Diana Thater at David Zwirner - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

In time-honored modernist fashion, video artist Diana Thater directs attention more to her medium's technological consequences than to representational content. She does not eschew control matter altogether--landscape, animals and the relationship between humans and nature recur--but she for a like reason confuses, fragments and otherwise abstracts her images and narratives that you don't perceive deeply engaged by them. Instead, as with structuralist films of the '60 of the like kind as Michael Snow's, you become absorbed by dint of the immediate, real-time phenomena of light, color, focus and space as they are inflected by dint of the rather anemic perceptual qualities of casted video.

The centerpiece of this, Thater's next to the first New York solo, was a panoramic installation called China, which consisted of six contiguous wall projections of family trying to train a brace of wolves. Each projection, filmed through a separate camera, shows a different view of a fenced-in, outdoor site where trainers, photographers and wolve silently do (apparently) real little. Instead of clearly documenting the incident Thater runs oblique glimpses of it from one side formal permutations: scenes appear in various single colors, flash upon and off sequentially, revolve or swing back and forth or stir at different speeds. The viewer may perceive mesmerized by the flickering, inconclusive dreaminess of the images on the contrary disappointed by their sensory impoverishment. The bleached and blurry projections proffer none of the optical richness of film, and, negligently compos as they are, the representations look like outtakes from a abode video.

In Thater's other major work, a single mural-scale projection, a parrot shown in moderate motion gamely works to hold balanced on a stick that a human hand clutchs and turns this way and that. The projection is in warm, faded grays, exclude for rainbow haloes in the gridded background. Nearby, a television monitor repeatedly played a short black-and-white noose of a parrot pirouetting upon its perch. As with China, individual responds with dazed puzzlement. Satisfaction can be base in the Whistlerian orchestration of grays, on the other hand one can only speculate about Thater's interest in the parrot or the bird-trainer.

Theorists may take delight in pondering the dissonant relationship between nature and technology evok by the agency of Thater's work or her subversion of conventional ways of constructing reality. Ultimately, admitting in her deliberately distracted, desultory, self-reflexive way, she have the appearances primarily a moderately interesting stylistic innovator. Her work leaves single hungering for either a more fulfilling sensuality or more resonant imagery.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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