Vignettes from Art and Life: 4. Bill Viola  

I saw Bill Viola's work for the first time in 2015 at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, at the still-tender age of 22. It was a crisp, sunny day with my dad. The exhibition blew my mind, both our minds. 

There were dark rooms filled with screens of people who were somehow merging with the elements. One was standing in front of a wall of fire, another endured litres of water being poured on his fragile body. It shook me out of my complacent attitude to visual art - I was going to a lot of art shows, reading art magazines and trying my hand at writing about what I saw but this had already made me arrogant. I felt like nothing could really surprise me anymore. That autumn, Bill Viola metaphorically slapped me in the face and I feel the effect to this day.

One work in particular stood out and comes back to me, one average once a week. The diptych Man Searching for Immortality/Woman Searching for Eternity (2013) shows an elderly man and woman carefully scrutinising their own bodies with small torches. They are examining every centimetre as if searching for a sign - do they look for glimpses of their youth? Their soul? 

Viola’s work is often concerned with time (not just in relation to time-based media) so this piece seems to fall into the category of existential conundrums. What really stayed with me for the last decade though, was the way in which the performers were carrying out the task. The man is methodical enough but detached, moving mechanically around the different parts of his body. The woman, however, is focused and gentle. She inspects every part of her skin that is within reach, slowly and with palpable familiarity. She knows exactly what her body has been through and her movements exude affection towards everything that it is capable of. 

I go back to this image in my mind to remind myself that I too know my body: its moles; colour gradients that range from translucent yellow to blotchy pink; and protruding collarbones that my son sometimes bumps his head on. 

I held on to Viola’s piece during my pregnancy, especially in the moments when I felt a mixture of awe and panic about the skin stretching across my stomach, hips and breasts. I find myself thinking about it whenever irrational self-judgement strikes now too, two years later. It doesn’t cure my insecurities but acts as a reminder of people’s - in this case, women’s - attitude to their physical forms, so familiar and alien all at once.

Perhaps this is a pretty plain reading of Man Searching for Immortality/ Woman Searching for Eternity, a work that poses a much bigger question about our incessant search for something greater or our collective fear of death. Yet Viola’s videos are an attempt to capture and intensify universal human experiences - could there be anything more human and universally felt than our bodies?