The Presence Project: Tony Oursler

From March 2007, we will be developing an online engagement with Tony Oursler's work, including discussion of recent exhibitions, past work and key publications.

In this project, analytical, documentary and interview texts will act as maps of key terms, ideas, and works, linking to pages of analysis, documentation, quotation, and comment. These pages will form the deeper structure of the site, offering a series of annotations on Presence and Tony Oursler's remarkable body of work.

These annotated texts are developing below.

This process will provide the basis for an ongoing engagement with Tony Oursler's work through the Presence Project.

Tony Oursler, Painting + Paper: Ooze

TONY OURSLER, (Usually) Black Anythingyou want, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
79 x 45 x 4.5 inches
20.7 x 114.3 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

These images are from Painting + Paper: Ooze, Tony Oursler's 2007 exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York.

Periodically, the eyes (large and small) of (Usually) Black Anythingyou want switch from colour to a negative black and white image. Then switch back. The eyes look about, blink, deferring attention across the room.

Uploaded Image
TONY OURSLER, Red "Love Hurts" Laboratory, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
58 x 47 x 4.5 inches
147.3 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

The lips, in Red "Love Hurts" Laboratory, are pursed repeatedly, with some difficulty. Then, a very quiet whisper.

Close up, to listen, its construction seems apparent: the hard surface, the brushstrokes, the screen surface and distortion of the mouth - the skin of the performer blushed red with make-up. The whisper is difficult to make out. It's necessary to get close enough to be confided in: "it happens...".

Articulated in a collision of sculpture, painting, video, and performance, these seven works are exhibited in a single room.

Formed in aluminium, and set slightly off the gallery wall, a flat, coloured surface is opened to reveal body parts - an eye or eyes, a face, lips, fingers - morphed to reflect the abstract shape in which they are captured. Over time, in some of the works, the body parts change.

Points of reference might include:

gaze

Uploaded Image
TONY OURSLER, Invisible Green Link?, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
57 x 61 x 4.5 inches
144.8 x 154.9 x 11.4
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

The eye, rather bloodshot, closes, opens, seems to fix on something. Then, looking up, to the left. The eye blinks, it's action apparently slowed down.

Issues of Presence are explicit - these works take up each other's time. Fixed to the wall, they assert a belonging to the animated realm of the visitor: some of them look and wait.

Linked to this, these pieces evade the forms they explicitly invoke. They assert painting, relocating video art into conventions of surface, paint, the hand, and abstraction. At the same time, this abstraction is loaded: these works play with play, denial, objectness, investment, fiction, science fiction, colour theory, gothic, animation.

Key phrases and concepts might include:

aura

colour

outer space

Uploaded Image
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

Bluerealisation with Head opens up a dimension behind the picture plane. The eye attempts to look down, the eyelid closes, opens. Eventually, the video performer moves back. A mouth takes the place of the eye, whispering. The performer moves in and out of shadow and focus, at times looking out, then head shaking rapidly, then a whisper: "see outside range of your vehicle....see...yes, I cried". Then the eye returns.

Related terms might be:

Uploaded Image
TONY OURSLER, Pink-too-long Fluid, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
57 x 55 x 4.5 inches
144.8 x 139.7 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

The eye of Pink-too-long Fluid looks up to the left, then out. Then to the right, and continues, slowly. Eventually, the image fades to lips, that perform an extended, slow kiss on the lens, almost filling the video image, leaving a coloured smear over the opening. Then returns to the eye.

In the adjacent room at Lehmann Maupin, seven works on paper - comprising clusters of images, drawings and notes - allude to outlines, contexts, thought forms and processes. They reference colour theory, ghosting, extra-terrestrial contact, the electromagnetic spectrum, meteors, colour blindness tests, the Northern Lights, theatricality, time, Phobos, inviting connections with other works.

Amongst these may be:

Sound Digressions in Seven Colours,

Spaced, 2006

Thought Forms, 2006

Blue Invasion, 2006

Blob, 2004

The Influence Machine, 2000

Six, 1996

Uploaded Image
TONY OURSLER, Purple Ideation Exposure, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
59 x 47 x 4.5 inches
149.9 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

The small eye of Purple Ideation Exposure persistently looks forward. Eventually, its focus shifts. Occasionally the eye disappears to black. In the larger opening, partial images of two bodies intertwining, sometimes indistinct, appear and pass by in continual movement: hands; a shoulder; part of the torso; a foot morphed like a hand; long hair.

Key connections might also be with:

Underwater (Blue/Green), 1996

Uploaded Image
TONY OURSLER, Ectovapor Ever-Changing White, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
82 x 54 x 4.5 inches
208.3 x 137.2 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

The mouth of Ectovapor Ever-Changing White draws in the air, then, as if holding its breath, or moving its lips as if about to speak or smile, shows its teeth. Periodically, speaking in a whisper or a hiss - "sick in the head" - other remarks - a vapour passes across the mouth, and the lips are subtly tinted with a spectrum of colours, one after the other.

Tony Oursler’s videotapes and installations have been exhibited worldwide, including one-person shows at capc Musee, Musee d'art Contemporain de Bordeaux, France; Kunstverein, Hannover, Germany; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE); Metro Pictures, New York; Museum Fur Gegenwartskunst, Basel; and the Museum Folkwang, Essen, West Germany. Born in 1957, he studied at Rockland Community College, Suffern, New York, subsequently receiving a BFA from the California Institute for the Arts (CalArts) in 1979, where he studied with the artist John Baldessarri. His major mid-career retrospective, Introjection, was presented by Williams College Museum of Art in Massachusetts in 1999 and was on view at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, the Contemporary Arts Museum in Houston, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Des Moines Art Center from 1999 to 2001. His work is represented in many major museum collections, including MOMA New York, The Whitney Museum of American Art and Tate Modern. Tony Oursler lives in New York.

Tony Oursler's extensive website, including image and video documentation, is at [link]. His major online project TimeStream, hosted by MOMA New York, is at [link]

Contexts and analyses

Gabriella Giannachi, Some notes on Tony Oursler, by Gabriella Giannachi
Nick Kaye, Media Entities and a Politics of Presence

to come

Tony Oursler: Interviews

References

Tony Oursler, Painting + Paper: Ooze

Contexts and analyses

see also

to come