Biography

Tony Oursler’s subversive video projections conjure psychological states and summon the spirits that abound in the airwaves, on the Internet, and in our own minds. The surfaces on which he projects his ghostly personages range from the substantial—stuffed cloth puppets, fiberglass forms, Plexiglas screens—to the insubstantial—a cloud of mist, a pool of water. Oursler’s most common themes touch upon the individual’s alienation from society, the pitfalls inherent in human relations, and the psychological impact of technology. His work reveals a fascination with the darker side of human nature at the same time that it capitalizes on our preference to be entertained by the images we consume, even as they consume us.

Oursler was born in Manhattan and grew up in Nyack, New York. In the mid-1970s he moved to Southern California to attend the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), intending to perfect his skills as a painter. At the time, conceptualism reigned supreme, and he soon abandoned his original aim under the influence of professors such as conceptual artist John Baldessari and performance artist Laurie Anderson. Surrounded by classmates such as Mike Kelley and Jim Shaw, Oursler began to experiment with various media, creating installations and making single-channel videos. He earned his B.F.A. in 1979 and moved back to New York in the early 1980s, embarking on a highly productive, ten-year period that saw his work acquired by prestigious institutions nationally an internationally. Oursler was catapulted to success when his work was shown in 1992 along with Matthew Barney and Gary Hill at Documenta IX, the big survey show held in Kassel, Germany. Since the mid-1990s he has been an established artist and became best known for his installations of rudimentary voodoo doll-like cloth puppets and larger stuffed heads onto which video images of human faces, distorted and unsettling, are projected. The actors in these videos are Oursler’s visual and performance artist friends, who read scripts that the artist composes himself, assembling found material culled from television, the movies, and the Internet. The scripts are informed by the artist’s research into early cinema, psychological disorders, and the occult.

Slip consists of the eyes and mouth of a woman projected on a snaky S-shaped fiberglass sculpture. It represents a departure for Oursler, who has paid increasing attention to the sculptural qualities of his work as a way of maintaining his connection to his interest in making art objects and not simply moving images.1 Oursler tinted the form an acidic shade of green, while the eyes and lips are colored in rosy flesh tones, demonstrating his continued interest in aesthetic effects common to more traditional media such as painting. Despite the bizarre appearance of the work, it retains just enough connection to the natural world to make viewers feel that it could be a living—albeit alien—creature. The creature’s lips move and it flashes its teeth as it softly vocalizes intelligible and unintelligible phrases jumbled together in an antinarrative emphasizing elongated sss sounds, forming a connection between Slip’s title and its serpentine form.

An attraction to the uncanny was ubiquitous among the surrealist artists, filmmakers, and writers of the past century, and Oursler has proven that such mysterious themes continue to colonize the subconscious mind in the 21st century. His work is capable of evoking emotions ranging from humor and delight to fear and revulsion as though he has recorded the content of our dreams and nightmares. Oursler’s stubborn insistence on the primacy of the physical object conflates with his ability to manipulate familiar features and moving images into representations of our collective unconsciousness. —J.N.

1. Michael Kimmelman, “In the Studio with Tony Oursler, a Sculptor of the Air with Video,” The New York Times, 27 April 2001.

(SJMA Selections publication, 2004)

Ousler was born in Manhattan in 1957. He enrolled at the California Institute of Art in Velencia, where he earned a B.F.A. in 1979. Following graduation he returned to NY, where he was picked up by Electronic Arts Intermix, the same electronic gallery and video distributor that handled Naim June Paik and William Wegman. Over the last thirty years Oursler has been shown widely both nationally and internationally. He has been featured in exhibitions at Stedelijk Musuem of Modern Art in Amsterdam, the Pompidou in Paris, the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, the Museum of Contemporary Art in San Diego, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work is included in the collections of notable institutions including the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angles, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona. This would be the first work by Oursler to enter SJMA’s permanent collection. (SJMA Collections Committee, 2003)

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