STUDIO AS STUDY A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists

Edited, with an Introduction, by Melinda Barlow

rawing, that intimate act of the hand often perceived as the most basic skill an artist must possess, was once described as “the bearing mother of all arts D and sciences.”1 Ingres insisted that drawing was “three quarters of painting,” while Cézanne refused to distinguish between the two media. “When one paints,” he wrote, “one draws.” Sculpture has had its share of master draftsmen, like Rodin, and yet sculptor’s drawings, like those by architects, are frequently seen to be purely utilitarian, because they lead to a three-dimensional final product, and reveal a process of conceptual trial and error. “A means of finding your way about things,” as Henry Moore put it, drawings are a way of envisioning possibilities.

In the mid-twentieth century, drawing was radically reinvented by artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Sol LeWitt. Pollock uniquely fused drawing with painting, his energetic lines of paint literally flying off the canvas, while LeWitt redefined the idea of the commission, and moved the act of drawing from the page to the wall. Through written instructions or “scores” describing precise arrangements of lines ultimately executed by others, LeWitt forged a sensual partnership between drawing and architecture, and helped transform the traditional notion of the studio.

Often a place where a work is crafted by hand in paint or clay, in the mid-1960s the studio developed a paper counterpart, the studio on the page, or in a notebook, where a work is crafted conceptually, as an idea. When art critic Lucy Lippard noted in 1968 that “the studio is again becoming a study,” it was this phenomenon that she was trying to describe.2 As art gradually “dematerialized,” drawings of happen- ings, performances, environments, and video installations became fascinating documents of works ultimately, if temporarily, realized in physical form.

With a title evoking Lippard’s insight, “Studio as Study: A Selection of Drawings by American Video Artists,” explores the various roles drawing has played during the last 35 years of video history. It brings together drawings by 15 artists of different ages and orientations, from pioneers of the medium to members of the latest generation, from makers of single-channel tapes to multi-channel installations, from those with backgrounds in anthropology and photography to those trained in sculpture and painting. The resulting portfolio, extraordinary in its range of styles

© 2002 Performing Arts Journal, Inc. PAJ 71 (2002), pp. 1–33. ᭿ 1

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To contribute to this collection, each artist was asked to submit a drawing from any period of his or her work, past or present, along with a statement describing that particular work, or explaining how and why he or she has used drawings. The pages which follow contain these things and more, including excerpts from the audio text used in an installation resembling a computer play-station (Julia Scher), a phonetic cue card serving as both drawing and statement (), and images which expand the definition of drawing, dissociating it from an activity performed by the human hand and locating it in the waveform possibilities programmed in a machine (Woody Vasulka).

For some of these artists, drawing has been a fundamental and continuous part of the creative process. describes drawing as a basic graphic element, one she often incorporates into live action performances. Chip Lord carries a pocket sketchbook whenever he travels, and Sadie Benning doodles, sometimes while editing. Mary Lucier and produce volumes of hand-drawn material, creating extensive paper trails for virtually every work. Some artists, however, feel that drawing should not be limited to an arrangement of lines on a page. Jonas distances drawing’s intimacy by showing the process live, on closed-circuit monitors; and calls the whole series of “primary hand-made images, props, sets, installations and videotapes” presented in a recently published catalogue drawings, perhaps because they are preliminary ways of trying out ideas.3

Many drawings included in this portfolio reflect important moments in video history, reveal basic aspects of working with the technology, or take the medium itself as their explicit subject. Ann Woodward’s whimsical illustrations for The Spaghetti City Video Manual and for a fable about a pirate cable TV station, for example, are reminders of the interest in community access pioneered by collectives like Videofreex, of which she was a member, while Beryl Korot’s delicate picto- graphic notations, elegant in their precision, were used to create a score for multiple channel editing. Especially rich with historical significance is the invocation by of Douglas Davis’s famous claim, in a “Manifesto” from 1974, that “the camera is a pencil”—an essential hand-held tool for communication.4 To make the drawing included here, Campus used a stylus and digitizing tablet, basic input devices for the computer which recall the oldest of writing implements, the stylus and wax tablet. And in Poetic (Coda) # 13 (1997) by Tony Oursler and Untitled (1998) by Sadie Benning, both reproduced in this introduction, the video medium itself is the subject of composition. Oursler’s ironic still life gives us a product: the familiar plastic box used to hold videotapes, hovering behind a snaking line reminiscent of videotape as it unwinds, while Benning’s sketch of a phantom silhouette both inside and outside the lens of a camcorder suggests an interface between reality and image, of humanity and the machine.

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Sadie Benning, Untitled (1998). Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Other drawings in this portfolio reveal different aspects of the changing relationship between humanity and technology, redefine the idea of the commission, and expose the continuing legacy of conceptual art. Rita Myers likens the advent of the computer to that of the Sony Portapak, pointing out that software now enables one to generate many slightly different versions of the same drawing, and that this radically changes the meaning of making a preliminary “study.”5 (It also changes, once again, the meaning of the studio, giving it a new incarnation in cyberspace.) Myers’s elevation and axonometric drawings for Correspondences: Day into Night into Day (1992), like Julia Scher’s lighting plot for Wonderland (1998) and ’s perspective drawing for Delphine (2000), were commissioned by architects and designers. Thater’s drawing, however, includes hand-collaged elements on its borders: dynamic shapes indicating the placement of projections in space, and pantone strips providing a patchwork of the installation’s color scheme.

Chip Lord’s sketches for Picture Windows (1990), and Doug Hall’s installation Terminal Landscape (1995) reveal the legacy of conceptual art. As Lord explains in his statement, one of the drawings included here contains an idea he ultimately did not use. As LeWitt noted in his 12th sentence on conceptual art, “For each work of art that becomes physical, there are many variations that do not.” Hall asked his students to make drawings in response to a written description of a photograph. He then took a group of these drawings and used them in a larger mixed-media installation of his own conception that explored the role of mass media in contemporary society.

While many books have focused on drawings by painters, architects, and sculptors, and while drawings by individual video artists have been included in a number of recent collections and catalogues, drawings by a range of video artists have rarely, if ever, been considered as a subject unto themselves.6 This portfolio therefore provides a rare opportunity at a key moment, for drawing is currently experiencing a resurgence, as witnessed by a show at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York in the summer of 2000 featuring more than 100 drawings by artists working in different media.7

The selection of drawings assembled here aims at similar breadth on a smaller scale, and likewise celebrates drawing’s continued intimate pleasures. From Mary Lucier’s atmospheric pastel sketch of a lithe female figure flipping through the air, used to pre-visualize a video-dance performance; to Bill Viola’s hand-written notations for the creation of a primitive “scale”; to Gary Hill’s phonetic cue card that transforms language into a mysterious code (used by actors in a tape exploring Gregory Bateson’s concept of the metalogue)—the drawings included here demonstrate tremendous range, versatility, and vitality. Unique conduits to the creative process, they also implicitly issue a call to experience each work live, or in object form—as tape, installation, projection, or performance—and then to ponder further the fascinating relationship between each drawing and the work it prefigured.

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1. Gerhard of Brugge, An introduction to the general art of drawing (1674), quoted in Susan Lambert, Reading Drawings (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 9. 2. Lucy Lippard, “The Dematerialization of Art,” in Changing: Essays in Art Criticism (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., 1971), 255. 3. Tony Oursler, “Sketches at Twilight,” in Tony Oursler—My Drawings 1976–1996 (Köln: Oktagon, 1997). 4. Douglas Davis, “Manifesto,” in Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 437. 5. Rita Myers, e-mail to the author, August 17, 2000. 6. ’s Video-Architecture-Television, Writings on Video and Video Works 1970– 1978 (NY: Press, 1979), edited by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, includes numerous schematic drawings for installations. Relatively recent books and catalogues featuring drawings by video artists include Mary Jane Jacob, ed., : Video Sculpture (New York: American Museum of the Moving Image, 1991); Bill Viola, Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House, Writings 1973–1994 (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995), and Melinda Barlow, ed., Mary Lucier in PAJ’s Art + Performance series (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000). 7. Called “00,” the exhibition was installed at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery from July 6– August 31, 2000. A catalogue with an essay by Klaus Kertess was published by the gallery to accompany the exhibition.

MELINDA BARLOW is Assistant Professor of Film Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is the editor of Mary Lucier in PAJ’s Art + Performance series published by the Johns Hopkins University Press (2000).

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Joan Jonas

I began with sculpture and art history. Drawing was always part of my vocabulary. In relation to performance (first public 1968), I made diagrams of my pieces, patterns of movement, plans of spaces: the line and the circle, the beach. Later I included the act of drawing in the live action.

The use of video in performance (Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy, 1972), suggested many possibilities of drawing in relation to the medium—the monitor, the camera. I drew looking at the monitor. A small drawing could be seen projected. The camera tracked details of the performance for the monitor or the projector that were seen simultaneously with the live action. There were layers like the live and the taped.

I conjured series of images in sequence for the camera like a film rolling by. The work was partly about watching the process of image making. Watching someone draw can seem intimate while the closed circuit of the video distances the viewer. Drawings were on the list like beads on a string, combined in a montage with objects, gestures, actions, and sound. They related in a poetic or musical structure.

I drew a portrait of my dog, Sappho, who had one blue eye and one brown eye. The eyes in the drawing are doubled. This was made for a poster. The dog’s head and “Organic Honey’s Vertical Roll.” This image became a sort of icon for the piece: woman/dog. Different dog drawings were made for other versions.

This particular portrait was then part of the set for the piece. It was central. The camera framed me standing in front of the dog’s head in a floozie mask and feather headdress (Organic Honey) holding a mirror that reflected the image into the lens. The audience saw the gesture with the close-up.

The presence of the dog has to do with my references to mythology—the ideas and structures. In myth there is often the presence of the animal helper which represents the raw energy that enables one to survive obstacles. In my work I am involved with ancient and contemporary ritual and the roles women play. Women had their other, their companion. I have a performing dog. This portrait was the first in a series of ongoing dog portraits. In Organic Honey I also traced the outline of a dog’s head around the rolling bar of the vertical roll. On paper the nose was at the top of the page, the ears at the bottom. The picture came together as the bar rolled. At the end of the performance I howled like a dog into a microphone—the sound reverberated and doubled.

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Ann Woodward

In 1970, right out of college, I became a member of the group Videofreex. My background was in painting and in the years I spent with the collective I did little work with video, concentrating on drawing, photography, and graphics which I felt supplemented the group’s main focus of “bringing television to the people.”

The drawings of the winking monitor, sick VTR, and the cam- eras are from The Spaghetti City Video Manual written by Parry Teasdale and a group effort of

the Videofreex. My drawings for the book were largely technical, serving to illustrate Parry’s directions on ba- sic care and repair of early video equipment. The monitor was one of the light touches and it kind of became a signature for the Freex.

In 1975 Skip Blumberg asked me to illustrate his story “Jungletown TV On-the-Air” which told the tale of some animals who put together a

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Woody Vasulka

These time segments belong to a larger work titled Time/Energy Structure of the Electronic Image, dating from 1974 through 1975. The images are produced on a scan processor (Rutt/Etra Model-4, Rutt Electrophysics Inc.), a tool providing various means of reprogramming electromagnetic conditions around its display (cathode ray tube or CT).

Compared to my previous work on videotape, the work with the scan processor indicates a whole different trend in my understanding of the electronic image. The rigidity and total confinement of time sequences have imprinted a didactic style on the product. Improvisational modes have become less important than an exact mental script and a strong notion of the frame structure of the electronic image. Emphasis has shifted towards a recognition of a time/energy object and its programmable building element—the waveform.

The majority of images, still or moving, are based on their capture from the visible world with the help of the camera obscura principle through a process involving the interaction of light with a photo-emulsion surface. The conversion of light into a code occurs simultaneously at each part of the emulsion in exposure time. Contrary to this, the conversion of light into energy potentials during electronic image forming is achieved sequentially, giving particular significance to the construction of the referential time frame. (The single value on the pick-up tube has to possess exact time coordinates in order to be reproduced in the identical position on the display.) The organization of energy components even in a television camera is of course provided by the camera obscura present in front of the image pick-up tube.

The possibility of disregarding this organizational principle and realizing instead a total absence of such a process in certain modes of electronic image forming has interested me the most. The result has been an inevitable descent into the analysis of smaller and smaller time-sequences, a process necessary to understanding wave formations, their components, and the process of their synthesis and programmabil- ity. To me this indicates a point of departure from light/space image models closely linked to and dependent upon visual-perceptual references and maintained through media based on the camera obscura principle. It now becomes possible to move precisely and directly between a conceptual model and a constructed image. This opens a new self-generating cycle of design within consciousness and the eventual construction of new realities without the necessity of external referents as a means of control.

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secs./mins.

→

Beryl Korot, minutes 13–18, video notation from Text and Commentary (1976). Each horizontal line represents one second of black control track. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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Beryl Korot

Text and Commentary consists of five woven texts, five channels of video on five monitors (placed in a horizontal line in a freestanding wall), five weaver’s notations of parts of the programmed pattern of each weave and pictographic notations which represent a full visual score of the 35 minute work. All of these provide varying perspectives of the same information in a variety of scales and media, and translated into different systems of composition. Among other concerns the work explores the non-decorative meaning and numerical basis of abstract pattern. As the first computer on earth in that it programs pattern, the loom is my tool for thinking about ancient and modern technologies, and for programming multiple channels like threads on a loom to create a non-verbal narrative. The video portion of the work was recorded with a camera hanging from the ceiling at varying distances as I wove and recorded simultaneously. The five weaving texts were programmed with slight pattern changes as you read from left to right. The work moves from a semi- documentary, rhythmic view of the weaving process to a very detailed magnification of the cloth. Pattern itself becomes the surface of the video screen as it is built up line by line before the viewers’ eyes analogous to the way the video image itself is constructed of lines comprising fields and frames. Near the end of the video portion each weave faces itself being scanned on the monitor placed opposite it. The viewer sits on a bench between the woven text and video commentary. The drawings illustrate the numerical basis of the woven pattern; the pictographic notations illustrate the time structure of the video. These pictograms were also essential in construction of the work as I sat on the floor with small drawings of each of the recorded images and placed them in an order, horizontally and vertically, to become the basic editing score for the video.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Bill Viola, Anthem (1983). Videotape, color, stereo sound; 11:30 minutes. Photos: ©Bill Viola, courtesy of the artist.

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Bill Viola

Anthem originates in a single piercing scream emitted by an eleven-year-old girl standing in the reverberant hall of Union Railroad Station in Los Angeles. The original scream of a few seconds is extended and shifted in time to produce a primitive “scale” of seven harmonic notes, which constitute the soundtrack of the piece. Related in form and function to the religious chant, Anthem describes a contemporary ritual evocation centered on the broad theme of materialism—the architecture of heavy industry, the mechanics of the body, the leisure culture of Southern California, the technology of surgery, and their relation to our deep primal fears, darkness, and the separation of body and spirit.

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Gary Hill

Phonetic score from the production of Why Do Things Get in a Muddle? (Come on Petunia), 1984, color, 32:00. Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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Mary Lucier

Amphibian (1985) is a collaboration designed for two channels of simultaneous, synchronized video projection and live dance performance. Elizabeth Streb performs on a steeply raked ramp with a small stage jutting out towards the audience. This form is flanked on either side by two 5Љ x 7Љ projection screens through which recorded images of Elizabeth’s body move as she interacts on video with various natural elements such as rocks, water, trees, sky. The top of the ramp is level with the bottom of the screens, creating a horizontal flow which can be regarded in terms as three equal channels of events. The lighting, by Heather Carson, is confined to a tall rear scrim, the ramp, and the platform, at a level of intensity no brighter than the projects themselves. Sound occurs only at the beginning and the end so that most of the piece is performed in silence. The task for Elizabeth is to perform in sync with the adjacent recorded images as they progress from one environment to another. It is essentially an abstract, temporal composition suggesting an obscure evolutionary narrative.

This pastel sketch is part of a series of drawings in which I attempt to envision the overall configuration of the piece, conveying something of both its formal and kinetic properties. This particular drawing is typical of the process I use to pre- visualize video as (performance or installation) space. Other kinds of notation— single image renderings, sequential sketches, scale plans and elevations, and voluminous written material—accompany each phase of every project. It is a way to arrest the flow of time, making the ephemeral more concrete; a way to get some mental traction in a slippery cerebellum and help the mind penetrate the matter.

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Peter Campus

I plan my work in my head, when waking up, watching TV, driving, and at the times I have set aside for thinking about work. The first work on a new piece is done that way, purely in the mind. Then I pick up my camera. In video, working with the camera is as easy as working with a pencil. I don’t feel the need to make sketches or story-boards. I just go out with a camera and try out my ideas.

Early in my life I was more of a planner, now I’m more of a capturer of images, and a refiner of them. When I was working at WGBH in the seventies I worked out all my ideas in my studio with my own video equipment, so that when I showed up at the WGBH studios I recreated there what I had planned at home. Now I just work at home. My ideas go right from mind to camera. It takes a while capturing images, looking at them, going out again with the camera, then working with the images on the computer.

Presented here is one of my drawings from 1990. I was working directly on the computer, using a stylus and digitizing tablet. The drawings showed some of the awkwardness of the process, which I like. I was not working towards some other end, but just wanted to make drawings. When they were finished I made photographic silver prints of them. I did this for two years, then later combined this activity with digital photography. This drawing is called A Small Thing and is about the observation of some small animal’s remains, its skeleton measured by calipers, its brain in a glass.

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Chip Lord

This installation was a collaboration with Mickey McGowan and was commissioned by the San Francisco for the show Bay Area Media, March 15–May 13, 1990. The drawings represent different stages of thinking about the specific installation at SFMOMA. Picture Windows was purchased for the collection by Zentrum für Kunst und Mediatechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany, and was exhibited there in May, 1991, in a slightly different form.

I carry a pocket sketch pad with me when I travel, and these four pages (#1) reflect my thinking about Picture Windows while I was traveling in Yugoslavia in November, 1989. They include a sketch of how the “dollhouse” would be fabricated, how the window video would be shot through venetian blinds, as well as an idea that was later scrapped—to let the house float above its podium. Shooting the video channels involved a lot of improvisation between Mickey and me, but some scenes were pre-visualized. There is one such image among these sketches—“telephone”—but it was not used in the final version.

I did an early presentation drawing, not included here, before we learned that the gallery was octagonal. We envisioned the house as a walk-around sculpture with multiple video windows.

Drawing #2 (dated 2/15/90) is a sketch for a presentation made to Media Arts curator Bob Riley, and depicts details of how the piece would be installed at SFMOMA, on a ziggurat made of TVs and a white picket fence. This was simplified for the final installation, but the octagonal gallery had already been selected for the show at this point. The final decision, to put the house against the back wall creating a more frontal presentation, is shown in the upper right hand sketch.

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Rita Myers

This installation looks to the practice of alchemy as the staging ground for a confrontation of the inner self with the presumed neutral landscape. Alchemy is universally understood as a paradigm for psychological and spiritual transformation. It is a narrative composed of twelve stages of modifying the prima materia, the raw material, which finally becomes the philosopher’s stone. The prima materia is never identified. It is, ultimately, the alchemist. Moreover, when the end is achieved, the narrative evaporates. The philosopher’s stone breaks the cause and effect chain, revealing the preceding steps as actually existing in a synchronicity. This installation implicates my own biography, in the form of dreams and recollections, as the prima materia.

The installation consists of a progression of twelve tables arranged in the form of a spiral. Each table presents a still life that evokes a stage in the alchemical narrative. In sequence from the outermost table, there are: a mound of stones; fern leaves floating in water; a burnt house; fossils of ferns; water and mist; the skeleton of a small bird; two metal squares; a bonsai tree; two small flames; a brass canoe; yellow roses floating in water; and a spinning prayer bowl. Each table also presents a spoken narration of a dream or memory, associated with the still lifes and their underlying alchemical meaning.

The tables face a set of French doors which stand partially open. Beyond the French doors is a video projection of a winter landscape. When a viewer approaches the central table, the spinning prayer bowl, the winter landscape is interrupted by a short burst of images consisting of a flash of light, an immense figure, and extremely magnified viewers of the still life objects. The effect is that of an hallucination, a violent disruption of the outer world by the inner one, a convergence of the miniature with the gigantic, an implication of the viewer in the climax of the center, an irruption of the self in the landscape, and a dissolution of linear time in a synchronicity.

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Doug Hall

The images on the following page were part of the 1995 media installation Terminal Landscape. The installation used as its subject matter those events that reach us through the mass media and become part of the kaleidoscopic backdrop to our lives. I wanted to suggest that our relationship to the media was interactive rather than passive and spectacular: that we usurp images and stories from all of the sources available to us, including the media, claiming them as our own, using them oneirically to fashion our dreams and fantasies.

In the installation, the section with the drawings came after the notorious aerial shot of O. J. Simpson’s white Bronco freeway ride—that I sentimentalized by slowing the image and adding a Nina Simone sound track—and before some particularly poignant news footage from the Oklahoma City bombing which ran in reverse as if trying to unplay the tragic events it recorded. I had asked students in an advanced class at the San Francisco Art Institute where I was teaching to make one drawing each in response to a written description that I gave them of a photograph from . They weren’t shown the image. They only had my written description. From the twelve drawings produced, I chose nine and turned them into slides. In the installation the projected slides dissolved into one another while a voice recited the same description I had given the students. As the voice concluded, a slide of the original newspaper image slowly dissolved in and remained on the screen for several seconds, in silence, before dissolving into the next and final sequence.

The Photograph

They seem barely contained within the frame of the photograph: this group of determined black men—eyes forward, muscles strained—marching from our right to our left with their steel machetes raised defiantly into the air. The camera is close—too close: sweating faces fill the picture and the blades of their weapons are held aloft like metallic exclamation points in the sky. Their clothing, not military issue by various styles of the short-sleeved shirt, is punctuated by an occasional baseball cap. The man closest to us radiates a seething ferocity from the center of the photo. Seen from the chest up, his massive shoulders bulge beneath a white t-shirt and his thick neck, full face, and forehead glisten in the sweltering heat of the mid-day sun. Unlike the other men, whose eyes are directed in front of them, his are shifted to his left, even as he faces forward, creating the impression that he is scrutinizing us out of the corner of his eyes.

The figures of the men fill so much of the frame that little of the surrounding background is visible. What can be seen confirms the impression of a sultry, tropical location. In the far distance, between the heads of some of the men, is an irregular, horizontal band of gray, suggesting low mountains covered with vegetation. On the left side of the photo, in the middle distance, is a lone palm tree whose trunk, capped with fronds, juts into the sky at an angle that is parallel to the machete blades. The tree mimics the machetes (or is it the other way around?), both mocking and accentuating the intensity of the scene. Two additional bits of vegetation are barely noticeable as they emerge from behind a couple of the men’s heads, appearing to grow from the tops of their crania.

In the background, on the far right side of the photograph and mostly obscured by the men in the foreground, is a domed mansion that glows on the page like a white shell on a beach. Between and behind upheld machetes, hands, and arms we see parts of the dome and a section of a portico with its classical pediment, supported by slender Ionic columns, only two of which are fully visible. Rising from the peak of the pediment we see the thin gray line of a pole, crowned by a wind-blown flag, whose markings are unreadable in the distance.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Taylor, the skate-boarder, in Sadie Benning’s Flat is Beautiful (1998). Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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Sadie Benning

I’ve always loved to draw, always been a doodler. I used to draw to calm down as a kid. When I was in the 6th grade with my dad in New York I made stenciled graffiti drawings, put them on large buttons which were pins, and sold them on the street. I always drew, even before I had access to the camera. I came back to drawing recently when using modern technology. Malfunctioning equipment—that fragile electronic component—can really make you want to use a pencil. I started to draw a lot again while working on Flat is Beautiful. The technology wasn’t very advanced (I was working on Sony Hi 8 editing decks). It was very slow. While waiting for the reel-to-reel deck to edit I would draw.

When I made Flat is Beautiful, I was interested in the age of 9–10, that in-between moment before you develop, that time period before girls have breasts, when things between boys and girls are much more equal, when your bodies are very similar. It’s a “pre-gendered” world, a beautiful time. I wanted to make a story with a little kid at this age but not with a kid’s real face—I didn’t want to give acting directions or end up with a child actor’s expressions. Using masks was a way to allow people to project their own feelings or experiences onto fixed expressions (I was influenced by Chantal Akerman’s actors who are somewhat “stoic” or distant). I drew 20 masks for the film. They started as tiny drawings but I blew them up on a Xerox machine and glued them onto cardboard to give an effect of three dimensions.

The drawing of Taylor, the central character in the film, was done before the film was made. It was my first drawing of this kind, and eventually the head in this drawing became the mask worn by the child who played Taylor. The other drawing included here is a camcorder with the silhouette of a person sticking inside and outside the camera at the same time—a doodle I made while editing Flat is Beautiful.

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Julia Scher, Julia Wonderland (1998). Photo: Courtesy of the artist.

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Julia Scher

Queen Alice

attention there are live cameras here, in if this is such a smart room how come I’m wonderland, recording you. tripping on all this stuff? warning, live cameras, here now, recording you. why don’t you pay attention to me? In wonderland. warning, your size may change, hey what’s wrong? why is it so hard to see here in wonderland, thank you for coming! stuff in here? your wonderland guard today is phoebe. phoebe hey, here’s the access hole, hey over here, here’s is your wonderland guard. the hole hey here’s the hole! your guard today is elizabeth. elizabeth is your hey, what’s this x-ray machine doing on now? wonderland guard today. this is not a good resting place! I’m getting follow me, with children, to wonderland! out of here follow me, to wonderland. attention, attention, hey I don’t want to be a clone kid! no rights for robots hey I don’t want your inflated ego crash site! fantasy body search engines hey, you are the people of wonderland, but we are the people of wonderland we are here to where are you? service you we are the people of wonderland . . . you’re servicing what/ mouse up! mouse up! mouse up! hey, that’s my rope! attention mouses down, mouses down there’s no romance about uniforms! our intelligent room is here to service you! it’s twilight, and if the mouse handlers are here, this wonderland room hole is an intelligent room where are they? tracking your movements, now. it’s time for you to realize that i’m not available don’t worry you are being tracked, completely . . . for access control platform here, in wonderland. hey! give me that gas mask! attention stay awake, please stay awake if this is a smart room why is the furniture in the gallery. too small this intelligent space is made from ten thousand hey if this is a smart room, why are there all these zillion bytes. wires on the floor? attention, robot mannequin, prowling, now. if this is a smart room, how come i’m tripping on warning there is no translation of I in this area all this stuff? computer please give me the layout for the if this is a smart room, how come the lights virgin islands! don’t work? our wiring closet is a layer 3 wilderness if this is a smart room, how come you sound please come inside and explore so dumb? our wonderland hole and wiring closet is a hey, you’re just a pack of cards layer 3 wilderness area your space isn’t my space your space—not your potency, is important to us. if this is an intelligent room, why are all these off with her head, off with her head. weird people in here? the door mouse says off with her head. if you’re so smart, how come you have that weird at your request, I will be showing you new background music? improved children’s merchandise. if you’re so smart why does what you say sound thank you for posing and providing your body so dumb? juices in our hole area hey give me my jpeg back it’s twilight in america I want my jpeg back where is adaweb where’s ada web its twilight in I don’t have the layout for the virgin islands the web if this is such a smart room, why is there a child attention body fluid testing in this area sacrifice platform in the middle attention this smart space is resettling you’re just a pack of bytes automatically you’re just a pack of bytes you’re just a crazy pack of bytes!

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Љ

x 46-3/4

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Vienna Secession, photoprint on mylar with ink and collage, 18 Secession, Vienna

(2000), drawing for the

Delphine

Diana Thater, Thater, Diana Photo: Courtesy David Zwirner Gallery, New York. New Gallery, Zwirner Photo: Courtesy David

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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/152028102760049292 by guest on 25 September 2021 Delphine (2000)

Diana Thater

I think about nature and sculpt with images of it in space. I ask questions about reconstructing subjectivity, using nature and sometimes animals as my models, that is, “models” in the Bressonian sense. The way we learn from animals is all wrong. Science only looks at animals—drugs, electrodes, experimentation—to find out some stupid information that is not available to humans.

My idea is that to develop a new viewer, or a new frame of viewing, one must present as subjects those who are traditionally seen as objects. This is a place to begin. In order to transform a viewer who probably brings to the work a singular point of view, I present her with a disconcerting space, one with images imbedded in it that make it move, that change it. And these images undermine the singularity of time, space, and being. They do it through the image of nature/animals whose experience of time and space never seems to me to be singular and who express their experience of “present-ness” with their whole beings.

Delphine was shot with four cameras simultaneously: two digital video cameras held by the scuba divers and two super-8 cameras used by crew members wearing only snorkel gear. Thus, the shots from the bottom looking up are all on video and the shots from the surface looking down are all on film. These are inter-cut without regard for separating the different media; film and video are obviously cut together. The qualities of each are visible and the differing perspectives are also apparent. So clarity and atmosphere, grain and line flow into one another. The perceived immediacy and flatness of video and the perceived memory and depth of film give way to and mutually reinforce or deconstruct one another.

I am looking for something more than the visually arresting. I want to find something that is spiritually arresting—the ineffable, the sublime moment when the viewer loses herself (and one can only lose oneself if one has the sense of self to be open and unprejudiced) and is forced to reconstruct herself, that is, to re-find herself. This is the moment of transformation that is not depicted but is acted. It does not happen in the image—in the pictures—but in the space and in the viewer, and the dolphins are not its object nor its subject but its model—a model for rethinking the self.

Excerpted from “A conversation between Carol Reese and Diana Thater on the occasion of the opening of Delphine at the Secession, Vienna, 2000,” in Diana Thater: Delphine [catalogue], Wiener Secession, Vienna, Austria, 2000.

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