Tony Oursler
Tony Oursler is primarily known for his innovative combination of video, sculpture, and performance, often exploring the relationship between the individual and mass media systems with humor and imagination. Always rooted in the medium of film, he conjures sculptural and immersive experiences using technologies that hark back to magic lanterns, Victorian light shows, camera obscura and auratic parlour tricks, but that also look forward to the fully networked, digitally assisted future of image and identity production. As a pioneer of video art in early 1980s New York, Oursler specialised in hallucinogenic dramaturgy and radical formal experimentation, employing animation, montage and live action: “My early idea of what could be art for my generation was an exploded TV.” His enduring fascination for the conjunctions between the diametrically opposed worlds of science and spiritualism have allowed him to explore all kinds of occult and mystical phenomena, employing not just smoke and mirrors, but playing the role of circus showman and extricating the sham from the shaman. Oursler’s aesthetic and interactive technomancy reveals not only the ghosts in the machine but the psychological impact of humanity’s headlong dive into cyberspace.
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Oursler graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in 1979 and has an extensive exhibition history with recent museum shows at; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, NY (2016); LUMA Westbau, Zurich (2015); and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2014). He participated in the 54th Venice Biennale (2011); documenta VIII and IX, Kassel (1987, 1992); Whitney Biennial, New York (1989, 2006); and the Biennale de Lyon, France (1995, 2015). Oursler’s work is included in many public collections worldwide, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, USA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; National Museum of Osaka, Japan; Tate Collection, London, UK; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands and ZMK/Center for Art & Media, Karlsruhe, Germany.
RFA Exhibitions
Selected Images
Tony Oursler, Unidentified, Redling Fine Art, Los Angeles, 2017
Installation view
Imponderable, film still, 2016
5-D multimedia installation (color, sound)
90 minutes
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Imponderable, film still, 2016
5-D multimedia installation (color, sound)
90 minutes
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Imponderable, film still, 2016
5-D multimedia installation (color, sound)
90 minutes
Museum of Modern Art, New York
Imponderable, installation view, 2016
5-D multimedia installation (color, sound)
90 minutes
Museum of Modern Art, New York
My Saturnian Lover(s), film still, 2016
Wood and foam, acrylic paint, fluorescent paint, resin, 2 channel video (13:41 minutes)
96 x 144 x 120 inches
still from TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, Apr. 21 - Aug. 21, 2016
“You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did.” – Tony Conrad
still from TC: The Most Interesting Man Alive, Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia, Apr. 21 - Aug. 21, 2016
“You don’t know who I am, but somehow, indirectly, you’ve been affected by things I did.” – Tony Conrad
“X ERGO Y”, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Holland, 2015
Installation view
template/variant/friend/stranger, Lisson Gallery, London, 2015
Installation view
template/variant/friend/stranger, Lisson Gallery, London, 2015
Installation view
“Agentic Iced etcetera”, Pinchuk Art Centre, Ukraine, 2013
Installation view
“The Poetics Project” with Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France, 2013
Installation view
Still from the music video “Where Are We Now?" by David Bowie, directed by Tony Oursler, 2013
“Influence Machine,” Tate Modern London, UK, 2013
Installation view
“Dispositifs,”Jeu de Paume, Paris, France, 2005
Installation view
Still from “The Watching”, as part of Documenta IX, Kassel, 1992
Still from “Joyride” with Constance DeJong, Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 1989
Still from the music video "Tunic" by Sonic Youth directed by Tony Oursler, 1990