Zakar–Contemporary Art: Diana Thater Lights Up MCA Chicago

[23 Nov]

The Sympathetic Imagination installation show has been around for a year now. First debuted in her hometown of Los Angeles over the summer, Thater's featured works were curated as a living retrospective of the artist's work since the early '90s, and the show is certainly full of life. Diana Thater has been known since the turn of the new century as a woman who blurs the line of art object into creating spaces of mediated material.

West entrance to MCA; this was my first visit and the cashier that helped me, Taylor, was an alum of ISU from the Theater department! The show was located on the 4th floor.

Immediately the lighting changed to a soft blue and took over the entire corridor in a sculptural way. Lights across the balcony in another room were almost like banisters draped from the windows. The initial impression upon me was that colored light was going to creep in from the pieces themselves. I walked A Series of Events, 2003, 2015, 2016 first. Typically text-based pieces do not require the viewer to move, but this nondescript work led me toward the emergency exit door, away from the entrances to the show. This work was just as unassuming as its title, and seemed out of place until finding the history of its manifestations. Originally the work was a video capturing phrases on a cinema marquee that would come as a succession of 'titles' flashed onto the screen.[1] This work in particular is indicative of two interests in Thater's work: 1) It is an example of Thater's transient condition of her works: they can become visible at any time, interval, or visual medium. This is also evident in the collage of photo stills from Untitled Videowall (Butterflies), 2008. At one moment a corner of the room appeared blank, and the next–a silhouette or two would appear. It brings to mind the video series by Hito Stereyl were she makes herself invisible through the medium of film. Incidentally, Martin Creed's room installations with lights going on and off oscillate at about the same interval as Thater's projections.

2) Thater also notes it was inspired by the form of indices in books and that she attempted to adopt their logic. This process typifies another theme of Thater's work: investigating forms of culture and communication. Even though most of the video installations have content involving nature's ecosystems, most animals and sites filmed represent a political, ritual, or historical significance. We see this in A Cast of Falcons, 2000, where Thater portrays simultaneously the Egyptian god Horus as well as a creature that cannot look back at the viewer. The earth was projected at one end of the hallway, with the moon mirroring it across the other end. Projectors lined one side on podium shelves, high above the viewers eye line. Not pictured are the falcon videos shown in between the two celestial bodies. In this way the earth and moon are actually the predominant forces that can look back at us in the room in lieu of the falcon's restriction.

Projectors descended from the ceiling, and screens reside on the floor. In this way, the mediated screens made themselves self-evident, and they took positions unconventional from most video art. The curation of the show was certainly an effort with the artists to expose approaches to display. In an ART21 interview on Delphine, 1999, Thater says that she wants to create an awareness in viewers of mediation and ecosystem we interact with, rather than allowing for the audience to get lost in self-reflection.[2] This work in particular has elements of surprise: the way projections overlap onto adjacent walls gives the feeling that you were walking through Shedd Aquarium. It is not a clear case of appropriation but calls on our familiarity with Discovery channel-like films.

Installation view of The Sympathetic Imagination

In Life is a Time-Based Medium, 2015, Thater explicitly takes the installations' themes into account and radically fuses two rooms into one viewing experience. Again a specific species signals the setting and significance of filming with the rhesus macaques loose in a Hindu temple. We are allowed, at some distance (mediated between a screen, made evident by a bottom panel of viewers sitting in theater seats) to enter into the "temple of the monkey god" (notes of author). She profiles at once the intersections of human-animal-nature as well as displayed image and the tangible museum through a facade entrance created to match the projection. This work exemplifies our confrontations with rituals and practices outside of faith and include our constant unawareness of mediated image.

The moments that could be found in this show were more than what I expected. Much like the time-based and loop works of artists like Creed, Thater has created for silence a vibrant home. It is an odd feeling to leave a show and know that you have missed some of what was there; I couldn't possibly take it all in, even though many visitors appeared to be attempting just that.

GALLERY OF PHOTOS AND RELATED CONTENT:

https://vimeo.com/68262392
http://dianathater.delmonicobooks.com/film.php
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cR8hHg06ooY&t=12s