Bill Viola, 1951

Born in 1951, Bill Viola is internationally recognized as one of today’s pioneering artists. He received his BFA in Experimental Studios from Syracuse University in 1973 and married Kira Perov in 1978, beginning a lifelong collaboration working and traveling together. Today, they live and work in Long Beach, California.

Viola has been instrumental in the establishment of video as an essential form of contemporary art and has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For more than 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances and works for television broadcast. Viola’s video installations—which are total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as in spiritual traditions such as Christian mysticism, Sufism and Zen Buddhism.

The Anthem is centered on a single piercing scream by an eleven-year-old girl standing at the Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles. Viola extended the duration of the original scream and shifted it in frequency to produce a primitive seven-note scale that forms the video’s soundtrack. The visuals comprise images of materialism, especially those related to contemporary America – to its industry and architecture, to the mechanics and the worship of the body and to the country’s leisure culture. Viola also uses analogies such as giant oil pumps and the beating human heart, cars streaming along a freeway and blood flowing through veins, modern surgical technology and tree branches in a forest. He calls these a ritual evocation of "our deepest primal fears, darkness, and the separation of body and spirit." By using the image of the girl opening her mouth to start screaming, the artwork itself becomes a cry for help. Even though the girl is the obvious visual source of the noise, her scream extends beyond the contours of her body, spreading and flowing like a universal breath. "The Anthem", made in 1984, was a piece ahead of its time. Its use of sounds and images, and also of the idea that combines them, is inspired. A single shriek becomes the embodiment of all that is wrong with the world.