The Museum der Moderne in Salzburg shows Bill Viola
Dhe third floor is immersed in black, it booms, dribbles, hisses, bangs and waves eerily from five cabinets and two halls that were installed for eight video works. Bill Viola, born in New York in 1951, is a world star of video art with works from more than three centuries, so expect something. Five of the eight films date from the noughties, probably the artist’s most productive phase. The earliest and, at seven minutes, first video “The Reflecting Pool” from 1979 floats in space; it shows a man jumping into a pool of water but never getting there, stretched super slow motion in VHS optics. The most recent, 2013’s Water Portraits, runs continuously and shows two women and a man lying underwater in a riverbed, sleeping, peaceful in the element they come from but cannot live in.
After all, Salzburg organized the first solo exhibition to complement Viola’s work in Austria. The Museum der Moderne can make good use of its appeal, since more than three quarters of it lives on foreign visitors who are now flocking back to Salzburg after a two-year Corona break. Gone are the days when you could move almost unhindered through Getreidegasse.
Water plays a central role
For the house with the locations Mönchsberg and Rupertinum, the show ties in with the exhibition on the English live electronics pioneer David Tudor that was shown last year. Like this, Viola is said to have a strong affinity for music. But the American is also infatuated with Renaissance painting and a great seeker of spirituality. The element of water plays a central role in his work.
The show was curated by Christina Penetsdorfer and Thorsten Sadowsky in coordination with Kira Perov, Bill Viola’s wife, who runs his Californian studio. She dispenses with explanations on the walls, unconditional immersion is desired. An accompanying booklet is available. Viola masters the overwhelming as well as the continuation of motifs from art history. His “Five Angels For The Millennium” shows in an endless loop a man breaking through the water surface with an explosive sound, emerging, rising in a spray fountain. You never know on which of the five screens there will be a bang next time, the atmosphere here is also menacing, meaningful and very serious.
Visitors to Documenta 14 will encounter a video with which Viola continues Théodore Géricault’s shipwreck painting “The Raft of the Medusa”: In the ten-minute film “The Raft” from 2004, nineteen adults from different ethnic groups and social classes are washed over by torrential water masses, until they end up lying on the ground in a heap of wet misery, not dead, but not very much alive either. Symbol for a world society waiting for the apocalypse? In any case, the video fits snugly into our day, perhaps better than it did twenty years ago.
The museum itself is also about to change: for Thorsten Sadowsky, born in 1961, who has been in charge of the museum since autumn 2018, Viola is the last curtain as acting director. In March it was announced that he would be moving to the foundations of the Schleswig-Holstein State Museums in Gottorf Castle on October 1st. A building task and 45 million euros await him there, with which he is to reposition the collections. Since he defines himself as “entrepreneurial thinking”, this is exactly the right task for the last part of his career.
Sadowsky gives his team and himself good marks, despite Corona, a lot has been initiated and implemented. A new mission statement plus canon of values, construction work, more than four exhibitions, all international and diverse. Visitor numbers could rise to 80,000 this year; in the last year before Corona there were 102,000.
In Salzburg, however, there is still a staff shortage because the state that owns the museum has still not appointed a successor to Sadowsky. The application period for a new management is still running, until the selection committee has decided that the “Albertina of the West”, as the museum was called pompously at the balance sheet conference on Wednesday, will have to be patient.
Bill Viola. Museum der Moderne, until October 30th. The accompanying volume is “Bill Viola im Dialog. Selected Writings and Lectures” (Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft, 39.90 euros).