Nick Kaye: Oursler’s dummies present their anchoring in the material space as their essential dilemma, as they “act out” the problem of installation itself. Such a trespassing by the virtual into the dilemmas of materiality works to amplify the dummies’ occupation of a kind of negative space before the viewer, emphasizing lack, failure. In hypothesizing the dummies’ conversations, Oursler has thus emphasized their negative relationships to the spaces of their installation, and to viewers themselves, as if to ensure their distance, however strongly they may invite the viewer’s emotional identification. He notes that:
It’s part of their design: provocation through absence. How they relate to each other, to us, is by psychological dependency. If they could speak they might say something like
D1—“I occupy space yet I can’t perceive that space”
D2—“I can’t occupy your space yet I can perceive it”
and on like that. Each “surveils” the other, incapable of self-reflection. (Oursler in Malsch 1995: 62-4)
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