ART REVIEW : The Gentle Enlightenment of Video Guru’s ‘Narrative’ : Art: Bill Viola’s newest environment is like an electronic, walk-in version of a Hindu mandala or a high-tech Buddhist prayer wheel that helps explore consciousness.

In the last 20 years, Bill Viola’s art has been an extended exploration of the nature of human consciousness--of what it is, how it operates, what it can endure or truly know. Using video technology, the most up-to-date medium available, he has gone in search of an ancient conundrum.

“Slowly Turning Narrative” is Viola’s newest video environment to explore the theme, and it’s among his best. At once seductive and disturbing, mesmerizing and playful, poignant and bizarre, it has the quality of an infernal machine designed for gentle enlightenment.

The piece was jointly commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, where it was first shown last fall.

Now installed in the downtown space of the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego, the “Slowly Turning Narrative” unfolds on a large, rotating panel placed on a mechanized spindle at the center of an enclosed, darkened, rectangular room. One side of the panel is a white screen, the other is composed of three mirrored surfaces. Images are projected onto the turning screen from two video-projectors mounted high on opposite walls.

The device is simplicity itself, but a dizzying spatial complexity results. As the screen continuously rotates, the projected images seem to slide across the white surface in varying degrees of warped distortion, punctuated by momentary clarity. When the mirrored side of the screen arrives, the image is suddenly reflected deep in the silvered glass, as well as visually bounced across the room’s surrounding walls.

Uncannily, you seem to be looking at, through and into a random sequence of continuously moving pictures. The permanent and unstoppable shifting of consciousness is brought into view as an artistic subject.

Viola’s images are environmental, yet the surroundings he composes aren’t just “out there.” They are also fully coincident with the spectator’s physical and perceptual self. Reflected in the moving mirror, you see yourself repeatedly passing by, constantly slipping away, as part of the image flow. Meanwhile, the reflectiveness transforms your body into a living screen on which the projected imagery fleetingly appears.

The video images are brief, diverse and sometimes difficult to make out. There are scenes of feet walking under water, open-heart surgery, fireworks, a carnival, a conflagration, a wedding, a car crash, abstract patterns of light, figures walking in the woods at night and more. Most are in high-contrast color; occasionally the black-and-white upper half of a face fills the screen and looms on the gallery’s walls, as if an omnipotent being.

Dramatically charged, the seemingly uncomposed sequence of pictures is like a mind wandering. Scenes of leisure, of destruction, of survival and of mundane life, tightly compressed into the space of the room, jostle for attention before slipping mysteriously away. They have the commanding yet fragile presence of fleeting thoughts or waking dreams.

Viola is one of the few video artists for whom sound seems to be as crucial an ingredient as sight. Among the peculiarities of commercial television is the way audio is central to our experience of it--we tend to follow programs more with our ears than with our eyes, since TV is, as often as not, a background accompaniment to doing other things--even though the technical quality of the audio tends to be low. By contrast, sound is pointedly significant to Viola’s “Slowly Turning Narrative.”

As in much of his work, a deep, ominous rumble, emitted from amplification speakers placed around the room, creates a dense and continuous hum. This dramatic, background roar adds a relentlessly expectant aura to the space, as if something cataclysmic is about to be revealed.

Over the rumble an echoing voice repeats a dull chant: “The one who uses. The one who controls. The one who believes. The one who observes. The one who sleeps.” The litany, so extensive as to appear infinite, goes on to beckon the one who inspects, collates, resists, goes, does, feels, knows, moves, stands, turns away, eats, robs, accuses, achieves--and on, and on, as the screen continues to turn.

“Slowly Turning Narrative” is like an electronic, walk-in version of a Hindu mandala or a high-tech Buddhist prayer wheel. Merging modern and ancient artistic traditions of East and West, Viola creates a compressed environment in which the mind seems to disengage from itself in a perplexing effort to know its own being.

The precariousness of such a procedure is evident in a second and unsuccessful video-sculpture called “Heaven and Earth,” also on view at the museum. A square wooden column stands between the floor and the ceiling. Bisecting the column at the center, two video monitors are placed face-to-face, one up and the other down, a few inches apart.

A standing adult looks down at the lower monitor, where the image of a newborn baby can be seen. Seemingly reflected in the infant’s face is the image on the monitor above it--an old woman, perhaps dead, laid out in a hospital bed.

Perceiving the face of death in life, of one generation in the next, are qualities plainly illustrated in “Heaven and Earth.” Yet, this demonstrative quality keeps the viewer passive and disengaged. “Heaven and Earth” is an overweening sermon, “Slowly Turning Narrative” a generous and expansive meditation.

* Museum of Contemporary Art, 1001 Kettner Blvd., San Diego, (619) 234-1070, through Oct. 20. Closed Mondays.