Bill Viola: The Moving Portrait

Who are we? What does this all mean? What happens after this? Renowned artist Bill Viola has been asking these questions for more than forty years. From the moment he held the video camera in his hands in the late 1960s and saw the flashing red recording light, Viola knew he had found his life’s calling: to unearth the soul and the meaning of life by imaging himself and others in video.

In curating “Bill Viola: The Moving Portrait,” I carefully looked over Viola’s impressive career and was struck by two things:

First, how often Viola turned to self-portrayal, even if he considered himself a performer in the service of his art. Particularly in the initial years of the device, one of the most striking aspects of Viola’s work is the manifold ways in which he has placed himself in front of the video camera. To some degree, this is not unusual, for many of the earliest experimentations with new technology have resulted in self-portraits of sorts. Whether it is Samuel Morse’s telegraphic message, “what hath God wrought,” in 1844; Alexander Graham Bell’s first words on the telephone in 1876; or Thomas Edison’s first phonograph recording of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in 1877, the operators of these mechanisms are linked to their memorialized acts of self-expression—acts that have come to describe both the technology and the individuals themselves—self-portraits, if you will. Even at this later stage of his life, Viola has returned to imaging himself, with Self Portrait, Submerged (2013), a newly acquired work on display on the first floor of our museum.

The second thing I noticed was that how, even as Viola’s tool box expanded—from the simple Portapak camera and the grainy videotape recordings of the early 1970s to sophisticated, expensive equipment, high-definition plasmas, and large crews of production staff and actors in the early 2000s—he continued to use the language of portraiture. He kept using the face and body to investigate human character. Unlike the conventions of portraiture as we understand them, Viola is not creating a likeness of the individual depicted, but rather, a portrait of the human condition—a portrait of all of us who are peering into his video creations.

The works I selected for the show span Viola’s entire career, from the 1970s to the present. They showcase Viola’s range of technical mastery, from the cathode ray tubes of television to flat screens and high-resolution luminosity; from intimate, quiet, small, framed works to large-scale, projected, cinematic installations. I invite you to visit the exhibition, the first in Washington devoted to his art, from today through May 7, 2017, and experience how portraiture looks in motion.