-Research Tony Oursler's projection sculpture to identify some of the ideas and methods he uses in his work.
Tony Oursler has used the medium of film to create his own unique sculptural aesthetic, taking the images out of the television box and making them function in three-dimensional space. A recurrent theme in Oursler's work is the way in which visual technologies influence and even modify our social and psychological selves. His practice continuously engages with popular culture and questions how systems of mechanical reproduction, like photography, film and television, have come to dictate not only the way we see the world, but also the ways that images are constructed. Ourlser's formal vocabulary is deceptively simple, employing objects of everyday life, both high and low, that range from kitsch to folk art, and investing them with a new aesthetic meaning. A key feature of his work is the ways in which the human body comes into play. On one level the body is employed in a very literal sense through the projection of fragmented and alienating body parts onto fibreglass forms. On another level the body functions through the encounter with the work. Oursler's scenarios constantly invoke the very human wish to lose oneself in fantasy.
-How do you think the Enlightenment concepts of Science, progress, reason, individualism, empiricism, universalism, freedom and secularism can be applied to Oursler's work?
Drawing extensively from his obsessively researched timeline,
Tony Oursler will freely employ the strategies, all that
abracadabra, now you see it now you don’t, smoke and mirrors
prestidigitation, of proto-cinematic projections, as an investigation
into the arcane roots of his supposedly new medium and an
intervention into the mysticist causes for all these extraordinary
effects. From Gaspar Robertson’s moving image theater of the
1780’s conjuring the devil in a Parisian crypt, to Kircher’s camera
obscura, running parallel yet divergent to its age of Enlightenment,
Oursler takes those shadows out of Plato’s Cave and does the
whole phantasmagorical light show of evolving technology’s
increasingly more sophisticated projections. And more than simply
the quasi-scientific charlatan’s way of conjuring the worlds
beyond, the way in which Oursler distills this technology is in
itself a life after death, a mode of reproduction in the simulacra, of
living on through what has been made, that is at the heart of The
Influence Machine . Technology is its own post-human Golem
here, not so much the persistence of spirit as the interminable
machine. Be it all the ways that technology cheats death, from
perpetual simulation to more simply scaring the begeesus out of
people, the ways in which television’s constant
reminder/rebroadcast of death acts to invoke some personal victory
over it (this time) for the viewer, or the immediate, nearly
concurrent rise of spirit photography that accompanied the birth of
this seminal medium of mechanical reproduction — Oursler
understands how the mystery of every technological innovation has
brought with it a deeply superstitious sense of possibility in terms
of communicating with the dead.
