Spiritual Utopia - A Study Of American Photographic Artist Bill Violet

This thesis focuses on the development of video art in new media, mainly analyzing the Passions series created by the video artist Bill Viola in around year 2000. Combined with his early and recent art works, the author applied the visual culture theories to exploring the multiple art languages of Viola’s video art works.The thesis is divided into four chapters. The first chapter is about the background of the video artist Bill Viola, and then the author introduced the 20 pieces of works in Passions series. From chapter two to chapter four the author used Bill Viola’s art works as examples to analyze the three typical video art languages which he often uses. The second chapter is about the study of Image Appropriation of Medieval and Renaissance master paintings in Viola’s video art language. The third chapter is the relation between visual images and religion in Viola’s video art language. The fourth chapter is about Viola’s idea of time and space in using video technology, and Viola explored the virtual and real issues. In the process of analyzing the video art works, the author used the visual culture theories, and Benjamin, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Deleuze, Guy Debord, Foucault, Baudrillard and others’ theories.This thesis studied Bill Viola’s video art languages used in the video art works. Not only the author paid special attention to the expression of emotions Viola emphasized in his works, but the author also explored the spiritual world in Bill Viola’s works as well.