Bill Viola, American,  1951-2024.

A pioneering videographer who helped so many others.

He used his medium to point to the inexplicable marvelousness of the sentient world and the  privileged witness of humans;

of our shared humanity;

of our shared animality with other animals;

of our shared life with all life.

 

He died today of the consequences of early onset Alzheimer’s disease. 

 

Bill Viola – Egg Hatch – I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like 1986 (youtube.com)

 

The manner of his death is poignant. 

He trained his equipment all his working life to record or represent strange and wondrous inexplicability 

to enter himself, young, into an inexplicable loss of the self in all the ways in which this is defined; until death took him. 

 

The title of the work included here – I do not know who it is I am – in which a hatching chick is included

is taken from the Rig-Veda, the Sanskrit text that defines a spiritual process from birth through states of human  consciousness to arrive at a transcendent reality. 

 

I give thanks for his life and work and am repeating that comforting phrase: requiescat; requiescat.

 

Photo of a chick hatching is the artist’s.