TONY OURSLER, Bluerealisation with Head, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
92 x 42 x 4.5 inches
233.7 x 106.7 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK
Nick Kaye: Bluerealisation with Head operates in disjunctive relationships between spaces and practices. In re-siting the signs of video art within painting and offering references to the painted surface, as well as abstraction and the hand, these works recollect Oursler’s early shift of medium from paint to video. Remarking in his essay, “Sketches at Twilight” (Oursler 1997) on the evolution of the single-channel tapes that formed a principal focus of his work from 1979–1992, Oursler notes that during his training at CalArts:
[t]he possibility of entering a video space was radical and ultimately desirable for me [. . .] My experiments in painting ended up in front of a camera and I often painted while looking through a camera [. . .] Through the lens my pictures could be electrified with all the attributes of life: if they needed a hand or a mouth I would just cut a hole and stick the body part through it. [. . .] I was struck by the ability of the camera to alter the laws of physics; to transform matter, space and time, inanimate to animate: worlds unto themselves. (Oursler 1997: pages unnumbered)
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