Diana Thater’s Between Magic and Science: cameras and parlor tricks
/*February 18th, 2010
research
Thater’s work in the past has focused on recreating abstracted immersive environments, using angled projections to transform the geometry of a space, often featuring the animal kingdom:
Diana Thater’s two channel installation Between Magic and Science deconstructs the magic metaphor that drives the myth of cinema and the cinematic apparatus. Not unlike an Andy Warhol film (Sleep, specifically), Thater offers the visitor the casual and yet involving spectacle of a continuous/reiterated gesture. In Thater’s piece, a magician keeps pulling a rabbit out of a top hat, an old cliché circulated in popular culture (including film and animation) that has become something of a symbol or archetype for the magic trick. In the first channel, Thater both dissimulates and exposes the magic trick by promenading the camera around the magician, an investigative motion that, however, repeatedly reveals nothing about how the trick is accomplished. In the second channel, the camera is static and records a “conventional” framing of the action, a tripod shot that references the illusory powers of cinema and its ability to create alternate realities out of “tricks” such as performance, production design, and montage. Both channels are commenting on the different persona or functions of the cinematic apparatus – the phenomenological or documentary camera (reminding us of Dziga Vertov’s kino-eye) and the camera of optical illusions and technological marvels, a device that traces its lineage to magic lanterns and the kinetoscope.
Diana Thater, Knots + Surfaces, 2001
The dramatization of this mise en abime goes deeper than these two asymmetrical mirrorings of the same action, however, since both channels are not projected in the installation space but inside an old Los Angeles theater, which is the footage actually projected for the visitors. Thater seems to be commenting on the layers of imaginary space that constitute the frame or screen of the cinematic mirage – just as the revolving camera is unable to unveil the mechanism or deception of the magician’s trick, so does Thater’s stitching together of the spaces represented in her two-channel piece appear seamless and opaque, hiding the layers of artifice within the totalizing control of the production.
Diana Thater, Between Magic and Science, 2010
And here, perhaps, Thater’s metaphor is too neatly tied up or packaged: the fact that her installation appears so convincingly to be a simple totality, in spite of the complex orchestration of its production, does not offer us a substantial or effective enough experience of the mise en abime she is representing in the piece. The work is more in the story about the work (including the thrilling tale of Thater’s acquaintance with a secret club of Los Angeles magicians) than the work itself, which makes the actual gallery experience a little anti-climactic compared to the curator’s introduction.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
