Bill Viola’s video The Reflecting Pool first surfaced in Britain as part of a Film and Video Umbrella showcase of the artist’s work that accompanied a survey exhibition of his multi-screen installations at Riverside Studios in London in 1988. The piece is both deceptively simple and deftly crafted – a harbinger and a distillation of what would become, for Viola, increasingly recurring preoccupations and motifs. A man (Viola himself) emerges from a thicket of trees and steps towards a manmade pool – reminiscent of a tank outside an ancient temple. He composes himself, then tenses and jumps. We do not see or hear the splash as he hits the water because his leap is arrested in mid-air, his body tucked into a foetal position, suspended in time and space. The freeze-framed figure remains in limbo but the waters beneath him continue to ripple, awash with intimations of unexplained disturbance, and fringed with the half-glimpsed outlines of penumbral human presences. After a while, the frozen figure dissolves. The pool grows dark, then light again, and the man we have previously witnessed, now naked, rises from its depths, before disappearing into the trees. 

The Reflecting Pool brims with myriad associations, encompassing baptism, (re)birth and renewal, the co-existence of multiple layers of reality, the allure of absorption in nature and the stripping away of the enchantments of illusion. If the piece has a primal character, it is one that seems to have a formal echo in the entry-level technology it has at its disposal. This, too, is somewhat deceptive. Although the video effects appear rudimentary to contemporary eyes, they were state-of-the-art for the time (the late 1970s) and, even then, demanded painstaking application and manipulation. It is rumoured that it was two years before Viola was happy with the final result. With that in mind, my ears always prick up when I hear the disarming rumble of an overflying aircraft on the soundtrack, clearly audible over the warble of running water and the rustle of the trees. What is it doing there? I always smile when I hear it announce itself. A zen-like twist in an otherwise immaculate video haiku, a Cage-ian interruption to an otherwise consummate, self-contained composition, it injects a note of the everyday into the hush of this archetypal, existential scene and, for me at least, is the perfect riposte to those who find Viola (and especially the later Viola) unduly solemn and portentous.

The news of Bill Viola’s passing, across the river from the mortal present into the hallowed stillness of posterity, inevitably confers an extra resonance to a series of works that vividly and unapologetically deal with the big universal themes: of life and death, body and spirit, transience and transcendence. And so it may it come to be with The Reflecting Pool, with its subtext of transformation and return, its aura of the infinite. The passage of time, and the changes it brings, invariably sheds new light on the circle of life and the meaning that it holds, although it is often the case that the illumination people find there is largely in the eyes of the beholder. We see what we want to see and hear what we choose to hear. As much an oracle as a mirror, The Reflecting Pool continues to reflect the beauty and the mystery of the world around us, and our all-too-fleeting place within it. Its light is undimmed after almost forty years and will surely remain so. It is an extraordinary work (meditative and mesmeric, indelible and dream-like) and a fitting epitaph to its creator.

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Steven Bode is Associate Director of Film and Video Umbrella.

Image sourced from the Art Institute Chicago (artic.edu)