How pioneering video artist Bill Viola's near-death experience influences his work on

How pioneering video artist Bill Viola's near-death experience influences his work on religion

Ben Luke

Where many of us would thrash and panic, Viola has claimed he remained calm: “I was witnessing this extraordinarily beautiful world with light filtering down,” he once said. “It was like paradise. I didn’t even know that I was drowning… For a moment there was absolute bliss.” 
The Queens-born artist later likened it to being “in another dimension”. His uncle pulled him out of the water to safety, though Viola recalled his anger at being wrenched from his subaquatic rapture. Inevitably it affected him profoundly: “Later I knew I had crossed the threshold to death,” he said.

Fast-forward 43 years to 2000 and Viola’s video installation Nantes Triptych prompted a different kind of epiphany among visitors to Tate Modern’s opening displays. By then, he had established a significant reputation in the art world, but this was the moment that he began a journey to becoming one of the most popular artists in the UK — I witnessed people in tears in front of the work. 

It’s impossible to avoid connecting Viola’s childhood experience with the work’s imagery. The triptych’s central panel features a fully clothed figure underwater, “floating limply in this black void”, as he has described it. To the left is a woman giving birth; to the right, the artist’s mother on her deathbed. Though the central figure is not him, Viola has described the Nantes Triptych as a form of self-portrait “in another world with the experience of life and death”.

"Where many of us would thrash and panic, Viola has claimed he remained calm"
.. do we know how we would react, or is this just allowing the imagination to freewheel? Actually, from hearing/reading a good many NDE accounts, it seems calm is more typical. Certainly some initially struggle. Others are so taken by surprise that there is no struggle. But either way, rapidly peace supervenes.

I've heard it said that drowning is a terrible, painful way to go. Yet the NDE accounts often describe an overwhelming feeling of peace. Perhaps it depends on how far down the road one reached, before turning back.