Bill Viola made video art ask the biggest, most universal questions

My most intense memory of Bill Viola’ s art is watching his video of a man sinking passively underwater, before rising slowly again, with the cold North Sea actually below me. I’d travelled from London to Orkney to see a small retrospective of his works, including this piece, Ascension, at a gallery on a pier at Stromness . It was completely worth the journey. Ascension especially, with its hypnotic soundtrack of bubbling water, was an uncompromising embrace of a near-death experience.

I hope his death , from complications of Alzheimer’s disease, was as peaceful as he makes near-drowning look. Viola traced his interest in watery graves to his own experience of submersion in a lake as a child. Water however isn’t the only way of dying in his art. In his series Martyrs , installed in St Paul’s Cathedral in London in 2014, a man sits impassively as flames rise around him. You can certainly describe this as a religious work.

Viola unabashedly set out to resurrect the oldest, most universal powers of art. In doing so he raised video art out of a ghetto of introspective media critique and made it a popular spectacle. Artists who dabbled with video equipment in the 1970s and 80s were fascinated with taking on television to explore what it is to live in a video-saturated age: important yet cerebral stuff. Viola went for the soul instead.

He set aside political questioning of the media age or irony about pop culture simply to use the technology at his disposal to address the same dilemmas we have faced in art since the stone age. What is it to be alive and to die? Is there anything after death? Do we have souls? And how do people know and love one another? If these big questions sound impossibly vague, you may be one of those people who find Viola a bit gushingly humanist and cloyingly “spiritual”. Yet he was always precise and very physical in his imagery.

He was entranced by the Renaissance artist Pontormo’s painting The Visitation , in which Mary and Elizabeth greet each other in a balletic joining of hands and movement while two other women closely look on. Yet it was only when he was driving to his studio in California and saw women talking on the street who looked exactly like Pontormo’s group that he decided to re-create the painting as a video, building a Renaissance street scene set, clothing actors in robes of pale bright Pontormo colours.

The resulting 1995 work, The Greeting , led to more video re-creations of great paintings such as Emergence , a vision of a young man rising from the tomb, dripping water – a signature touch – based on a 15th-century fresco. Viola was exploring not just spirituality but the nature of the moving image in these works. Renaissance paintings are still depictions of moving bodies, billowing and breezing with life. When Viola dramatised such pictures he was in a way reversing the process, using the moving image to capture the stillness of a great painting.

That dialogue between motion and stillness goes to the heart of his achievement. We’re immersed in video, in streaming, surrounded by screens. So what makes part of this ceaseless visual flow into “art”? Surely it can’t just be that it is shown in an art gallery. Viola’s works are uniquely intelligent because this is what he asks. He takes on art’s traditional themes to meditate on death, martyrdom, resurrection, by dwelling on stark screen images – a body sinking, women greeting each other – so you hold your eyes on one thing intensely, watch and rewatch it, separate this moment of mystery and meaning from the busy rush of electronic imagery we let wash over us. Don’t just let the babble of media carry you off into the shallows, says Viola.

After Viola, video and film became ever more present in galleries and museums, yet the use of the moving image in art has become as unfocused, ever-changing and multitudinous as it is in the world all round us. Even the term “video art” seems archaic now. Instead, artists use screens as readily as we all do, so lightly and easily that very few think in a disciplined way about what might make screen images stand apart as true art, let alone set out to rival and remake the old masters as Viola did.

Bill Viola will be remembered as the most serious, and at the same time the most accessible artist ever to pick up a video camera. It is no hyperbole to say that as a video artist, he is likely to remain unsurpassed.