NEW YORK.- The Whitney Museum of American Art presents the New York premiere of Five Angels for the Millennium. The installation by American video pioneer Bill Viola was jointly acquired by the Whitney in 2002 in a landmark three-way partnership with the Tate, London, and the Pompidou Center, Paris. The acquisition of the piece made headlines as the first internationally shared purchase of a major contemporary artwork. The exhibition is organized by Whitney curator Chrissie Iles and will be on view through March 6, 2005.

Recognized as one of the leading figures in video art, Viola uses image, sound and music to create projective narrative environments exploring universal human experiences, such as birth, death, and the nature of consciousness. The artist's subject matter is rooted in the history of Western and Eastern art, as well as in spiritual traditions including Sufism and Zen Buddhism.

Five Angels for the Millennium (2001) is one of the artist’s most complex works to date. Its central focus is water in its historical, psychological and spiritual dimensions. Five individual video images are projected simultaneously onto various walls within a dark room. In each projection, a clothed man plunges into a pool of water. The figure is submerged in or reemerges from the water, at times diving into the surface or hovering over it, in a continuous loop of differing sequences. As each figure slowly appears and disappears, the intense color of the projections shifts from blood red to gray blue, evoking a sense of both the sinister and the purifying aspects of water. An audio track accompanies each of the projections, which are titled Departing Angel, Birth Angel, Fire Angel, Ascending Angel, and Creation Angel. Each sequence is projected in slow motion with some sequences running backwards as well as forwards, and at times upside-down, disrupting conventional readings of the image and disorienting the viewer.

James Lee Byars: The Perfect Silence will be presented concurrently with Bill Viola: Five Angels for the Millenium.

Bill Viola (b. 1951) began experimenting with video as an undergraduate in the College of Visual and Performing Arts at Syracuse University in 1970. As a young artist he worked at the Everson Museum in Syracuse as a technical consultant and video preparator. During this time, he participated in the staging of groundbreaking exhibitions of video artists Peter Campus, Nam June Paik, among many other early video artists. An equally important influence was his involvement in the “Rainforest” group, in which he explored experimental music and sonic sculpture under the guidance and direction of the pioneering composer David Tudor.

Viola has taken a humanist approach to new media, using video to delve into the phenomenon of sense perception as a language of the body and an avenue to self-knowledge. His works depict a range of profound, yet elemental human experiences and themes that have engaged artists throughout history. The works synthesize many disciplines and philosophies to present a broad view of contemporary art’s relevance to the modern world, a view that has firm roots in the history of both Western and Eastern art, world religion, mysticism, poetry, philosophy, and the natural world.

In 1995, Viola represented the United States at the Venice Biennale, where his suite of five installations entitled Buried Secrets was shown to international critical acclaim. At the MultiMediale in Karlsruhe, the artist received Germany’s highest award in the media arts -- the Medienkunstpreis -- presented in honor of his pioneering video work. Viola also has received fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the J.S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the MacArthur Foundation. He has received honorary degrees from Syracuse University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1998, the Whitney presented a major Viola retrospective, the first full-scale overview of his work.