Bill Viola: The Passions

In his opening essay, John Walsh traces Viola's development as a video artist and the intellectual and spiritual concerns that have preoccupied him over the years. And in "The Artist in His Studio," Walsh offers a rare first-person account of the making of Emergence, a new work commissioned by the Getty for the exhibition. A transcription of a recent conversation between Bill Viola and Hans Belting reveals the roots of Viola's involvement with image making and the role that older works of art have played in his development. Peter Sellars explores the spiritual foundations and meaning of Viola's work in a remarkable essay that is as much meditation as study, while Viola himself selects some fifteen works of art, which, along with pages from his personal notebooks, represent the sources that have inspired the Passions series. Finally, Kira Perov has selected and organized frame sequences from each of the twenty Passions pieces, accompanied by the artist's descriptions. Altogether, Bill Viola: The Passions is a thorough and richly illustrated study of a new and compelling group of works by this seminal contemporary artist.