VIDEO PRESENCE Tony Oursler's Media Entities
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VIDEO PRESENCE Tony Oursler’s Media Entities Nick Kaye The space after the light leaves the monitor; where life begins and the machine ends—the living rooms and bedrooms where the bodies are— these are the interesting spaces. Tony Oursler, in conversation with Mike Kelley, 19991 ince his exhibition of The Waiting in 1992, Tony Oursler’s work has focused on the video image’s operation in the space and time of performance and encounter, explored in relocations of projected or screened images onto Sthree-dimensional objects, including dummies and mannequins, flowers, spheres and abstract sculptural forms. Overtly theatrical in their negotiation of place, pre- sentation and “projection,” while referencing historical and contemporary spectacle, including phantasmagoria and spiritualist practices, as well as popular reactions to technology, Oursler’s staging of these uncanny presences engages with psychologi- cal and perceptual responses to mediatized forms and signs. In the course of this activity, Oursler’s work has come to emphasize the experience and performance of “presence” in ways that depart from the overt displacement of the “authority” of “classical presence” that Chantal Pontbraid influentially identified with “the expres- sion of performance through technical means” in her essay “The Eye Finds No Fixed Point On Which To Rest,” published in Modern Drama in 1982. Indeed, in its engagement with the performance of presence through media, Oursler’s work can also be seen to defer in significant ways from the critique of presence that, in his book Presence and Resistance (1992), Phillip Auslander, after Pontbraid, identified with the cultural politics of contemporary, media-based performance practices. By contrast, Oursler’s hybrid objects are designed to prompt processes of empathy and catharsis, frequently taking their effect in the viewer’s recognition of and identifica- tion with a “media entity” whose perceived “presence” may challenge the integrity and stability of the onlooker’s position. A meeting with Bluerealisation with Head (2007), one of seven such pieces grouped in a single room under the title Ooze for the Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York, February to March 2007, immediately confronts the visitor with such questions. Formed in aluminum, and set slightly off the gallery wall to achieve an explicit depth in real space, each of these pieces presents a hand-painted surface which has been © 2008 Nick Kaye PAJ 88 (2008), pp. 15–30. 15 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 opened to reveal mediated body parts; an eye or eyes, a face, lips, fingers; morphed to reflect the abstract shapes in which they are captured. Over time, the mediatized eye in Bluerealisation with Head seems to explore the space before it: looking down, the eyelid closes, opens again. Eventually, the “video performer” (Oursler himself) moves back, revealing a “media space” behind the picture plane. Moving in and out of shadow and focus, at times shaking his head rapidly, his mouth then comes to takes the place of the eye, whispering: “see outside range of your vehicle . see . yes, I cried.” Simultaneously, on an adjacent wall, the lips of Red “Love Hurts” Laboratory (2007) purse repeatedly and with some difficulty; it whispers, very quietly. On moving close up to listen its construction becomes apparent: the hard surface, the brushstrokes, the screen, and distortion of the mouth; the skin of the performer blushed red with makeup. The whisper is difficult to make out: “It happens.” Grouped together with Pink-too-long Fluid (2007), (Usually) Black Anythingyou want (2007) and its four other companion pieces, these works seem to take up each other’s time. Fixed to the wall, they assert a belonging to the animated realm of the visitor: some of them appear to look and wait. VIDEO GRAMMAR Like its partner pieces, Bluerealisation with Head operates in disjunctive relationships between spaces and practices. In re-siting the signs of video art within painting and offering references to the painted surface, as well as abstraction and the hand, these works recollect Oursler’s early shift of medium from paint to video. Remarking, in his essay “Sketches at Twilight,”2 on the evolution of the single-channel tapes that formed a principal focus of his work from 1979–1992, Oursler notes that during his training at Cal Arts: [t]he possibility of entering a video space was radical and ultimately desirable for me [. .] My experiments in painting ended up in front of a camera and I often painted while looking through a camera [. .] Through the lens my pictures could be electrified with all the attributes of life: if they needed a hand or a mouth I would just cut a hole and stick the body part through it. [. .] I was struck by the ability of the camera to alter the laws of physics; to transform matter, space and time, inanimate to animate: worlds unto themselves. As this suggests, from its inception Oursler’s work has explored the spatial complex- ity and transformative capacity of the video image; its negotiation of relationships, spaces, and times before and behind the screen. Here, too, Oursler’s work has called on video’s close relationship with live performance and music to address the viewer’s place in the work, while articulating the implicit theatricality of time-based instal- lation. Thus, Oursler’s earliest tapes recorded his overtly theatrical realization of improvised scenes within hand-made and painted sets. Foregrounding his function as performer, Life of Phillis (1977), Oursler’s earliest available tape, is comprised of a 16 PAJ 88 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 series of vignettes in which Oursler’s hands are seen manipulating dolls, objects, and materials in such a way that, he suggested in his extensive conversation with Mike Kelley3 published in 1999, “nothing was really hidden from the viewer.” Originally an installation in which episodes played to camera and reel-to-reel VCR at noon each day at Cal Arts, and later compiled into a 55-minute, single-channel work, Life of Phillis plays through fragmentary, tabloid-inspired narratives that, he suggested to Kelley, “revolve around a desperate, young, abused girl character, someone out of the pages of the National Enquirer.” In doing so, the piece exemplifies the “personal/pop” sources of his early work, which he goes on to detail as: a combo of supermarket tabloids and personal experience, mostly things that I picked up aurally from others. I was like a narrative antenna in the early work—studying and collecting urban legends, fables, folk tales. The only unifying factor in these tales is that they never really happened. They are always told second or third hand: “Listen to this: a friend of a friend had this happen.” Emphasizing narrative telling over coherence or closure, these early single-channel tapes are turned explicitly outward toward the viewer. Like the subsequent Dia- mond Head (1979) and Good Things and Bad (1979), Life of Phillis plays overtly on the viewer’s reading of impoverished objects and signs as the protagonists and victims of extreme events and emotions, a process in which the theatrical character of Oursler’s performance is instrumental. Performing toward, he tells Kelley, “the grainy, almost mystical space” produced by early mono video, in which, Oursler suggests, “[y]ou could almost see the machine turning reality into a shimmering approximation of itself,” the transformative nature of this video space is undercut by Oursler’s manipulation of prosaic objects by hand. Presenting dime-store dolls and toys as its protagonists, the fictional “places,” narratives and characters of Life of Phillis are invoked despite the explicitly makeshift nature of their construction, while the transformed space of video and the distancing of the screen is counterpointed by the overtly self-conscious theatricality of Oursler’s manipulations to camera. In these works, Oursler concluded to Kelley, “I was playing with our desire to get lost in narrative space/time. We love a story so much that we will breathe life into it no matter how much it is degraded.” From 1980, Oursler extended these processes toward the camera’s intense illumination and remediation of color, manipulating the camera controls to amplify the shifts of color produced by contemporary analogue video. Adapting graphic ideas from his painting to video, Oursler applied paint while looking through the lens, mixing colors to exploit the screen’s illumination, and combining, he recounted to Kelley, “all sorts of styles and levels of symbolism,” while playing “with voice, sound, and music and narrative.” Reflecting the view, set out in his essay “Pop Dead Pictures,”4 that “if an image exists, then it has already destroyed the possibility of being constructed by the viewer,” these dream-like works were thus “designed to mirror a thought pattern or process,” and so operate “in opposition to a film grammar, which is [. .] attempting to replace the eye.”5 Indeed, Oursler’s resulting “video grammar,” while including KAYE / Video Presence 17 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 Clockwise from top: Tony Oursler, Bluerealisation with Head (2007), Red “Love Hurts” Laboratory (2007), Pink-too-long Fluid (2007). All pieces aluminum, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player. Photos: Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York. 18 PAJ 88 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 residual references to plot, storytelling, scene, and character, engaged directly with the viewer’s complicity in forming the image, while addressing the transformative role of video as an affective medium.