Published in NY Arts Magazine / Vol.10 No.1/2, January/February, 2005

Pravin Sathe: Tony Oursler is one of the foremost video artists of his generation. A look inside one’s psyche and it seems Mr. Oursler has captured every emotive expression in his sculptures. His most recent permanent exhibition at the Seattle Public Library is a “collection of murmuring apparitions in a broken out section of a wall along an escalator – pure Tony Oursler.”

With that, welcome Tony Oursler. Please give us a brief background of your artistic underpinnings.

Tony Oursler: Well, I started out painting when I was a kid. I went to a small two year community college where I studied with a guy named Cora Rafos, and he was the one that sent me to CAL Arts. I went to CAL Arts in1976 and graduated in 1979 and while there I studied with many interesting artists such as Judy Pfaff, Jonathan Borofsky, Susan Rothenburg, John Baldessari and John Mandel. At CAL Arts, I was introduced to video as a form of art making and it replaced the canvas for me. I made a literal transition from the canvas to the moving image when I was convinced I could be the next big thing so to speak back in the 70’s. That’s my background, dabbling in the ephemeral world of the moving image while having a foot in the concrete world of art making.

PS: In the introduction I mentioned that your work reflects one’s psyche. What is it about media and this inner monologue that fascinates you?

TO: For me television, cinema, the telephone, or for that matter the Internet are all technological representations of modes of communication. They are surrogates for face-to-face communication. They interact with the psyche in very unique ways, and I think they provoke very unique emotive or psychological interactions. One could even look at it as an evolutionary process. We have extended our psychic position by all these technological forms, which happen to be virtual and mimetic as I call them, which means they mimic part of our consciousness.

PS: You speak of the mimetic nature of these technologies, and the visual nature of your projections certainly suggests this. But the text is what captures a viewer before he or she enters a room. How do you formulate your text so the viewer – and in this case the listener – is captured before viewing the piece?

TO: Good question. A lot of people forget about the linguistic side of my work and sometimes I would like to forget about it. If you have a linear story, even if it is just a spoken work, you might as well be sitting in a movie theatre, and I am very precise about the difference between an art object and a movie. One of the things I find unique to an art installation is that it is perpetual; it doesn’t have a beginning middle and end. So I dispensed with that notion and I worked with different techniques to develop my language. I studied stream of consciousness writing and poetry, and I looked into the surrealist strategies of random text development and statements from the MMPI. From these influences I have cultivated many different methods in which to write text for my work over the past ten years. At the moment, my text sounds like 50’s beat poetry.

PS: Moving back to your use of technology in the creation of your work, the advent of video projectors has been critical to creating your sculptures. It has allowed you to display something out of the box, literally and figuratively. Can you discus video projectors and their role in making your art.

TO: You mentioned in the box and out of box. Before 1991, I was producing inside a rectangular screen format, whether that was projected or a television set or a computer screen. The notion of the screen as the edge, being the corporately produced parameters of the image was always disturbing to me. In 1991, my year zero, I found an inexpensive video projector. It allowed me to project onto the surface of sculptures I was making and use it as a three-dimensional screen. It was a major breakthrough for me.

PS: You like I am a huge fan of the internet. What is it about the Internet as a multimedia artist that you find most interesting or promising for your work in the future?

TO: We should probably mention we have done a website together, which is chic but more informational. I have developed artwork specifically for the Internet, with Constance de Jong and Stephen Vitiello called Fantastic Prayer, but it is something I would like to readdress. I am interested in the how the Internet affects poltics; a way to bypass the corporate structure of media. In terms of art, what will be interesting to see are the emoticons, the weird short hand people use in Internet language while typing to another in developing new forms of art and communication.

PS: You are married to a painter, Jacqueline Humphries, and you recently collaborated on a project entitled Sleepwalk in New Orleans. Here you are a video artist, she a painter. We know painting is much slower process than jump cuts and edits in video. How did this collaboration work?

TO: Jacqueline being an abstract painter, a rare beast these days, had some very interesting ideas for how to generate images on video that were at once very homemade and yet very high-tech. They looked almost like fractals, but had a very organic quality to them; inks floating in water shot in macro. Starting out as a painter I was very sympathetic to how somebody could retain the painterly qualities of oil paints or acrylic and translate that into an installation. It was challenging and a lot of fun and we are always fantasizing about what the next project should be.

PS: Why don’t we see more of these collaborations in the art world?

TO: That’s a good question, I think because people are scared. I think there is so much competition in the art world that when artists’ have a chance to do a project they generally won’t collaborate with someone else. They just want to show their own thing, because they feel the need to promote themselves so heavily. It’s too bad; one really grows from the process.

PS: Your next major piece is at the Musee d’Orsay, a response to Gustav Courbet’s “The Painter's Studio; A Real Allegory”. Can you talk a little bit about the project?

TO: Serge Lemoine invited me to be one of the first contemporary artists to react to works in the collection. Jacqueline brought to my attention the Gustav Courbet piece entitled The Painter's Studio; A Real Allegory, Seven Years of my Aesthetic Education. I did quite a bit of research on the painting and it is a very big painting, I didn’t know that when I first saw it in a book. When I went to the museum and said I wanted to work with that painting, they said, “But of course, you are an American, you would want to work with the largest painting in the museum.”
I said, “Wait I only saw it in a book, I had no idea it was that big.”
I plan to take the exact shape of his painting but extrude it out into a shoe-box, almost like a stage set, and have it at 90 degrees to the original painting so you will be able to look from left to right between the two. The piece will have two sets of people, there will be an artwork by myself in the center, and I have invited five to seven artists to contribute artworks to my studio. I think one of the wonderful things about the Courbet piece was to suggest that artists’ are not alone. Though they work in a solitary manner, they have a collection of influences flowing through the studio, some fantastical others very real. John Baldessari, who’s never been to my studio, and someone I consider a type of kindred spirit in terms of his art production I invited to read a text. I have been trying to restrict it to the past seven years, as he did, and thus been looking at the immediacy of who passes through while including some important characters like Constance de Jong, Tony Conrad, and some assistants who work here.

PS: Off the beaten path, if you were curator for one show who would you show and why?

TO: I would curate my wife, because I would like to see her showing more, but that’s not right, that’s too much nepotism. I don’t know, I would do a lot of research and find someone who hasn’t shown and give him or her a show.

PS: Married to a beautiful wife, a new baby, spending time on Long Island and New York, is this the end of Tony Oursler?

TO: (laughs) That’s right, the beginning is the end and the end is the beginning.