You can’t help thinking that if Christopher Wren had wanted two permanent video installations in chapels next to the high altar in St Paul’s, he would have arranged to be born 300 years later. Still, artist Bill Viola does at least have form, having previously created similar installations in Durham Cathedral and a chapel in Venice. Imagine . . . Bill Viola: The Road to St Paul’s (BBC1, Monday, 10.45pm) takes us through his 12-year quest to create the artworks, one evoking the life of the Virgin Mary, the other the tortures and deaths of the Martyrs.
Why video? John Moses, the former dean of St Paul’s who commissioned the work, brushes off centuries of religious art with the words “If you have a painting, you stop for 15 seconds then pass on.” Speak for yourself, your worship! This contemporary form requires a greater degree of involvement from the viewer than the traditional ones, he explains. But Viola is not just respectful of the Renaissance tradition, he is steeped in it, and this film demonstrates that his work really can bear the comparison.
Like an Old Master he works with a team of assistants to achieve his visions, but his most significant collaborator is his wife, Kira Perov, billed as “co-curator”. And despite his tech-heavy medium, the transcendental is his subject matter. While the physical world may be the backdrop, “the human soul, the software, is really where I want to be with my camera.” Previous work has evoked the passage of life to death, as seen in the film of his dying mother. In St Paul’s the added dimension has to be the Resurrection, as a cleric hastily reminds him.
The shoots, in stunning but remote and challenging locations, look gruelling. A previous work, “The Raft”, had participants so bombarded with water jets that they tumbled over. Here the actors playing the Martyrs in a 2013 shoot are buffeted by wind machines, covered in soil, drenched with water or hung upside down. It’s a very particular and minimalist form of acting, achieved by almost emptying out the personality. Norman, playing the earthbound Martyr, has a particularly difficult time being sprayed with eight bags of dirt while not “mugging”. The actress playing Mary has different challenges, grieving over a limp male body in a loin cloth in a live-action Pietà, while Viola shouts encouragement: “That’s your son, Alessia. That’s your boy.”
The painstaking work begins of putting together the myriad pieces of the Mary film in a shimmering, ever-changing predella (individual scenes from the life of a saint). Finally the day of reckoning comes as first the Martyrs and then the Mary are revealed in situ before an audience of worthies both spiritual and temporal. “Kira and I are just beside ourselves,” says Viola, overcome to the point of tears. Wren might well have been enraptured too.
★★★★☆
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