Tate, the Whitney Museum, New York, and the Pompidou Centre, Paris, today announced their decision to jointly acquire a major new installation, Five Angels for the Millennium, by the American video artist Bill Viola. This acquisition is believed to be the first international co-purchase by three major museums of a contemporary work of this significance.
Bill Viola’s Five Angels for the Millennium 2001 is one of his most ambitious and complex works to date. Dealing with the theme of water and its historical, psychological and spiritual dimensions, it features five video images projected directly onto a wall in a dark room. On each panel, a figure is submerged in or re-emerges from water, at times diving into the water’s surface, or hovering over it, in a continuous loop of sequences. The saturated colour shifts from blood red to grey blue, alternately evoking a sense of the sinister and of the purifying. An audio track accompanies each panel; the panels are also titled individually: Departing Angel, Birth Angel, Fire Angel, Ascending Angel, Creation Angel. The installation is site-specific to a given space, and the images are larger than life-size.
Bill Viola describes the piece `The human figure arrives intermittently as a powerful explosion of light and sound that interrupts an otherwise peaceful, nocturnal underwater landscape. Because the sequences run in slow motion, and are further altered by running backwards and forwards or right-side up and upside-down, the image is read in unexpected ways, and the disorientation becomes an essential aspect of the work’s theme’.
The joint purchase has been supported by Lynn Forester de Rothschild for Tate and by Leonard A. Lauder, Chairman, Whitney Museum, for the Whitney Museum of American Art. The Pompidou Centre is seeking support from other sources.
Nicholas Serota, Director, Tate, commented
Viola continues to produce some of the most evocative and spectacular video works of the moment. This collaboration between three museums will ensure that audiences in three cities are frequently able to see this important work.
Maxwell L. Anderson, Director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, commented
Increasingly, for the past several years, institutions around the world have been seeing themselves as colleagues rather than competitors. Five Angels for the Millennium is a magnificent piece, both poetic and powerful; it is also of such a huge scale that each of us could not possibly show it on a consistent basis. Our partnership allows this extraordinary work to be brought to the broadest possible international public. I believe strongly that a new spirit of interdependence has made this kind of arrangement viable as a model for all kinds of co-operation among museums.
Alfred Pacquement, Director of the Centre Pompidou, Paris, said
Bill Viola’s Five Angels is one of the most ambitious works by the major figure of video art: plunging the spectator into a dark and sonorous space, Viola proves his incomparable mastery in the way he makes the human figure appear and disappear. This work takes its place among the great classical and spiritual works of art.
The Tate Collection of international art from 1900 to the present day is one of the most significant in the world. This work by Bill Viola would complement a substantial group of film and video installation works by renowned artists such as Eija-Liisa Ahtila, Tacita Dean, Stan Douglas, Steve McQueen and Gillian Wearing.