Diana Thater: Between Science and Magic

"I was listening to 'Subterranean Homesick Blues' in the car one day, and I got out of the car and - when I was a kid I was a jump-roper - and Kelly was in the yard and I said, 'Don't you think "Subterranean Homesick Blues" sounds like a jumprope song?'" That was LA-based film and video artist Diana Thater in 2006 just before that year's Whitney Biennial opened talking about her collaboration with T. Kelly Mason on Jump, a 16-minute film featuring a band (headed by Mason) playing Bob Dylan's song in 16 different musical styles while a group of teens jumps rope. I've always liked the story because it offers a glimpse of Thater's process, which is at once whimsical and rigorous, two adjectives that also describe her more recent project, Between Science and Magic currently on view as an installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art. Two clattering projectors project two versions of the same endeavor in the cavernous main gallery of the museum. The films together show magician Greg Wilson pulling a rabbit out of a hat; we see two different camera operators, and the trick, and the process of capturing it, along with its screening, are united, dismissing the usual separation of capture, projection and reception. As a viewer in the theater, we occupy several "sites," watching the trick, the filmmaker, and even the theater where Thater screened and then reshot the projection. Sitting in the dark, listening to the noisy projectors, you can't help but try to put the pieces together. Thater's work invariably invokes this kind of curious pleasure, in part because she unabashedly mixes smart ideas, reflections on her medium, and the pleasures of our world - a great song, jumping rope, magic, movies - in works that are like elegant, delightful media essays.