Bill Viola
Five Angels for the Millennium (2001)
From December 10th, 2021 to April 10th, 2022, the Centre Pompidou × West Bund Museum Project presents Five Angels for the Millennium (2001). This monumental video environment designed by American artist Bill Viola at the turn of the new millennium is presented here in an exceptional manner in the Museum’s "Box", a space dedicated to the most daring multimedia experiments in the contemporary history of artistic creation.
Bill Viola, Five Angels for the Millennium-Creation Angel, 2001 ©Bill Viola Studio, Photo: Kira Perov
Bill Viola is born in 1951 in the State of New York (USA). This leading video pioneer has been involved in radical experimentation using electronic media since the early 1970s. Like certain artists of his generation, he saw that the television screen could represent a new reality and connect distant cultures. His body of work is unique, from his first black-and-white experiments with video, to the sophisticated treatments of his large high-definition projections. His starting point is sensory experience, which he destabilises by playing with temporal paradoxes and ambiguities of perception.
Bill Viola, Five Angels for the Millennium-Departing Angel, 2001 © Bill Viola Studio, Photo: Kira Perov
Contemplation, the threshold and the passage of time are recurrent elements in Bill Viola’s work, as are the primordial elements that preside over life: water, fire, earth and air. Drawing on a multitude of cultures and traditions, his works thus distil a diffuse spirituality. In Five Angels for the Millennium, Bill Viola includes no narrative elements. The installation is composed of five videos projected on the walls, arranged on either side of the space. The element of water is omnipresent, tinted with various colours. Announced by a crescendo of sound that combines noises and indistinct voices, bodies suddenly cross one image or another.
Two performers, Josh Coxx and Andrew Tritz, embody the five angels: “Departing Angel”, “Birth Angel”, “Fire Angel”, "Ascending Angel" and “Creation Angel”. These enigmatic images were recorded in 1999 by the artist using an underwater camera in a pool in Long Beach, California. Underwater lights were employed to create the subtle differences in blues and greens, with one take using a red light for “Fire Angel”. The lights also provided a heightened contrast of chiaroscuro. In editing, the five takes were slowed down and some were edited in reverse, or upside down so that the diving body seems to emerge from the depths, being pulled up by a supernatural force. These dazzling apparitions leave behind them the disturbance of their passage through this liminal space.
Charged with an unknown energy, the work becomes a space of projection for its viewers, each taking their place in this floating, contextless duration. “With the Angels”, says Bill Viola, “the room is the piece. Your body becomes the frame, the dividing line”. Irruption and serenity, alchemy and contemplation foster a whole spectrum of sensations and emotions, in which the artist attempts to connect with the foundations of the human condition.