Endless Searching and Reflections: The Theme of “Life” in the Video Art of Bill Viola

• Main Authors: Chen, Chi-Jer, 陳其哲
• Other Authors: Chen, Kuang-Yi
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2015
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/vsv76d

碩士 === 國立臺灣藝術大學 === 美術學系 === 103 === Bill Viola, a master of video art, concerns about the “Life” issues of human being, creates works traversing the personal landscape of body, mind and spirit, such as the human senses, perception, consciousness, and self-awareness, etc., as to personal passions and meditations of birth and death, even the metaphysical transcendence and rebirth and ascension of the soul. In the beginning, he explored the potential of the medium video, and has been using it as a tool to investigate the phenomena of the living-world by grasping the technological nature of it. Owing to the birth and passing of his beloved ones, he has more profound realization of the connotations of life and the destination of soul. With long-term pondering and practice of the eastern and western religions, from which Viola extracts abundant spirituality without falling into any of the specific religious ideology, to create the touching oeuvre full of mysterious atmosphere, as an attempt to release the self and human beings from suffering. He is one of the less than handful contemporary video artists who make art with so-called old-fashioned religious and spiritual contents. The author investigates the development of the context of Viola’s creation which seemly reflects his endless searching and reflections of human life. With an axis of the life issues which Viola interests for a long time, selecting the representative ones from the huge number of works of Viola’s every period , the author reorganizes and connects them and tries to construct a schema of life puzzle and find out the trend of the core of the ultimate concern of the subject matter in the creation of Bill Viola.