Bill Viola shows new works at Blain Southern

Bill Viola’s video works deal with with universal themes, from mortality and religion to the division between mind and body. To enable such sweeping symbolism, his protagonists often act before empty black backgrounds; their slow-motion, portentous movements allowed wider meaning by being untethered from specificity of place.

_{Bill Viola, 'Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures', 2013 (detail), Video/Sound installation, nine channels of colour High-Definition video on a 3 x 3 grid of plasma displays; nine channels mono sound, 306 x 183 x 9cm (120.5 x 35 x 3.5in). Photo: Kira Perov. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Blain|Southern.}

But in the American artist’s nine-channel installation Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures (2013), on view at Blain Southern’s show of the American artist’s latest works, nine episodes unfold in simply sketched-out, quotidian environments: a building site, a front garden, a gallery space. Viola moves from the general towards the particular, with everyday actions as his subject - such as the digging of a hole, or the pouring of water in a bowl.

_{Bill Viola, 'Chapel of Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures', 2013 (detail), Video/Sound installation, nine channels of colour High-Definition video on a 3 x 3 grid of plasma displays; nine channels mono sound, 306 x 183 x 9cm (120.5 x 35 x 3.5in). Photo: Kira Perov. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Blain|Southern.}

This extra detail, however, does not equate to extra content. For, as the title suggests, the work is all about one rather unexciting thing: futility. The hole is repeatedly filled as soon as dug, and the water seeps out a crack in the bowl as soon as it is poured. We even see a man pulling a cart up a grassy hill, just to see it fall down the hill, over and over again, in an echo of Sisyphus. What does this tell us? That our lives are futile and/or involve failure? That we are destined to repeat the same mistakes? The work seems a heavy-handed way to make such statements.

_{Bill Viola, 'Angel at the Door', 2013. Colour High-Definition video large projection on wall; stereo sound. 215.9 x 383.5 cm / (85 x 151 in). Photo: Kira Perov. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Blain|Southern.}

_{Bill Viola, 'The Dreamers', 2013 (detail). Video/Sound Installation, seven channels of colour High-Definition video on seven 65” plasma displays mounted vertically on wall in darkened room; four channels stereo sound, room dimensions: 6.5 x 6.5 x 3.5m. Photo: Kira Perov. Image Courtesy of the Artist and Blain|Southern.} Similarly lacking in nuance is Angel at the Door (2013), where an actor stagily fidgets in anxiety at a presence behind a door, and the ‘Mirage’ series (2012), in which expressionless figures in the Mojave Desert walk towards the camera from afar.

Downstairs, a seven-channel work The Dreamers (2013) is full of visual interest; immaculate in its production, it shows from above different people under rippling water, in a state of sleep or meditation. But, again, and strangely for an artist so attuned to human emotion, the piece fails to move the viewer’s spirit – its impact is as inert as its motionless bodies.

• Bill Viola: Frustrated Actions and Futile Gestures is at Blain Southern until 27 July 2013.

Sam Phillips is a London-based arts journalist and contributor to RA Magazine

• Royal Academy of Arts