In the tumultuous 1960s, Congress created the National Portrait Gallery and gave it a pointedly backward-looking mission: to display paintings of prominent citizens. And when they said paintings, they meant it: Photos were banned from the gallery, as were paintings of anyone who hadn’t been dead for at least a decade.
That attitude was quaint back then, and it seems downright fusty today in the age of the selfie, when self-portraits of everyone abound, says National Portrait Gallery curator Asma Naeem. Luckily, the gallery has broadened its mission over the years to include photography, performances and installations. And starting Friday, with the opening of “Bill Viola: The Moving Portrait,” it is adding another modern medium to the list: video art.
“We’ve had examples of video art before, but this is the first all-video art exhibition we’ve ever done,” Naeem says. “Doing a retrospective of Bill Viola’s work shows that portraiture is not a concept that’s stuck in the 18th or 19th centuries.”
Viola has been at the forefront of video art for more than four decades, and works from his entire career are on display. One early piece, “The Reflecting Pool,” is a seven-minute video in which Viola approaches a pool of water in the woods and starts to cannonball into it. But before he hits the water, the top half of the screen freezes, leaving him hovering in the air, while the water in the bottom half continues to ripple and move. Slowly, the artist’s image fades away.
The piece shows how Viola was testing the limits of technology at the time while grappling with his own mortality, Naeem says.
“As human beings, we think our lives are so monumental, but we are just one little blip in a big universe of moving and unfolding things,” she says.
Water shows up frequently in Viola’s art, often as a portal between life and death, perhaps due to an experience Viola had as a small child, Naeem says.
“He was in upstate New York and he fell off a kayak and started to drown,” she says. “When he drifted down to the bottom of the lake it was magical, so peaceful. He was so mesmerized by the plant life and tiny fishes, he didn’t want to leave when he felt his uncle’s hand on his shoulder bringing him back up.”
Viola, who is 65 and lives in Long Beach, Calif., explores the relationship between breath and life in subsequent works, including “Incrementation,” a 1996 creation consisting of a television playing a black-and-white video of the artist breathing while an LED display connected to the TV counts each of his breaths. Though the number never gets that high, the counter is big enough to go up to 900,000,000 — the total number of breaths in an 85-year life, according to the artist.
The most recent piece in the show, “The Dreamers” (2013), suggests that Viola has, at last, come to accept death — and demonstrates his continued embrace of new technology. It consists of seven large HD plasma screens showing people of different ages floating peacefully in water, seemingly asleep, with smiles occasionally playing across their faces.
“It’s beautiful, the way you hear water rippling over their bodies,” Naeem says.
Maybe it’s all the images of water or perhaps it’s the artist’s sincerity, but whatever the case, viewers tend to find Viola’s pieces moving, in both senses of the word.
“Many people end up crying,” Naeem says. “We might need to have tissues on hand.”
National Portrait Gallery, Eighth and F streets NW; Fri. through May 7, free.
