The face has always been important in my work. The face is where language comes forth. It’s the way we communicate. It’s really the window into identity and empathy.
Tony Oursler, in “Who’s Making It: Tony Oursler,” Gotham TV segment, New York Metro TV, filmed 2001, video, 5:08 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews.
Tony Oursler began making experimental single-channel videos while studying at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the late 1970s. He and a group of CalArts peers shared a “kaleidoscopic” approach to artmaking—a kind of interdisciplinary enterprise that encompasses music, text, images, sculpture, and performance.1 For his videos, Oursler wrote scripts and constructed characters from modest and often strange found materials—like kitchen spoons, bits of toilet paper, or painted cardboard—animating them within handpainted sets. The school’s outmoded Sony Portapak video cameras yielded fuzzy images with ghostly streaks that intrigued Oursler.2 Amusing, disorienting, and with an intentionally low-budget aesthetic, his surreal videos challenge the seamless editing of Hollywood productions, which slickly dissolve the distinctions between reality and media image.
Tony Oursler thinks of television and film like psychedelic drugs that induce a dream space, parallel to reality. Calling them “mimetic technology”1—a term he borrows from pharmacology to describe drugs that emulate human consciousness—he is interested in the way television, film, and media imagery mimic human thought to engender seemingly real emotions. Oursler came to this realization watching a lot of television as a teenager. Influenced by his magician grandfather Fulton Oursler, he developed an understanding of how mimetic technology, through close approximation of reality, has the power to also alter our perception.2
Tony Oursler, in “Smoke and Mirrors: Tony Oursler’s Influence Machine: A Conversation Between Tony Oursler and Louise Neri,” in Tony Oursler: The Influence Machine (London: Artangel; and New York: Public Art Fund, 2000), 56. ↩︎
Fred Nadis, “Of Linking Rings and Magic Lanterns: Tony Oursler’s Family Gothic,” in Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler (Zurich: LUMA Foundation, 2015), 447–57. ↩︎
Faces and moving images are eerily projected into clouds of smoke and on trees and walls in Tony Oursler’s multiple-projection outdoor installation The Influence Machine (2000). Light and the sounds of babbling voices materialize into sculpture. Known for his work projecting images through space onto various mediums—fiberglass armatures, paper, smoke—Oursler combines the intangible qualities of light with the physicality of material. In what he calls a “third space,”1 Oursler—whose grandfather Fulton Oursler was an accomplished magician skilled in the trickery of spirit photography2—explores the hypnotic effects and subtle, even insidious, power of mediated imagery. The Influence Machine takes its title from an early eighteenth-century invention, a spherical glass vacuum that had no practical use but emitted a mesmerizing green glow. This trance-inducing device was the precursor to the cathode-ray tube used in early television technology.
Tony Oursler, in “TateShots: Tony Oursler Studio Visit,” filmed January 2011 at Tony Oursler’s studio, New York, video, 4:19 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews. ↩︎
Fred Nadis, “Of Linking Rings and Magic Lanterns: Tony Oursler’s Family Gothic,” in Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler (Zurich: LUMA Foundation, 2015), 454. ↩︎
With blinking eyes and whispering lips, Tony Oursler’s projections of faces onto fiberglass sculptures create lifelike figures that make media imagery tangible. Despite the alien forms of these “electronic effigies”1—as in the green, S-shaped Slip (2003)—their facial expressions and language communicate. Oursler’s scripts sound like stream-of-consciousness ramblings or, as he describes, “a sort of babble, like someone’s in a therapy session,”2 initiating unfinished narratives that the viewer is left to complete. Mirroring human struggle and humor, they play on human empathy; like film and television characters with whom we bond, they invite our affinity.3
Tony Oursler, in “Who’s Making It: Tony Oursler,” Gotham TV segment, New York Metro TV, filmed 2001, video, 5:08 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews. ↩︎
Tony Oursler, “Who’s Making It: Tony Oursler,” Gotham TV segment, New York Metro TV, filmed 2001, video, 5:08 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews. ↩︎
Deborah Rothschild, “Introjection: In Oursler’s World, No One Escapes Its Unbidden Influences,” in Tony Oursler: Introjection, Mid-Career Survey, 1976–1999 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1999), 14. ↩︎
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