[Distant siren]
♪ Doo doo doo ♪
♪ Doo doo doo...♪
[Vocalizing continues]
Diana Thater: This time of year, it's unusual to see a whale.
Usually right now, you see maybe dolphins.
I don't know.
I think she went back out to sea.
♪...doo doo doo doo ♪
[Singing fades and stops]
I thought for a while I would become an architect
'cause I'm very interested in space…
which is why I make installation 'cause installation is all about moving through space.
And perhaps that's more of what I was really interested in,
is dealing with the complexities of our relationships to space.
And a friend of mine had visited this temple in India.
It is a temple to the Hindu monkey god, Hanuman.
You know, I'm always looking for these kind of amazing...
coincidences between the animal and the human world,
between animal culture and human culture.
So I wanted to go film monkeys in the temple to a monkey god.
I always have a vision or an image, like–
like a photograph in my mind of what I'm going to see.
It's never there,
but when I get there, what's really there is even better.
So when I got there, I found out that the temple didn't have an interior.
It's just a facade built on a cliff.
And when I made the installation, one room is the temple.
You walk through the doorway, and I made my own interior.
And of course, what you find when you go in
is an image of theater seats with a viewer sitting in it,
watching a movie of monkeys.
So it's the theater, which is the sacred space.
The viewer comes in, and you watch someone watch.
[synth music]
I've always been incredibly influenced by hollywood film.
Ever since I was a child, I've been a sort of film fanatic.
You know, I grew up wanting to be two things.
I either wanted to be a movie star or I wanted to be an artist.
And a really great way to become an artist is
to go to graduate school and study art with real artists.
I wanted to read a lot,
and I wanted to learn theory and I wanted to work in film and video.
I had a friend who was an architect,
and he said all the best graduate schools are in Los Angeles.
So I picked up and moved to California.
It's almost a tradition.
Teachers teach, the students graduate,
they go on to become artists and teachers themselves.
— So the relationship of this work to the work in the other galleries,
can you talk about that for a minute?
— I mean, living in L.A., you're surrounded by signs...
— Mm-hmm.
— Of course, so it's certainly inspired a lot by that.
[Diana Thater] And I think that's important to L.A. artists, also,
is if you're always involved with young people,
if you're always involved in teaching,
you're always talking about new ideas.
[synth music]
♪ ♪
So I'm just building a tiny video wall.
♪ ♪
This is the installation at LACMA.
Normally I install one piece at a time.
But for something like this, it's really complicated.
I need to be able to move around and look through every doorway.
Like, you have to get down here…
look through this doorway to this doorway,
so you can see that every view is planned so that from any doorway,
you see another color and another image.
[synth music]
When I first started working, I wanted to make something new.
And I came to the idea that abstraction in art is the abstraction of the figurative.
But abstraction in film and video is the abstraction of time.
And that's how I came to working with images of the natural world
because the natural world is not inherently narrative.
It's another kind of time, another kind of cycle.
I'm interested in the relationship between images and space and time.
When the viewer walks in, I want them to…
know that they're entering into a work of art.
So how do I make you conscious of the space that surrounds you?
I do that by tinting the space because that makes it a volume.
And it makes you fully conscious of the space you occupy,
uh, how you move through it.
You see your shadow, you interfere with images,
and the technology is exposed,
so there's a kind of loss of self,
but there's a kind of hyperconsciousness of self.
And each of those spaces is sort of really choreographed to give you the opportunity
to have a sympathetic bodily response to an experience.
And that sympathy is not constructed intellectually or emotionally.
It's seeing the dolphin spinning in space and feeling it fully within your body.
I'm interested in you feeling the buzz and feeling that super-fast flutter that bees do…
the giving viewers an opportunity to feel their full self in the presence of other kinds of selves.
[Recording of birds chirping at high speed]
Animals are quite foreign to me.
I want to film them, but when I'm with them,
I am afraid of them.
I think I'm a lot more of a city girl than I am anything else.
People think I'm an adventurer just 'cause I go to exotic places and film gorillas or dolphins.
It's not because I'm an adventurer.
It's because I have to.
This is Keebu. Every day, when I went up in this tower,
Keebu would climb a tree opposite me and sit and watch me film every day,
so I have tons of footage of Keebu sitting in this tree, and he's quite beautiful.
"Gorillagorillagorilla" is a piece that I made in the Mefou National Park in Cameroon.
The work focuses on western lowland gorillas.
The gorillas are in these huge enclosures surrounded by double electrified fences.
It's to keep them safe. It's to keep humans from poaching them.
They are so endangered.
They are so vulnerable.
But I found that documentary filmmakers who had come there before me
had built these huge towers with ladders on them
so that they could film the gorillas as if they were out in the wild.
So I decided I would film them in 3 ways:
gorillas as explained to us by science…
gorillas as if they're free…
and then the third, imprisoned, the way they really are.
It's really about questioning how we know animals,
how is information about animals delivered to us,
and it's delivered to us in these ways.
[synth music]
This is an era in which the greatest changes that are happening to the earth are manmade.
There was this idea that animals were returning to Chernobyl,
which is, of course, the largest nuclear meltdown in history.
[Overlapping chatter]
So I went to Chernobyl, and I spent 7 days living in a trailer
with a very small crew.
It's dangerous.
It's radioactive.
It's fascinating in so many ways.
I use the abandoned movie theater as a movie theater,
and I projected images of the outside on the interior of the movie theater.
The one thing I never wanted was to reinforce the propaganda that
animals are thriving in Chernobyl, which they're not.
The whole point of the piece is the struggle,
the will to live, and the struggle to live.
[soft electronic tone]
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?
♪ Doo doo doo doo doo doo... ♪
Thater: I think all artists want to change the world.
I hope all artists want to change the world.
And if there's any place that we can imagine a different world,
it's through art, it's through literature, it's through film.
♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪
And I'm completely willing to say it.
Maybe if I'm willing to say it, other artists will say it, too, that,
you know, come the revolution,
I'm going to be ready.
♪ Doo doo doo doo ♪
[soft electronic music]