Bill Voila's 'Buried Secrets' At ASU Hints At The Mystery In All Of Us. By Jonathan Kandell YOU KNOW SOMETHING is up as soon as you round the gallery corner and descend unexpectedly into pitch darkness in the first room of Bill Viola's video exhibit, Buried Secrets. Suddenly emerging from the darkness, two rows of videoed faces (no bodies), their eyes closed, mouths gagged with handkerchiefs, as if kidnapped. These anonymous people are trying to talk to us; but their voices, from barely moving mouths, muffled by the gags, are a loud, collective garble. It's terribly uncomfortable, especially if you come upon it without warning. Under the weight of this torture, I found myself pacing nervously in the dark, thinking like the protagonist in the novel Illuminatus: This was "Operation Mind Fuck." But I soon realized Buried Secrets is more like a Buddhist koan than a brain tease. Buried Secrets, on exhibit at the Arizona State Museum of Art through June 9, is contemporary art at its peak. These are the same pieces that represented the United States at last year's prestigious Venice Bienalle (the Olympics of art). You can see them here in the desert away from the huge crowds, critics and cameras of that rambunctious event. The five separate rooms of Buried Secrets are about the "secrets within," says Viola: the secret parts of us that remain inside, yet spark our spiritual nature. He quotes the 13th-century Persian poet Rami, "When the seeds are buried in the dark earth, their inward secrets become the flourishing garden." Whereas the first room was about literal secrets--the people cannot talk and, because their eyes are shut, they cannot even convey emotion--the next room is a more subtle form of mystery: the nature of consciousness. "The Veiling" consists of layers of large translucent gauze hung parallel from the ceiling. Two separate videos are projected into these layers, from opposite ends of the room. It took me 20 minutes to realize one video was of a man emerging from the woods, and the other was a woman doing the same. The video images are most clear and distinct near the projectors, and merge together in a blurry mush as they travel through increasing layers of cloth. Everything is set up here to prevent the viewer from connecting the disparate parts: You can't see the man and woman from the same location, you're looking into the veils from an angle, the videos are dim, they unfold slowly over 20 minutes, and so on. This feeling of being constrained from uncovering the work's meaning (secret?) was enhanced by a museum guard who prevented me from entering between the veils, my natural urge. (I managed to sneak in when he wasn't looking, naively hoping for clarity; but the meaning of the images was still just as unconsummated.) It's easy to miss the next room, "Presence," since it takes place innocuously in the stairwell leading to the next sequence. Nothing to look at, just a series of speakers lining the wall, projecting whispered stories of childhood and aging. I walked the steps, trying to figure it out, and then, at a select spot halfway up, I suddenly heard loud breathing coming from what I could swear was inside my own head. After jumping back, I looked up and realized it was focused from a speaker on the ceiling by a carefully arranged parabolic disc (like a satellite dish.) The next room, at the top of the stairs, "Interval," consists of two large videos projected alternatively on opposite walls. To the left, a nude man calmly and slowly towels himself off after a bath. To the right, intense close-ups of fire and rushing water. At first the two images alternate at about a minute a piece, and I found myself moving my head back and forth as if at a tennis match. Then the pace increases, ever faster, and pretty soon the two videos are strobing in microseconds. The clipped sounds of rushing fire starts to resemble a techno drumbeat--in fact, the whole room is strangely like a macabre rave. There's a moment when you physically can't take both images in, and the two merge into a weird synthesis. Then darkness and quiet, and the cycle repeats. The use of primordial Jungian images--water, fire, nude, clean--lodges deep inside the psyche, and I found the whole mad rush strangely comforting. The last room, "The Greeting" is the simplest. The video shows two women being met by a friend in a weird urban setting that resembles a painting by de Chirico. The catch is that the 45-second footage is slowed down to 15 minutes, making every breeze, nuance and detail tortuously evident. The paradox here is that this "video" unfolds so slowly it actually becomes a painting (or, more accurately, a series of paintings). Once again, Viola uses painfully simple techniques to raise profound philosophical issues. Yet Viola's art doesn't look beautiful or deep in the ways we normally expect of art, and you're likely to miss the point if you don't spend considerable time letting them unfold. I watched a dozen patrons during my visit pop into the rooms and leave with a quick glance, apparently thinking "What's the big deal?" But to experience the Viola-effect you have to detox from the fast pace of TV imagery and take it in more like prayer or nature. That is the beauty of Viola's art, and its greatest lesson. He somehow manages to transport us to a mystic mind-state normally achieved with intense meditation or heavy drugs via a medium more commonly associated with pop culture triviality. There's a lot I could say about the Buddhist theories of consciousness implicated in Viola's scenes, the archetypal underpinnings of the imagery, and the relation to more conventional media like theater or painting. But to do so would be to ruin the experience itself--and that's what's primary in this show. Bill Viola's Buried Secrets continues at the Arizona State Art Museum, 10th Street and Mill Avenue in Tempe, through June 9. For more information call (602) 965-2787.

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