1994
Diana Thater's video installations remind me of a solitary walk I once took not long after sunset along the canals of Venice, California. What struck me that summer evening was not the quiet drama of the sun's light gradually withdrawing from the sky, nor the sky's subtle shift from crystal-clear azure over the ocean to a more opaque, seemingly out-of-focus, orange-tinged thickness over the city. From the westside of Los Angeles, sunsets seem to happen in reverse: well after the sun dips beneath the western horizon, an orange glow appears above the opposite horizon, toward downtown where the smog is thickest. What I remember most vividly, however, is the light of many televisions, individually illuminating the interiors of bungalows and condominiums, glowing softly behind curtains and drapes, reflecting off the ceilings of rooms above ground level, and casting slight shadows across grassy yards, parked cars and the rippling water in the canals.
Against the backdrop of the sunset's beautiful afterglow, the light of the TVs constituted an alternative, yet similarly plotless drama, an extremely artificial performance whose beauty was not qualitatively different from that of the urban sky. Whatever characteristics distinguished the two types of light simply did not make sense in terms of a fundamental opposition between nature and culture or reality and artifice.