Rare is the artist who can transform the material world into a sublime metaphysics. With unblinking vision, Bill Viola comes closest. Considered his masterwork, I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like appears as a mythic journey that begins in a state of vegetative memory and concludes with ecstatic ascension. The style of Viola's five-part tape is ethnographic-stern, unsentimental, contemplative. Exquisitely long takes of, for instance, buffalo grazing in absolute serenity, reveal an animal consciousness that exists outside of traditional time. There is something shamanistic at work as Viola abandons the realm of reason in search of rituals of transcendence. A fish magically propelled out of an alpine lake, entranced fire walkers in Fiji, lightning striking a vast plain, a chick's heroic struggle to be born: things of this world, but each a poignant rung on the journey toward self-knowledge. Throughout I Do Not Know What It Is I Am Like vision is a primary sense-the eye, the seeing and observing. In one stunning sequence, a slow zoom reveals Viola reflected in the pupil of an owl's eye-a consciousness that is species to species.-Steve Seid