{"id":12651,"date":"2017-03-14T14:45:08","date_gmt":"2017-03-14T13:45:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.arttrav.com\/?p=12651"},"modified":"2020-10-21T12:45:39","modified_gmt":"2020-10-21T10:45:39","slug":"bill-viola-renaissance-art","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.arttrav.com\/florence\/bill-viola-renaissance-art\/","title":{"rendered":"Bill Viola Reminds us How to Look at Renaissance Art"},"content":{"rendered":"

If everyone looked at Italian Renaissance Art<\/strong> through the eyes of video-artist Bill Viola<\/strong>, art history, and Renaissance art history in particular, would, I imagine, undergo a… Renaissance. The retrospective exhibition at Florence’s Palazzo Strozzi, “Bill Viola, Electronic Renaissance” (March 10 to July 23, 2017) for the first time puts the American’s video installations in direct comparison with the Florentine and Tuscan works of art that inspired him. Through contemporary medium infused in past aesthetic, Viola reinterprets the Renaissance by reminding us of the universal themes depicted in this period’s art, like life and death. The exhibit, which could not possibly find a more suitable home than this, also presents an evolution of video art that retraces Viola’s career and video technology more generally, making this an opportunity to become acquainted with this oft-difficult medium.<\/p>\n

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Exhibition display of Paolo Uccello’s Deluge (SMN) with Bill Viola’s The Deluge (Going Forth By Day) 2002 at Palazzo Strozzi, Florence.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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Soon after Bill Viola graduated from the arts department of Syracuse University (my MA alma mater), where he was able to use the most sophisticated video and sound technology of the time, he came to Florence for a year and a half to work as technical director in the experimental gallery art\/tapes\/22. It was 1974. He’d come from a training that emphasized form over content, that rejected historical art as being too infused in “questionable religious dogma, irrelevant for the contemporary world” (Catalogue, Italian edition, my transl., p. 139). What’s ironic is that, in video art, the technology of the 1970s wasn’t really sufficient to communicate said “form” – as some of Viola’s early works in the Strozzina section of this exhibition demonstrate – while the concept or content would be quite philosophically appealing.<\/p>\n

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Perhaps the most interesting early work on display at the Strozzina is the interactive Eclipse\/Vapor which projects the viewer on the screen as she inhales the Eucalyptus vapor on the mat.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In the midst of all this abstraction, Viola found himself “in” with the major players of the contemporary art scene of 1970s Florence: Superstudio and Archizoom, UFO and Gruppo 9999. Experimental was the word of the day. At the same time, the American found himself in Florence for the first time, and I imagine him wandering around like any arts-attuned American tourist might. Eyes and ears wide open – he did a lot of sound recordings, more so than photos and videos at this time – he explored the city.<\/p>\n

Viola observed how the city’s great art was incorporated into churches and public spaces, making it a physical experience that brought him to realize the true reason for art. “I had my first unconscious experiences of art connected with the body, because many of the works of that era… are simply a form of installation: a physical, spatial experience for total consumption,” reflects the artist in 1992. This is the moment he realized that sensory and visceral experience was his medium. Ironically, while Florence often uses the Renaissance as a major limitation to its being able to make progress in the contemporary arts, the city seems to inspire plenty of stranieri<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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