TONY OURSLER
If Picasso had a digital camera….
The cubist dissection of the face and its radical reassembly along the flattened planes of the canvas opened the way for a new psychological intrusion into the psyche of the sitter. Picasso’s painting of Dora Maar, Buste de femme at chapeau(Dora) 1939 * with its kooky facial architecture, manages to reveal more of the sitters character than the most fastidious realism could possibly account for. And whilst Oursler’s work, with all of its theatre, humour and domestic voyuerism may seem a mile away from Picasso, Oursler’s extraordinary digital sculptures owe much to painting.
However it is Oursler’s ability to implicate the audience in the unfolding drama that so heightens our experience of the work. We are not viewing the work in a binary exchange between object and viewer but are made complicit in his poignant, human and occasionally unsavoury dramas.
As we do with Picasso, we forgive the reconstruction and become seduced by the admonitions, the pleading humanity, the brilliantly engaging babble filled with insight and lunacy, comedy and tragedy.
Tony Oursler is regarded alongside Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman and Gary Hill as one of the most influential pioneers of video art. Recognised for ‘freeing’ the video from its two dimensional frame and projecting images onto three dimensional forms, Oursler has developed a medium he amusingly describes as ‘digital clay’.
Oursler’s works explore the potential the three dimensional object carries, especially when combined with his dramatic animations, creating a family of unique, comically mutant forms. These insistent characters beckon the viewer with a blend of apparently nonsensical mutterings and poetry, all the time peppering the monologue with psychoanalytic references and a poignancy that captures most all viewers. Our presence seems to implicate us in these voyeuristic dramas; we find ourselves seduced by the humour, the melancholy, and the emotional intensity of his animates.
Underlying his psychedelic imagination is a fundamental exploration of the relationship between individuals and mass media systems. Recent installations (such as at Kunsthaus Bregenz) address the convergence of media consumption and post-modern psychosis. Oursler continuously engages with popular culture to question the way visual technologies influence and modify our social and psychological selves and the way systems of mechanical reproduction have come to dictate the way we ‘see’ and understand the world.
Though his works may notionally attend to bigger social and political issues, it is his capacity to speak to fundamental human emotions that so absorbs us. Oursler’s worlds constantly invoke the very human wish to lose oneself in fantasy. He trusts in our capacity to empathise, identifying with aspects of our predicament– isolation, loves lost, transcendence, uncertainty, allure and repulsion; this the central stuff of an Oursler work.
– Andrew Jensen
EXHIBITIONS
The artist was born in New York and completed a BA in fine arts at the California Institute for the Arts, Valencia, California in 1979. He participated in the Documenta 8, 9 and 10 series in Kassel, Germany.
Play Video
TONY OURSLER’S ‘ELECTRONIC EFFIGIES’ : BETWEEN TWO SPACES