Editing Bill Viola (section)

== Artwork ==
=== Style ===
Viola's art deals largely with the central themes of human consciousness and experience – birth, death, love, emotion, and a kind of humanist spirituality. Throughout his career he drew meaning and inspiration from his deep interest in mystical traditions, especially [[Zen Buddhism]], [[Christian mysticism]], and [[Sufism|Islamic Sufism]], often evident in the [[Transcendence (religion)|transcendental]] quality of some of his works.<ref>{{Cite web |date=June 6, 2024 |title=Bill Viola {{!}} American Academy of Arts and Sciences |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/bill-viola |access-date=June 12, 2024 |website=www.amacad.org |language=en}}</ref> Equally, the subject matter and manner of western [[medieval]] and [[renaissance]] devotional art informed his aesthetic.

He often explored [[Dualism in cosmology|dualism]], or the idea that comprehension of a subject is impossible unless its opposite is known. For example, a lot of his work has themes such as life and death, light and dark, fire and water, stressed and calm, or loud and quiet.<ref>{{Cite news |last=Quaranta |first=Dario |date=January 25, 2019 |title=Bill Viola {{!}} Video art |url=https://www.dadablob.com/bill-viola-video-art/ |access-date=June 6, 2023 |website=Dada Blob... Exotic worlds and Pop culture! |language=it-IT}}</ref>

His work can be divided into three types, conceptual, visual, and a unique combination of the two. Gardner feels that Viola's visual work, such as "The Veiling", and his combination of both the conceptual and visual, such as "The Crossing," are impressive and memorable.

Viola's work often exhibits a painterly quality, with his use of ultra-[[slow motion]] video encouraging the viewer to sink into the image and connect deeply to the meanings contained within it. This quality makes his work perhaps unusually accessible within a contemporary art context. As a consequence, his work often receives mixed reviews from critics, some of whom have noted a tendency toward grandiosity and obviousness in some of his work.<ref>{{Cite web |title=Bill Viola A Retrospective |url=https://artreview.com/ar-september-2017-review-bill-viola-1/ |access-date=June 12, 2024 |website=artreview.com |language=en}}</ref>

Viola's interest in capturing the essence of [[emotion]] through recording of its extreme display began at least as early as his 1976 work, ''The Space Between the Teeth'', a video of himself screaming, and continued with such works as the 45-second ''Silent Mountain'' (2001), which shows two actors in states of anguish, which Viola described as “probably the loudest scream I’ve recorded.”<ref>{{cite web|url=https://tba21.org/silent-mountain|title=Silent Mountain|publisher=TBA 21 Gallery |accessdate=July 14, 2024}}</ref>

If Viola's depictions of emotional states with no [[objective correlative]] — emotional states for which the viewer has no external object or event to understand them by—are one feature of many of his works, another, which has come to the forefront, is his reference to [[medieval]] and [[classicism|classical]] depictions of emotion. His subdued ''Catherine's Room'' 2001, has many scene by scene parallels with Andrea di Bartolo's 1393 ''[[Catherine of Siena|St. Catherine of Siena Praying]]''.<ref>{{cite web|url= https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/76252|title=Bill Viola Catherine's Room|publisher=National Gallery of Scotland|accessdate=July 16, 2024}}</ref>

Viola's work has received critical accolades. Critic [[Marjorie Perloff]] singles him out for praise. Writing at length about the necessity of poetic works responding to and taking advantage of contemporary computer technologies, Perloff sees Viola as an example of how new technology—in his case, the video camera—can create entirely new [[aesthetic]] criteria and possibilities that did not exist in previous incarnations of the genre — in this case, theater.<ref>Marjorie Perloff: [http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/perloff/viola.html The Morphology of the Amorphous: Bill Viola's Videoscapes], Poetry on & Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions, by Northwestern University Press, 1998,
{{ISBN|0-8101-1561-1}}</ref>