Tony Oursler was born in 1957 in New York City. Shortly after, his family moved to upstate New York. For college, he moved to California in 1975 in order to attend the California Institute for the Arts. He received his BA in 1979. He had moved back to New York by 1981, where in addition to doing freelance film editing, he promptly was able to show his video work at the MOMA in New York, in an exhibition called Video Viewpoints. Entranced and involved with the alternative punk counterculture of the Reagan eighties (he directed a music video for post-punk icons Sonic Youth in 1990), the aesthetic of his early video work is reminiscent of the countless sarcastic neon cartoon album covers of underground punk bands. In what he admits is a pop aesthetic, bright colors construct cartoonish scenes that are narrated with a comical voiceover that sounds like it is trying too hard to narrate something abstract and silly. Oursler describes the videos as “very poetic fractured narratives.”
Obsessed with the idea of television and the culture surrounding it, Oursler thinks of TV as a medium that is socially unifying but also as something “unattainable” by the masses. While the majority of people will never be on television, he says, the portable video camera gave him “instant access to a pop space that was unattainable, that was reserved for another part of culture.” The first commercially available portable camera was released in 1982, making the medium extremely new to the masses. But, as exciting as the medium was, Oursler disliked the idea of the television set acting as a piece of furniture, and looked for a way to break from that. He wanted the video to act as its own work, not through the context of the television set.
In the early 1990s, with the invention of LCD mini video projectors, Oursler began to use video projections as a way to break outside of the screen. Artist Constance DeJong credits Oursler with “a singular, major contribution… He released the moving image from the rectangle.” In 1991, for a piece called Window Project, Oursler projected a video of a ghostly woman onto an arched glass window looking out into the city street. In 1992, he exhibited an installation called The Watching where he projected video of faces onto different sculptures. One was projected onto a sphere in the top corner of a room, another onto a faceless figure made from stuffed fabric. There were also security cameras throughout the gallery feeding to a control room on the top floor where gallery goers were allowed to aggressively confront other viewers in the gallery. After The Watching, Tony Oursler’s work began to move from video productions towards projection.
Tony Oursler goes into detail about his relationship with projection in an interview with Christiane Meyer-Stoll. He says that “many of my works play with the projection as skin, as identity.” He thinks of his projections of faces to be sexually ambiguous and finds that “one viewer sees a woman projected onto a figure, the other sees a man… [The viewers] are projecting onto the figure as well, psychologically.” This dual meaning of the word projection is what drives his work. The uncanny nature of the projections conjures disturbing images and feelings, which ultimately becomes a reflection of our own psyche. His eagerness for people to draw their own conclusions about the work is not only what makes his work postmodern but also what ultimately makes the work successful.
In 1996, Tony Oursler presented an installation called Eyes. This work consists of several videos of eyes watching television projected onto large fiberglass spheres. Larger than a human head, the projected eyes blink, twitch, and dart back and forth almost frantically with the reflection of a television screen reflected in the pupil. The overt references to watching television combined with the disturbing eyes are clearly referencing the troubling and addictive relationship people have to television. The eyes are instantly creepy and unsettling. Interestingly and ironically, in Oursler’s struggle to separate video from the television set he has returned to the television as a metaphor.
The new millennium brought another new direction for Oursler. In the fall of 2000, he showed an exhibition entitled The Influence Machine. Originally shown in Madison Square Park in New York City, the work consisted of many ghostly projections onto parts of the landscape, including buildings, trees, a fountain, a fence, and smoke. The title references a discovery in the 1700s that eventually led to the invention of the television, as well as a completely unrelated essay that explained a psychological condition where patients felt their actions were being controlled by an external source. The work is also directly referencing a device called the phantasmagoria, which was a projection device invented in the late 18th century that was used for ghost shows.
The reference to the phantasmagoria seems pertinent to his overall work because of a reoccurring theme of interaction with technologies. With The Watching, The Influence Machine and Eyes, Oursler references both cutting edge and outdated technologies, both of which stupefied their audiences at their conceptions. Television continues to enthrall popular culture, and is ironically linked to global increases in both violence and laziness. Tony Oursler seems to be very interested in the psychological effects of new addictive technologies.
Oursler’s focus on technology’s effect on human psychology is very relevant to the work that I have been doing. Common themes of obsession, addiction, and an overall humorous outlook are present in his work, which are things that interest me and have recently been propelling my work. His comments on technology and culture’s relationship to each other are smart and witty, and his use of uncanny imagery is creepy and intriguing, just as it should be. Tony Oursler has been a working artist for almost 30 years and has consistently been producing quality work. His work serves as a model as how to work in a new and evolving medium.
No comments:
Post a Comment