Tony Oursler has had solo exhibitions in the United States, France, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, UK, Italy, Greece, Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Japan, Israel, Belgium, Poland, and Sweden. He also participated to Documenta 8, 9, and 10 in Kassel, Germany.

For a full biography see his own website at [link]. See also [link] and [link] for further information.

Oursler has produced performances, videos, scupltures, painting and installations. He is one of the most interesting, original and productive artists working today.

Over 14 monographs have been written about his work. Since 1981 he has had over 250 exhibitions worldwide [link]

'Oursler's work tends to be multiple, intermixed and cumulative in terms of the diversity, collision and collusion of messages, visual, aural and linguistic' (Moure in Janus and Moure, 2001: 32)

'Since the '80s Oursler has explored violence, mass media, sex, drugs, mental illness, good/evil, love, chaos, popular culture, religion, Catholicism, technology, pollution and social dysfunction.' (King, 2005)

'Tony Oursler animates non-living objects with the use of projectors. Classified, along with Bill Viola, Bruce Nauman, Gary Hill and the like artists, among the most outstanding video creators, he has employed this technique in a totally different manner. In his works, a motion picture filmed with a video-camera is projected with a projector functioning on a laterna-magica basis as in the 19th-century theatre. The viewer does not stare at a rectangular screen, rather, s/he can see before him or her enlivened flowers, giant eye-balls, or puppets - talking, swearing at one another, quarrelling, and using coarse expressions. The contrast between the immovable, "dead" bodies of the dolls and the aggressive, vulgar language not spared by their "talking heads" add up to an unexpected dramatic power of this show.' (Milada Slizinska)

'Oursler refuses to hide his means of production, insisting that the video player and projector be in full view of the spectator as an integral part of each of his individual pieces or installations' (Janus in Janus and Moure, 2001: 56).

'Oursler's speech is the event' (DeJong in Janus and Moure, 2001: 257)

'Oursler's language registers the self as fluctuating, multivalent and/or conflicted, exposing not so much a pathology as a general condition' (ibid.)

'Oursler's technological configurations are not only plugged into philosophical issues of identity, abjectness, and spectacularity, but his uncanny virtual beings tap into a disorienting array of social, psychological, and existential issues. They link the differences between delusion and illusion, technology and miraculous apparition.' (King, 2005)

'Technologies attach themselves to the interface between our conscious and unconscious states so, in a sense, they are alive. Or at least, they seem to be.' (Oursler in Neri, 2001)

'What does the term "projection" represent to you?

It comes down to light, shinning light. Light passing through objects, space, playing on a surface forming a new skin. (...) Many of my works play with the projection as skin, as identity. They change from male to female and back again. This leads us into psychological projection - which is the concept of inner thoughts projected outward onto the world. One viewer sees a woman projected onto a figure the other sees a man, this has happened time and again. I finally realized that they are projecting onto the figure as well, psychologically. In this way the viewer exposes the gender of their reaction, to the artwork. The viewer has always been the artist's collaborator; finishing the work, carrying their own personal history into the process.' (Ousler in Christiane Meyer-Stoll)

'The ancient ventriloquists sometimes used a resonant cavity in the ground, or a vapor vent, to misdirect attention and confuse the location of the voice. (...) Most often, bent over and speaking in a muffled tone, the ventriloquist would easily convince the listener that their voice was coming from a "spirit" trapped in the ventriloquis's belly. (...) "Ventriloquism", in fact, means "belly-speaking".' 'The "marriage between puppetry and ventiloquism" took place in 1750 when the Austrian Baron von Mengen began to perform accompanied by a small pupper with a moving mouth.' (Conrad in Janus and Moure, 2001: 153 and 158)

'Oursler's voices are "thrown" upon their associated images; yet by remaining separately and differently localized from the image, each voice, paradoxically, "frames" its images' (Conrad in Janus and Moure, 2001: 163)

Grand Mal (1981)

Video artwork - 'the re-creation in moving images of a psychological condition that is the result of a simultaneous triggering of the brain's impulses: a sensory overload that causes the subject to experience a temporary seizure or loss of consciousness' (Janus in Janus and Moure, 2001: 56)

'Proceeding from the cerebral to the macabre, Tony Oursler's Grand Mal is proof that one can still make good video without using sophisticated production techniques. Oursler transforms the TV screen into a proscenium in which a series of bizarre tales are acted out by crudely painted hands, fingers, cut-outs, and live worms. Firmly rooted in the expressionistic camp, Oursler's world is inhabited by vegetable-like creatures, worms who labor inside intestines, and two people who love each other so much they copied the inflections in each other's voice. His primitively constructed sets are humorously inventive, as when a fire in a fireplace is represented by wriggling fingers, or when a painting drips blood. Oursler's monotone voiceover gives an ominous tone to these convoluted versions of classic themes of good and evil, punishment in hell, and the creation myth. Oozing idiosyncracy, Grand Mal is (dis-jointed), but always surprising.' (Lucinda Childs, 1982)

Window Project (1991)

Judy (1994)

Fantastic Prayers (1995)

by Tony Oursler, Constance DeJong and Stephen Vitiello

'a labyrinth of fragmented texts, sounds, and images centred around an imagined land of Arcadia, whose "residents are unaware of locations and Times" until a mysterious voice invades their serenity. Upon entering this seemingly endlessly navigable site [link], one finds a maze of connections that range from Oursler's disembodied mouths spouting phrases (...) to a tract of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, all of them accessible by a mere click of the mouse.' (Rush, 1999: 196)

For more information on Constance DeJong see [link] and [link]

and for Stephen Vitiello see [link]

Hello? (1996)

In his video installation Oursler, using a small-format projector on a tripod, projects an image into a wooden box. A voice calls out from the box.

Eye in the Sky (1997)

The piece features a fiberglass sphere onto which a single eye watching television is projected. We hear the sounds of channel surfing. The eye becomes a zone of passage.

Mansheshe (1997)

'In the politically charged, theatrical installation Mansheshe (1997), Oursler projects videotaped images onto glass and ceramic surfaces. The hybrid talking faces, which occupy ovals suspended from poles, stare directly at the camera and viewer. Each one utters found aphorisms about sexuality, religion, interpersonal relationships, and identity.' (King, 2005)

'Formally, Oursler seeks to remove the image from the television screen and project it onto the real world.' (Rush, 1999: 154)

The Influence Machine (2000)

in New York...

'The Influence Machine is theatrical but, ultimately, I realized that I wanted to keep it in context of art rather than theater, to present it as an installation, a visual and experiential "state" rather than a narrative.' (Oursler in Neri, 2001)

'Without warning, the buldings are trees (of New York's Madison Square Park) became animated by video projections of banging fists and rolling texts. The park was populated with talking heads that coalesced and dissolved into clouds of floating smoke filling the area.' (King, 2005)

'The Influence Machine attempted to embody key events and ideas from Timestreams. During my research, I discovered a different narrative lurking in the shadows. It starts with spirit photography and has to do with using technology to communicate with the dead. The Influence Machine takes the advent of telecommunications as its point of departure. In 1844, Samuel Morse invented Morse code, enabling people to communicate instantly over long distances (Interestingly, he invoked God¹s role in the invention in the first message!). A few years later, a teenage girl called Kate Fox in Rochester, New York began communicating with the spirit of a murdered peddlar by rapping on the walls of her house, using her own crude alphanumerical system, a kind of "folk" appropriation of Morse code. Her psychic activities caused a sensation parallel to the telegraph, sparking the New American Spiritualist Movement, which is still in existence today. This relation between psychic communication and telecommunications runs through each successive invention‹the radio, the television, and finally, the computer. I worked all these connections into The Influence Machine.' (Oursler in Neri, 2001)

and in London...

'The Influence Machine dramatises spirit visions and visits: Oursler draws on existing accounts of messages transmitted from other worlds and departs from conventional orthodoxy about mind-body unity, and space-time confines. In this outdoor urban phantasmagoria, the artist projected, onto trembling foliage and interlaced branches, and high up onto the surrounding buildings of an urban park/garden (Soho Square in London), looming, vast close-ups of out-of-body messengers, men and women with stories to tell of wanderings in other worlds. They describe out of body states and encounters that defy conventional physics. Oursler projected, on one wall of the square a huge fist rapping, as in the first Spiritualist séances, in the l840s in Rochester, when the Fox sisters reported ghosts knocking for admittance in a kind of performance of morse code. In the central garden/park, the artist beamed up wraiths and mediums on to the trees and even on to smoke, so that they dissolved and expanded, loomed and shrank, vaporised and materialised, in a sequence of hypnotic anamorphoses. The spectacle was inspired by the earliest Gothic popular entertainment, the phantasmagorias of the late eighteenth century, invented in Paris by a brilliant, Belgian showman, Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, who was born in 1763. Soon after the Terror, in the same period when the waxworks Chamber of Horrors were beginning to draw crowds as well, Robertson rented a convent to stage his illusions and terrify the wits out of this public and thrill them with delight at the same time: this was the new, mass entertainment of the age of heavy industry and political bloodshed, and the apogee of romantic individualism.' (Warner, 2001)

Boz (2004)

'Boz is a waist-high lump whose larger-than-life eyes are misaligned. They don't move in unison, instead opening, closing, and looking every which wayon their own. The Frankenstein-like figre's skin is covered with rainbow-tinted blotches. This suggests glitechs in both internal, cognitive transmissions, and external, electronic ones.' (Pagel, 2004)

References

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