Diana Thater in "Los Angeles" - Season 8 | Art21

[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]