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As guardians of the cultural torch, theme parks and museums herd millions of thrill-seekers through a mental haze towards a re-shaped history and a sketchy future. Here objects and environment become one. A souvenir is purchased and relocated in the home; it is used to unlock the crowded and carbon dioxide-filled corridor to the ‘transcendental.’
Presented in a “5-D” cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects (scents, vibrations, etc.), Imponderable is an immersive feature-length film inspired by Oursler’s own archive of ephemera relating to stage magic, spirit photography, pseudoscience, telekinesis, and other manifestations of the paranormal.
The Loner is a psychosexual journey through the dark landscapes of Oursler's insular narrative universe. The tape's paranoid, tormented protagonist — who is represented by such objects as a spoon and a water-filled sack — wanders through a hostile dreamspace of macabre obsessions and sexual alienation. Incredibly, Oursler renders this unlikely anti-hero as a sympathetic, totally believable "character." The artist's somnambulant, pun-laden narration and astonishing visual inventiveness add black humor to the surreal proceedings; for example, a bar scene is populated by an outrageous "cast" of found-object grotesques. Oursler's classic happy ending, in which The Loner "would live a wonderful life," rings with an ironic desperation.
In EVOL (love spelled backwards), the audience is voyeur, peering into the delirious and erotic dreams of a young man (Oursler). We drift with him through anecdotes that poke fun at the disparity between the culturally accepted stereotypes of sex and love we are taught as children and the realities we discover in adult life.
A collection of music videos by Sonic Youth, spanning from 1990 to 2002.
Blood and transcendence are themes that permeate Sucker, with its incarnations of religious iconography and sexuality. Life and death, good and evil are evoked as the incantatory voiceovers and sordid images make reference to communion, transfusions, bloodbaths, bloodlust, vampires and the specter of a virus loose in contemporary culture. Steeped in paranoia and dread, this work describes a subconscious search that is, in Oursler's words, "based on a movie, based on a book, based on a poem, based on a myth, which is based on the quest for human immortality."
9/11 is a first-hand, harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath, as observed by the artist. As the tragedy unfolds, Tony Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on the ground in Lower Manhattan. Oursler began recording after the first building was struck, and continued to record as the second tower was hit. His camera also captures the responses of New Yorkers and tourists at the site in the days that follow. 9/11 allows the viewer a highly personal and immediate perspective on the events as they occur.
Son of Oil is a cautionary tale about the decline of Western civilization, as only Oursler could envision it. Oil is the central metaphor around which he constructs a burlesque critique of the cults of money and power that fuel economic and sexual systems, social pathology and cultural mythologies. Allusions to terrorists, the Son of Sam killer, the oil crisis and John Hinckley locate the dense narrative text in the media-saturated vertigo of early-1980s America. The grand dimensions of this subversive drama, in which Oursler employs actors in addition to his usual puppet-like props and objects, are played out in a deliberately claustrophobic, fantastically rendered theatrical space.
Told with raw eccentricity and grotesque humor, The Weak Bullet is an ironic tale in which the trajectory of the eponymous bullet propels a bizarre narrative of social rupture and sexual paranoia.
AWGTHTGTWTA (Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?) is one of a recent series of single-channel video works in which Oursler explores the idea of the "chorus." Here Oursler asked high school and middle school students in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, many of whom are recent immigrants, to describe their ideal or fantasy places. The resulting piece brings together scenes of the students reciting text in unison, excerpts of their imaginative responses to Oursler's question, and found footage of the compulsive online gaming, shorthand sms text messaging, and YouTube improvisational recordings that characterize their environment. Through this combination of spoken text and frenetic gaming images, Oursler highlights disparate notions of fantasy, and gives new voice to the layered story-telling that threads through his work.