Bill Viola, artist and navigator, left behind a world full of beauty

In interviews, the artist often recounted a near-death experience he had at the age of six, when he nearly drowned while swimming in a lake in upstate New York. “I wasn’t actually scared,” he recalled in 2013. As he went under, he became acutely aware of the water, the fish and the light, and felt a deep, transcendental sense of peace. “It was the most beautiful experience… I considered it a great gift.”

Water was a recurring theme in his work, sometimes in great torrents, sometimes as a trickle. In a 1976 piece, “He Weeps for You,” water drips slowly onto the reinforced skin of a drum, the drama of the process captured in live video that shows the drops slowly expanding under gravity before making a short journey downward and making a quiet, crushing sound on the surface of the drum. In “The Raft,” a video commissioned for the 2004 Athens Olympics, a crowd of 19 people—a diverse group, men and women of different ages and backgrounds, seemingly unconnected—stand together as a great flood arrives. Water soaks them, knocks them over, and leaves them drenched, frightened and confused.

The violence in The Raft happens in slow motion, and like many of Viola’s works, it is based on a classic: Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa, which shows the horrific aftermath of a shipwreck. Géricault has captured a moment of suffering and death, while Viola’s video stretches a moment of suffering into a longer narrative. People are soaked, but they are not scattered. They stay together as a group, and by the end of the 10-minute video, they show signs of being more than just strangers with no connection to one another. They begin to care for one another, reaching out to touch, hold, hug. As with the near-drowning Viola experienced as a boy, crisis brings forth beauty, death gives way to birth.

I had known and admired Viola’s work for decades, but didn’t really discover it until I was old enough to feel death not as an occasional visitor but as a constant presence, taking parents and friends, aunts and uncles, classmates and colleagues, and even knocking on my window now and then. When you live without God, as I aspire to for religious reasons, the art that matters most is the art of mortality. And of transcendence. Viola, who was deeply interested in the spiritual practice of Zen Buddhism, Christian mysticism, and Islamic Sufism, explored these themes with astonishing poetry and kindness.

Kindness may be a strange word, but just as the near-fatal experience at a lake in New York gave him peace, Viola gave us visions of that peace. I never met him, so I don’t know if he was a kind person. From what we’ve learned about Alice Munro – a cherished author whose death in May revealed dark secrets – it’s best not to make assumptions about the character of seemingly decent people.

But a gift is a gift, and for that Viola deserves my gratitude. I particularly admired a work I saw at an exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in 2016: Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity. It shows two naked people, old but beautiful, illuminating their bodies with flashlights. In notes he wrote for the exhibition, Viola said that his subjects sought death, and: “When they are finished, they all turn off their lights, grateful for life.”

Viola died from the effects of Alzheimer’s disease, a disease that it is the sacrifice not only of life but of death, a fading of the light and of the philosophy we have gathered before the great, final moment of our existence. I wish Viola had lived longer to tell us more. But he did give us an indelible symbol of hope in a video he made for a production of Wagner’s death-drenched opera “Tristan and Isolde.” It is seen near the ecstatic end of the nearly five-hour work, on a screen behind the character of Isolde, during a musical scene known as the Liebestod. As she sings Wagner’s mad poetry, “Drown, sink – unconscious – supreme bliss!”, the lifeless figure of Tristan is swamped by a waterfall that slowly rises into the light and water, transformed. Life seems to pour out of him. in death. He gives life back to the world.

In an interview about his designs for Tristan, Viola spoke of “these subterranean rivers” in Wagner’s music. He could have been talking about life itself.

When one lives without a God who is a goodness to the world, discovering these underground rivers is the only way to give shape and dimension to existence. No one navigated the waters better than Bill Viola.