A near-death experience forged an artist profoundly wise about death, and life.
Michel de Montaigne, the wisest and most humane of philosophers, once wrote that, “To philosophize is to learn to die.” Bill Viola, who died Friday at the age of 73, learned to die at a very young age, which made his art some of the most philosophically rich and beautiful of the last century.
Water was a recurring theme in his work, sometimes great torrents of it, sometimes a trickle. In a 1976 piece, “,” water drops slowly onto the amplified head of a drum, the drama of it captured in live video that shows droplets slowly distending under the force of gravity before a brief journey downward and a small, annihilating thud on the surface of the drum.
Kindness may seem a strange word, but just as the near-fatal experience of a lake in New York gifted him with peace, Viola gifted us with visions of that peace. I never met him, so I don’t know if he was a kind man. After whatBut a gift is a gift, and for that Viola has my gratitude. I particularly admired a work I spent time with at a.” It shows two people naked, aged but beautiful, using flashlights to illuminate their bodies.
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