger to mysticism) has said of the piece that 'it is about the presence of the dead in our lives'. The three stone altars in San Gallo become transparent surfaces for the manifestation of images of the dead attempting to re-enter our world'.
Viola's work is underscored by a spiritualism that has, in the past, riled a number of critics. But while the triptych is rich in religious iconography - there is something undeniably baptismal about the water dousing his ethereal figures - it is really a showcase for what Viola does best: visualise liminality with a poetry that is hard to resist. Slowed-down footage captures the borderline status of his subjects, whose bodies are poised at a threshold of being and non-being. As in previous works, gushing water is used to delineate flux; the artist's interest in water as a medium through which one passes from one world to the next is founded in a childhood experience in which he nearly drowned.
Ocean Without a Shore isn't the artist's only work to be displayed in a place of worship; next year Viola unveil a specially commissioned work for St Paul's Cathedral in London. And despite his occasionally straying into non denominational self-help aphorising, not many artists can count the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Dalai Lama as admirers.
Ocean Without a Shore can be seen from 10 June to 24 November, Chiesa San Gallo, Venice.
The band that I worship TOOL should get in touch with Bill Viola...
More info on:
http://www.billviola.com/
http://www.oceanwithoutashore.com/
