LONG BEACH, California – Bill Viola, a video artist who teamed with director Peter Sellars on a groundbreaking production of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” originally seen in Los Angeles, Paris and New York, has died at age 73.
Viola died Friday at her home in Long Beach of Alzheimer’s disease, her advertised website.
What was called “The Tristan Project” debuted in concert form at Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2004, debuted on the Paris Opera stage the following year, and was performed in concert at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall in 2007. .
Its staging was revived several times in Paris, until 2023, and versions were presented in Helsinki; Kobe, Japan; London; Madrid; Rotterdam, Netherlands; Saint Petersburg, Russia; Stockholm; Tokyo; and Toronto. The videos were shown at New York’s James Cohan gallery in 2007.
“I hope audiences leave the theater with a deeper understanding of the nature of our short time here on Earth and the importance and power of love and any kind of relationship we actually have with the things and people of the world. — Viola said in one 2013 interview with the Canadian Opera Company.
As the singers performed on stage, a huge video showed images of individuals, water, candles and fire that ranged from grainy gray to high-definition colors. Her technique included Viola filming in the Vermont woods for a week alone with a video camera; building a waterfall on a sound stage and lowering an actor on a wire, then using the video in reverse during the performance to make the actor appear to be rising; for a crew of 70 in an airplane hangar with a 90-foot pool of water and a 25-foot-high wall of flames.
“A defining moment in nearly 140 years of continuous staging of an opera that transformed (and continues to influence) music more than any other work,” wrote Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed following a 2022 revival at Disney Hall.
During the Liebestod, the love-death that closes the opera, Tristan’s body begins to bubble and he dissolves like Alka-Seltzer as he rises.
“This was the moment where I realized where I can bring into play these experiences and these images that I’ve been working with about, say, fire and water, and really make them work within a larger whole,” Viola said in the COC Interview.
He married Kira Perov, director of cultural events at La Trobe University in Melbourne, in 1980, three years after they met when she asked him to show videos at an exhibition. Perov became her artistic collaborator and they spent a year in Japan on a cultural exchange program before moving to California.
Viola said four hours of video were filmed for the opera and that the production put a strain on her marriage.
“We put a lot of our personal money into finishing it,” he said in the 2013 interview. “When we realized we were two-thirds of the way there and the money was running out, we looked at each other and said, ‘This must be done.’”
Born in New York, Viola graduated from Syracuse in 1973, where he was mentored by Jack Nelson and began developing his video art. He worked at art/tapes/22, a video art studio in Florence, Italy, and had his first major European exhibition in Florence in 1975.
Viola moved to New York and spent 1976 to 1980 at WNET Thirteen’s Television Laboratory as artist-in-residence and in 1976 created “He Weeps for You,” a live camera zooming in on an image inside a drop of water, which traveled to the New York Museum. of Modern Art.
In the mid-1980s, Viola’s work was seen at the Whitney and the Museum of the Moving Image, and in 1987 he had what MoMa said was the first video artist to have a retrospective there.
He received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1978, 1983, and 1989, and a grant from the MacArthur Foundation in 1989. His work has been exhibited in several of the Whitney Museum of Art’s Bienielle exhibitions.
In addition to his wife, he is survived by his sons Blake and Andrei Viola and daughter-in-law Aileen Milliman.
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