The first image in Bill Viola’s video work “Mary” for St Paul’s Cathedral in London is a clash between modernity and timelessness, the superficial and the profound, the seductions of technology and the biological simplicity of nurturing a baby.
A beautiful mixed-race Madonna with closely cropped hair stares out at the viewer while nursing her child. Behind her a Los Angeles cityscape shimmers with all the meretricious accoutrements of the modern era — skyscrapers soar for Mammon and car lights streak past in a time-lapse sequence where the sun rises and sets in minutes. Yet it is she who commands our attention as she holds the baby to her breast. Her gaze is benign but fiercely protective, wary even as she exudes the calm of a woman experiencing the simple miracle of being able to sustain a life through love and milk.
It is 13 years since it was initially proposed that Bill Viola should create new works for St Paul’s Cathedral, the first permanent video installations commissioned for a cathedral or church in Britain. Two years ago, together with his wife and long-term collaborator, Kira Perov, he presented “Martyrs (Earth, Air, Fire, Water)”, a fluent, disturbing seven-minute piece that shows four individuals on parallel plasma screens undergoing ordeals through the raging elements.
Martyrdom is central to Christianity, yet Viola — whose spiritual explorations embrace Zen Buddhism and Islamic Sufism as well as Christian mysticism — imbued the images with a resonance that evoked the 21st-century torture cell as much as the New Testament. This is a powerful distillation of his decades-long quest to capture the spiritual in the everyday; like his hero, William Blake, Viola strives (as Blake’s St Paul’s memorial reads) to “hold infinity in the palm of your hand”.
Viola first started exploring the artistic potential of cathedrals in 1975 when he was investigating the impact of sound on the perception of space. What began as an acoustic experiment quickly developed into a fascination with cathedrals as living organisations. It seemed fitting when, almost two decades later, “The Nantes Triptych” (1993) and then “The Messenger” (Durham Cathedral, 1996) were presented in ecclesiastical settings. His attraction to the Christian aesthetic became yet more explicit in “The Passions”, pieces inspired by Renaissance devotional paintings, so this installation representing Mary seems like a natural culmination of his life’s work to date.
However, it has proved his greatest struggle. “It almost killed us,” he and Perov confessed in an interview before the inauguration. What we see, then, in this new work is Viola grappling with the weight of artistic and religious history, striving to evoke a woman who is simultaneously iconic (in the most literal sense of the word) and unknowable. From the potent opening image, the triptych of plasma screens (65 inches long in the centre, 50 inches long on either side) divides, first into three, and then into still smaller sections. Inspired by the predella tradition — in which small narrative works of art would appear below a central altarpiece — each section alludes to a moment in an existence defined by the birth and death of Mary’s son.
Perov has been credited more prominently than in other works on which they have collaborated. Viola, as ever, evolved the concept, but declares that his wife provided the key to unlocking Mary’s story by saying that they should focus on “the feminine principle” to evolve the piece beyond Christian imagery.
As ever, anything resembling narrative is shunned: what we have instead is a collage of impressions filmed alternately around Zion National Park in Utah, and the desertscape surrounding the Salton Sea in California. In the 18th and early 19th century, the German artist Caspar David Friedrich depicted biblical scenes that were dwarfed by the fierce beauty of the European landscape. Here Viola and Perov achieve the same effect with the American wilderness: in some images, a woman in modern dress wanders through a fertile mountainous landscape, in others, increasingly, she becomes lost in a wilderness of thorns and carcases.
It is Mary as “container of the uncontainable” — as some scriptures described her — who most strongly inspires this installation. That sense of an infinite emotional and spiritual capacity comes across most strongly in the simplest images. In the final sequence, we see the young white woman from earlier scenes, sitting like Michelangelo’s Pietà, holding her dead son in her lap. Brilliantly the scene evokes the opening image, powerfully emphasising the tragedy that she is not allowed the miracle of giving him life any more. She is a woman excavated by her grief, unable to believe the physical reality of what is in front of her. As she looks first to us, and then to her dead son, she embodies every mother who has ever lost a child. In those brief moments we can feel a whole world unravelling.
‘Mary’ will be open to the public in the north quire of St Paul’s Cathedral, London, from September 9, stpauls.co.uk
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