Since the mid-seventies, Tony Oursler has created a vast oeuvre comprising installation, painting, sculpture, performance, and video. In his installations, figures of heads, puppets, and dolls are animated by video projections with a narrated voice-over. Prior to this, spanning a period of twenty years, the artist created a large production of videos characterized somewhere between the visionary and the hallucinatory.<\/p>\n
Oursler’s videos form oblique and sinister narrations with often bizarre obsessive tones and atmospheres. They pay tribute to German Expressionist cinema and the vigorous Neo-Figurative painting of the late seventies and early eighties. The persistence of an unmistakable dark humor is mixed with mise en sc\u00e8ne of a distinctive and theatrical artificiality.
\nA veritable miniature universe, created and painted by hand, mixed with scenes of animation and projections, forms the stage of Oursler’s personal narrative re-interpretation. Influenced by a post-punk sensibility, characterized by the presence of narrating voices often off-screen, and by a liking for disturbing sound collages, his production suggests an atmosphere of oneiric states or trances.<\/p>\n
The playful and ironic approach to assembling heterogeneous materials from an enormous mass of cultural and subcultural artifacts is tied to an interest in those adolescent fantasies, dreams, and obsessions, at times also macabre and frightful, found in Western society.<\/p>\n
An uninhibited penchant for forms of simulation and parody of cinema and electronic special effects often leads him to results that are immediately and ironically self-referential and recognizable in their ability to reveal the mechanisms of illusion. His themes and references range from an interest in psychotic states, sexual frustration, and alienation to forms of mania, hysteria, and violence through the fundamental dichotomies of Good and Evil, life and death.
\nIn the late eighties, his growing interest in technology has led Oursler to investigate the most buried and repressed aspects of the human psyche and imagination so as to create real forms of social analysis and criticism. [F.B.]<\/p>\n
Selected Works<\/em>, 1979 The Weak Bullet<\/em>, 1980 Grand Mal<\/em>, 1981 Son of Oil<\/em>, 1982 Diamond: The 8 Lights (Spheres of Influence)<\/em>, 1985 Sucker<\/em>, 1987 JoyrideTM<\/em>, 1988 ONOUROWN<\/em>, 1990 Tunic (Song for Karen)<\/em>, 1990 Model Release, Par-Schizoid-Position, and Test<\/em>, 1992 Since the mid-seventies, Tony Oursler has created a vast oeuvre comprising installation, painting, sculpture, performance, and video. In his installations, figures of heads, puppets, and dolls are animated by video […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"collezione":[],"class_list":["post-101298","artista","type-artista","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
\nvideo, black and white, sound, 34 min. 20 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nDiamond (Head)<\/em>, 1979
\nvideo, black and white, sound, 13 min. 52 sec.
\nIn a vast assortment of objects and drawings filmed in close-up, images of vaguely identifiable characters\u2014a head and other anthropomorphic figures\u2014become visible.
\nGood Things and Bad Things<\/em>, 1979
\nvideo, black and white, sound, 11 min. 51 sec.
\nThis work is composed of a series of scenes similar to vignettes, in which faces and figures appear in succession, a hand indicates\u2014and dirties\u2014the pages of an open book, and a face is literally torn to pieces by six arms.
\nLife<\/em>, 1979
\nvideo, black and white, sound, 9 min. 17 sec.
\nIn a series of short “animated” scenes, we observe the labored growth of a small plant in front of a building and the disturbing destinies of some insects placed in small, transparent plastic tubes.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 12 min. 41 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nIn a painterly setting with dark and sinister shades, a bullet fired by small figures travels, entering other situations. The bullet kills a would-be suicide, straightens an antenna, and penetrates the body of a woman.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 22 min. 36 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nBeginning with an image of a device in a phase of emergency, this video accumulates images that are particularly gloomy and expressionistic in a crescendo of anxieties addressing themes of sex and death, passing among visions of terrorizing metropolises and the Garden of Eden.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 16 min. 08 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nIn this video, the \u201cmachine\u201d of the human brain is in crisis. Somewhere between signs of panic and hopelessness, Oursler depicts the story of a modern hero, played by an actor, who is obsessed with ghostly voices that bring him to the point of alienation, amidst scenes of urban and industrial decadence.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 53 min. 47 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nProduced parallel to the large multi-media installation of the same name, created for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, this video articulates a series of oneiric and often almost horrific scenes. The work shows human figures at the mercy of spirits and sinister presences. It alternates animated figures with the corporeal presences of actors immersed in dark and supernatural scenarios.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 5 min. 33 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nConsecutively, this brief work shows a series of frightful images and situations that mix sacred images and iconography with visions of violent death and blood\u2014all against pictorial backgrounds of unexpected beauty.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 14 min. 23 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nCreated as a collaboration between the artist and the writer Constance DeJong, this video advances like a frenetic journey, as the title suggests, through experiences and discoveries in a sort of modern Odyssey of the American culture of sensationalism and consumerism.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 45 min. 40 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nPerformed by actors, this video traces the wanderings of two patients who leave a psychiatric hospital. In having returned with a certain reluctance into the real world, Tony, Joe, and their dog Woody find themselves having to once again get used to everyday life and to the prospect of looking for a job and preparing their own food (besides having to keep a video-diary of their experiences). Produced in collaboration with Joe Gibbons, the video offers a series of situations of extravagant, almost dark humor, closely touching upon themes of solitude, health, abnormality, and death impulses.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 6 min. 17 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nProduced in collaboration with the experimental post-punk band Sonic Youth, this music video is dedicated to the tragic figure of a famous seventies American pop star, Karen Carpenter, and to her problems with anorexia.<\/p>\n
\nvideo, color, sound, 11 min. 44 sec.
\nPurchased with the contribution of the Compagnia di San Paolo
\nModel Release<\/em>, 1992
\nvideo, color, sound, 3 min. 24 sec.
\nIn this brief video, a female figure holds what appears to be a puppet. She recites legal texts, drawing a parallel among slavery, prostitution, and possession of the spirit through the power of mass media.
\nPar-Schizoid-Position<\/em>, 1992
\nvideo, color, sound, 2 min. 53 sec.
\nFeaturing Kim Gordon, the video shows the face of the performer superimposed over abstract backgrounds with a stream-of-consciousness narration.
\nTest<\/em>, 1992
\nvideo, color, sound, 5 min. 23 sec.
\nAnalogous to Par-Schizoid-Position, in Test the face of the performer\u2014Karen Finley\u2014is coupled with abstract backgrounds and free-association voice-over.<\/p>\n
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