We move, record, project, and see, changing the nature and configuration of what we see through our movement and our being and, ultimately, find ourselves not looking at the work of art but with it.
Diana Thater, quoted in Lynne Cooke, “Knots and Surfaces: A Gnosis,” in Diana Thater: Knots and Surfaces, ed. Lynne Cooke and Karen Kelly (New York: Dia Center for the Arts, 2002), 53.
Diana Thater films in the natural world, capturing how animals such as wolves, elephants, bees, and dolphins inhabit another kind of time and space. Playing with the temporal and spatial qualities inherent to film and video installation, Thater considers the ways media—like traditional Hollywood films and nature documentaries—shape our understanding of the world around us. She says, “It’s really about questioning how we know animals, how is information about animals delivered to us. . . . I want us to find different ways to think through living, and different ways to construct power. How do we think about the natural world in a way that doesn’t destroy it?”1 A pioneer of video installation art, Thater models her work on animal environments, exploring video’s capacity for imagining non-narrative time and expanded perception to induce a sympathetic response.
Diana Thater, in “Diana Thater: ‘Delphine,’” Art21 Extended Play, episode 240 (October 2016), video, 4:25 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=cR8hHg06ooY. ↩︎
Through multiple projections and screens situated in various spatial configurations—as in the monitors arranged lying on the floor in Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2) (2008)—Diana Thater’s video art installations shift viewing perspectives to change the way we experience video in relation to space. In her early work, the artist was interested in deconstructing the basic components of video by dividing images into red, green, and blue, the primary colors of light;1 as the artist says, “once you find the limitations of the language, you can exceed them.”2 In Untitled (Butterfly Videowall #2), Thater breaks apart the wall of monitors that would together show a comprehensive image; placing them upturned on the floor, they mimic the position of monarch butterflies resting on the ground at the El Rosario Monarch Butterfly Sanctuary, the preservation site in Mexico where the video was shot. Seen at our feet, their fractured images of a butterfly slowly flapping its wings alter how viewers see dimensionality in video, suggesting that the experience of space, like images, is constructed.
“Diana Thater: The Artist’s Museum,” The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, filmed 2010, video, 4:11 minutes, available at vimeo.com/16326381. ↩︎
Diana Thater, in Lynne Cooke, “Interview with Diana Thater,” September 14, 2014, published in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 22. ↩︎
For Diana Thater, the world of animals suggests alternative models of spatial realities from the gravity-bound human perspective.1 Her video installation Delphine (1999) features a pod of free dolphins as they twist and dive in three-dimensional movement through the depths of the ocean and break through its surface. Images projected at various angles wrap around corners of the gallery and bend onto the ceiling and floor. The installation itself, overlaying the constraints of human architecture with a volumetric space, is informed by the way dolphins interact with their environment. Breaking from the conventional filming of animals, in which the camera is an extension of a voyeuristic viewer,2 in Thater’s framing the artist and viewer look through, not at, the animal world.3
Michael Govan, “More Wolves Are Better Than One,” in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 120. ↩︎
Michael Govan, “More Wolves Are Better Than One,” in Diana Thater: The Sympathetic Imagination (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 123. ↩︎
Diana Thater, in conversation with Hildegund Amanshauser, January 2000, published in The Secession Talks: Exhibitions in Conversation 1998–2010 (Cologne, Germany: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König; and New York: Distributed Art Publishers, 2012), 122. ↩︎
While artists often project film and video work in a black box—a theater-like setting that facilitates the suspension of disbelief, allowing the viewer to escape into the world of the video—Diana Thater illuminates the gallery with intense colored light to heighten viewers’ awareness of their surroundings. She describes the gallery space as “water to a fish”1 because one can never wholly see it from the outside. For Thater, light is not illusionistic but experiential:
It’s something that needs to be navigated and it’s something that needs to be survived. But to a fish, water is an invisibility the same way space is to us. I wanted to figure out a way to make people aware of the space they occupy while they’re occupying it, and to see a space like an object . . . and when you go into it, you’re in the glowing light and you see, you sense, you feel this kind of fizzle of color, this intensity.2
Diana Thater, in Creative Minds artist talk on the occasion of the exhibition Beta Space: Diana Thater, San José Museum of Art, April 23, 2015, video, 2:45 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=cSUL_uPfinE. ↩︎
Diana Thater, in Creative Minds artist talk on the occasion of the exhibition Beta Space: Diana Thater, San José Museum of Art, April 23, 2015, video, 2:45 minutes, available at youtube.com/watch?v=cSUL_uPfinE. ↩︎
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