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5 feb 2020 · The artist’s interests and developments culminated in Room for St. John of the Cross, a 1983 installation based on the life of a 16th century Spanish Catholic mystic, poet and saint, which served as the centrepiece of Viola’s 1985 MoMA retrospective.
Room for St. John of the Cross. Inspired by the life and poems of San Juan de la Cruz, a 16th century Spanish poet and mystic, the video installation presents a monastic room, with recordings of whispered St. John's poems, and focuses on spiritual search and issues of faith.
- Bill Viola
- Francesc Torres Iturrioz
- 1983
- Bill Viola, San Juan de la Cruz
- Early Years
- Education and Early Period
- Mature Period
- The Legacy of Bill Viola
William "Bill" Viola was born and grew up in Queens, New York. He was a very shy, introverted child and found his internal world far more interesting and engaging than his external world of friends and family. He spent a lot of time drawing and by the age of three, with the help of his mother, he had perfected drawing motorboats. Once in school, th...
After graduating from high school, Viola enrolled at Syracuse University in New York. While he had intended to attend art school, his father urged him to pursue a more conventional liberal arts education. Later, he admitted, "In saying that he saved me. A lot of my friends were planning to go to art school and had I gone with them I would have been...
In 1983, Viola was hired by the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California to teach Advanced Video courses. Around that same time, he had become increasingly dissatisfied with the work he was producing, felt that he was losing his creative spirit, and that he lacked inspiration. For two years he struggled to continue producing his vid...
Bill Viola was instrumental in establishing video art as a viable medium in contemporary art. Overall, the works are powerful - for example art theorist Cynthia Freeland describes Viola's work as "'excessive': not only does its scale of presentation increasingly tend towards the grandiose, but the effects of encountering it may exceed our capacity ...
- American
- January 25, 1951
- Queens, NY
Room for St. John of the Cross is dedicated to the sixteenth-century mystical Spanish poet who was a follower of St. Theresa, the radical Catholic prioress who sought to return the Carmelite order to austerity, prayer, and contemplation.
2 set 2019 · Recall the Dark Night of the Soul, a short text by the sixteenth-century Spanish Carmelite St. John of the Cross. Viola became fascinated with the poem in college, later turning its paradoxical imagery (night shining like sunrise, oblivion yielding knowledge) into a video installation in 1983.
- Griffin Oleynick
Room Dimensions: 168 x 288 x 360 in. (426.7 x 731.5 x 914.4 cm) Credit. The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The El Paso Natural Gas Company Fund for California Art. Established in 1979, we are the only artist-founded museum in Los Angeles.
8 feb 1998 · In 1983, Viola made ''Room for St. John of the Cross,'' a piece in which sound, noisy but not overpowering, fills your body and nearly shakes it.
