Artist Bill Viola

This image was taken from the internet.

Purchased with assistance from the Patrons of New Art through the Tate Gallery Foundation and from the National Art Collections Fund 1994

 

The Nantes Triptych was originally conceived as a commission for the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in France, to be shown in a 17^th century chapel in the Musée des Beaux Arts in Nantes in 1992. Viola has taken the form of the triptych, traditionally used in Western art for religious paintings, to represent, through the medium of video, his own contemporary form of spiritual iconography. The three panels of Viola's triptych show video footage of birth (on the left), death (on the right) and a metaphorical journey between the two represented by a body floating in water (in the centre). The footage used was not originally shot for this particular project. The birth was inspired by the birth of Viola's first son in 1988 (although it does not depict his son's birth) and was filmed at a natural childbirth clinic in California. The artist has used this footage in several works. The floating body in the central panel was filmed in a swimming pool for an earlier work, The Passing (1987-88). Viola filmed his mother as she lay dying in a coma in 1991 as a means of confronting her death artistically. The three passages are accompanied by a sound-track of crying, water movement and breathing in a 30-minute loop. In this compacted space birth and death eclipse the dreamy suspension which represents, in the central panel, the thinking, active human life. Here it is not life's journey which is important, but its beginning and end.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jg19GwNCJU0#t=130