![]() ![]() The artist has spoken about his traumatic childhood experience of nearly drowning, though he also stresses the elemental significance of water within world religions and spiritual imagery transcending religious specificity. The central panel of Nantes Triptych shows a body floating in water, the visual metaphor of the human figure submerged in water being a frequently recurring motif within Viola’s work. Since the 1980s Viola has referenced traditional religious themes using his own contemporary form of spiritual iconography in video installations such as Room for St John of the Cross 1983 (Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles) or Nantes Triptych 1992 (Tate T06854), which was originally made for a seventeenth-century chapel in Nantes and is now in Tate’s collection. Jasper underlines the ways in which Viola’s work lends itself to theological interpretation, without fixing the work’s meaning or seeing Viola as a spiritual or religious artist: ‘Rather his central concerns provoke the possibility of theological reflection and inhabit the extremes of human experience which theology seeks to articulate.’ (David Jasper, ‘The Art of Bill Viola, A Theological Reflection’, in Sparrow (ed.) 1996, p.13.) In his essay, ‘The Art of Bill Viola, A Theological Reflection’, the historian of theology David Jasper has discussed these influences and the possibilities of reading Viola’s installations theologically. With no specific religious agenda, his work addresses the major themes of life, death and spirituality. Viola has a long-standing interest in sacred texts and has an eclectic range of influences from Tibetan Buddhism, Japanese festivals of the Dead and Indian Tantric art, to Renaissance painting. The image then returns to its original state and the cycle begins again. After a few moments, he inhales deeply, and, with his eyes shut and his mouth closed, he sinks into the depths of the blue-black void to become a shimmering moving point of light once again. His eyes immediately open and he releases a long-held breath from the depths, shattering the silence of the image as this forceful primal sound of life resonates momentarily in the space. His pale form emerges into the warm hues of bright light, the water glistening on his body. After some time, the figure breaks the surface, an act at once startling, relieving and desperate. We identify the figure as a man, pale blue, on his back rising up slowly. ![]() The water becomes more still and transparent and the figure more clear on its journey upwards towards us. Gradually the luminous shape begins to get larger and less distorted, and it soon becomes apparent that we are seeing a human form, illuminated, rising toward us from under the surface of a body of water. The image sequence begins with a small, central, luminous, abstract form, shimmering and undulating against a deep blue-black void. The artist has described the work in detail as follows:Ī large image is projected on a screen. The other two copies in the edition are in in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo. It exists in an edition of three with one artist’s proof Tate’s copy is number one in the edition. The Messenger 1996 is a video and sound installation with a running time of twenty-eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds.
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