TONY OURSLER

January 27 - March 10, 2000

Tony Oursler was born in New York in 1957. He attended the California Institute for the Arts in 1979, B.F.A. He lives and works in New York..

“An important aspect of Tony Oursler’s work is his fascination with the immense potential of new technologies - especially those, such as video, in which he finds structures of a quasi-mimetic kind. Technology, in his view, has the power to imitate human spiritual and emotional capacities, and he therefore regards it as the real heart of our age.” (Schneider, Tony Oursler, 1998).

Tony Oursler’s method of working is deliberately simple, crude and direct. From his early videos of the 1970’s and 1980’s to his dummies that took the place of the screen as a projection surface in the 1990’s, the artist has always managed to succesfully combine a seemingly provisional method of creation with a rigorous artistic intelligence.

His work consists mainly of electronically generated images projected onto various surfaces, mostly figures that are abbreviations of the human body mixed in with props made out of simple man body mixed in with props made out of simple materials. These ‘video projection automatons’ bare down on us with their archetypal feelings of fear and aggression, their sexual drives, their vices, their powers of seduction and craving for compensation disclosing a complex system of signs and language in which Oursler moves.

Themes such as violence, television, the mass media, sex, drugs, mental illness, pop culture, religion and pollution are among many that define the work’s techno-social landscape. His photographs, drawings, and lately, CD-ROMS further accentuate the artist’s interest in extending the definition of any one medium beyond its conventional use.