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
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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
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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.
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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. Thus, in his remarks to Kelley, Oursler noted that for Grand Mal (1981), one of the most influential of his single-channel works:
I thought of the viewer as the character. He or she is actually participating in a state of mind. That was the goal; to collaborate with the viewer, give them enough room to dream, to read into the signs yet to follow a loose path.
It is an engagement with this affective aspect of the medium, too, that defines Oursler’s step into installation and toward a heightened articulation of a media presence in the dynamic between the projected image and the onlooker. Here, Oursler’s approach to presence addresses the place and function of media as a “mimetic technology,” a term he reports borrowing from “[p]harmacology, psycho-mimetic drugs, drugs that mimic portions of our mental state.”6 In this context, Oursler’s grammar has developed toward equations between media technologies and psychological states and processes, moving directly, with Window Project in 1991, toward the creation of video work that “looks back.” Consisting of three discrete performances to camera by three performers; the writer and performance artist Karen Finley, the artist and poet Constance DeJong, and musician Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth; Oursler back- projected these works onto outward facing windows of the gallery. In his outline of the project, he notes that:
The idea of converting a window into a screen began with the impulse to counter the passive situation associated with video viewing. Also, I wanted to create a situation which would extend the works to a public outside of the institution, in other words into the street.7
Within this piece, too, Oursler foregrounded his address to the viewer’s psychological positioning in relation to the work, writing Karen Finley’s performance, Test, solely on the basis of his memory of the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), a series of questions to which respondents agree or disagree, so providing the basis of an empirically derived assessment of their psychopathology. First released in 1942 and in subsequent revisions expanded to 567 items, the MMPI provided a source through which Oursler could directly extend his turn toward the deploy- ment of media in works which reflexively mirrored and interrogated the viewer’s attitude and place in reading. Facing the gallery window from the street, then, Finley prompted the viewer to respond to twenty-one “questions,” including:
1. When in a crowd I feel lost. 2. I like to see all the way to the horizon. 3. I feel connected to others when I watch TV. 4. The people who used to live here are still watching us.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 Although clearly distinct in form, the works in Ooze are similarly designed in alertness to the time and attention of the viewer and toward a testing of response. Furthermore, these pieces share a referential complexity with Oursler’s earlier de- compositions of narrative structure. For Ooze, in a room adjacent to the installations at Lehmann Maupin, seven corresponding works on paper, comprising clusters of images, drawings, and notes, allude to outlines, contexts, forms, and processes that underpin various aspects of these animated presences. Relating these works, in part, to the major site-specific piece, Blue Invasion, created in collaboration with Constance DeJong to take place throughout Hyde Park North, Sydney, Australia, in January 2007, this aspect of the exhibition links these individual installations to Oursler’s published writing on color, as well as referencing ghosts, extra-terrestrial contact, the electromagnetic spectrum, meteors, color blindness tests, and the aurora borealis, while also inviting connections with other works. Indeed, the use of color in these installations is implicitly connected to the TimeStream project, Oursler’s publicly available and extensive media archaeology exploring popular responses to “new” media and its psychological and folkloric consequences and counterparts. Here, and as with many of Oursler’s installations since the mid-1990s, the works in Ooze offer allusions to the layers of meanings within which media structures operate. In this context, and suggesting, in “Pop Dead Pictures,” that “[t]echnology embodies Science and Fiction, literally,” Oursler has aligned his address to popular, psychological, and hysterical responses to media with perceptions of presence or, more precisely, with “the human fascination with the ‘living’ quality and live pres- ence of popular technology.”8
THE SPACES BEFORE
Following Window Project, Oursler’s introduction of projections onto the figure of the dummy from 1992 brought this engagement with presence to the fore. Articulat- ing the video image’s occupation of the “real” spaces and times it would ostensibly transcend, while creating strongly ambivalent plays between the animated dummy as mirror (of the viewer’s body in real space) and surrogate (of the artist as performer), these works placed the spaces and times of performing and viewing at the center of the work. In this focus, Oursler suggested to Kelley, “I’m interested in putting the video into the exterior world and letting it function there,” such that “[v]ideo no longer acts as a window to look through but is somehow made physical.” Extend- ing his address to the psychological positioning of the viewer before the work, the dummy installations, including Crying Doll (1993), White Trash/Phobic (1993), Getaway #2 (1994), and Judy (1994), were, he continues, conceived as “empathy tests or traps.” Thus, purposefully “scaled to the size of a doll or elf” to elicit a sentimental identification on behalf of the viewer, Crying Doll further demanded the viewer’s attention and emotional investment through, Oursler suggests, “its superhuman ability to never stop weeping, which in turn becomes horrifying to the viewer, who must eventually turn away.”9
It is an appeal to the onlooker directly supported by the doll’s operation across vir- tual and real spaces. Exploiting, Oursler notes, “our natural instinct to see oneself in
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 every perceived situation,”10 Crying Doll, like subsequent projections onto dummies, exposes the props and mechanisms of its operation: the untransformed materials comprising its seemingly unfinished body; the wooden support; the projector focused on its face, as if surveilling rather than animating its activity. Here, the very elements that assert the dummy’s occupation and functioning in the same space as the viewer also extend its emotional gesture, articulating the dilemma of its migration into the real space and spectacle of its exhibition. In this respect the composer Tony Conrad, one of Oursler’s collaborators, observes that:
These are not unified individual works in the modernist sense; eachis an art piece which has made a break for it, has escaped the Frame, but then—hobbled by the tether of video (its cables, the implied—even if not visible—framing the edges of the video image)—it fails, importantly, to stand free, and instead is pinned in place, projected flat, a crushed soul, skewered in the din.11
It is an aspect of the work Oursler frequently amplifies in emphasizing the dummies’ lack of mobility: trapping them under furniture; pinning them to the floor. Where for Crying Doll, as well as Hysterical (1993), Full Moon (1993), and MMPI Test Doll (1992), the figure is suspended on a wooden or metal pole, for Getaway #2, the dummy lies on the floor, its head (and projection) seemingly stuck beneath the corner of a mattress. MMPI (Red) (1997) is similarly immobilized beneath an upturned chair, while the head of Pinned (1995) is painfully fixed to the floor under the foot of a chair leg. In their address to the onlooker, the dummies may even reflect upon their dilemma. Comprised of a head animated by a looped projection onto a pillow, with a prone body formed from loosely stuffed jacket and pyjama trousers tied at each end, Deborah Rothschild, in her introduction to Oursler’s mid-career survey exhibition, Introjection,12 quotes the critic Peter Schejeldahl’s response to Getaway #2, which
simmers with disconsolate fury at the injury of its helpless condition and the insult of being trapped in public view. Occasionally its restless eyes fix the visitor and it speaks, “Hey, you. Get out of here. What are you looking at?” After pausing for mournful reflection, it tries again. “I’ll kick your ass,” it hazards with measured venom but not much conviction.
It is in the articulation of such dilemmas, too, that Oursler exposes a movement between spaces as a key mechanism in his work. Where in the single channel tapes, Oursler suggests to Kelley, “[c]onversion from real to video space was a big part of my process,” these installations simultaneously effect a reverse movement. Thus, where Oursler’s installation design serves to literally and metaphorically support the projection’s virtual act and identity, so it necessarily manifests and traps this “virtual character” in “real” space. Such a double movement plays on and amplifies the spatial complexity of video’s operation, while provoking a particular sense of these entities’ “presences.” Indeed, if, after the Oxford English Dictionary, “the fact or condition of being present” is understood as “the state of being before, in front
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 of,” so the phenomenon of “presence” implies a proximity felt in distance, a sense, for the viewer, of implicit division or tension in relation to the object. The perception of these dummies’ “being there,” under this definition, implies recognition of “the portion of space before or around someone or something” (OED), and so a percep- tion of that which is “in the same place” yet ineluctably apart, separate. It is this division that Oursler’s dummies are deployed toward and in which their dynamic is defined. Indeed, the dummy installation appears to seize the spaces before, asserting, in its relationship to the onlooker, the “presence” of its virtual spaces to its material support, just as these supports are dramatized by, and seemingly become present to, the virtual character’s state of distress. In this way, the dummy’s “presence” is amplified in its own divisions, by the dynamic opposition in which it is articulated between “real” and “video” spaces.
Significantly, too, this dynamic is amplified in these installations in the illusion of performance: in the presentation of an act seemingly doubled by purpose and inten- tion. It is to this end that Oursler’s dummies present their anchoring in the material space as their essential dilemma, as they “act out” the problem of installation itself. Such a trespassing by the virtual into the dilemmas of materiality works to amplify the dummies’ occupation of a kind of negative space before the viewer, emphasizing lack, a failure to fully occupy its own space. In hypothesizing the dummies’ conversa- tions, Oursler has thus emphasized their negative relationships to the spaces of their installation, and to viewers themselves, as if to ensure their distance, however strongly they may invite the viewer’s emotional identification. He notes that:
It’s part of their design: provocation through absence. How they relate to each other, to us, is by psychological dependency. If they could speak they might say something like D1—“I occupy space yet I can’t perceive that space” D2—“I can’t occupy your space yet I can perceive it” and on like that. Each “surveils” the other, incapable of self-reflection.13
In Underwater (Blue/Green) (1996), as for other works, this projection’s “performance” becomes the motor of the attempted migration between virtual and real spaces. Resting on the simulation of a common phobia, Underwater (Blue/Green) presents a head projected onto a fiberglass model within a tank of water. Following the logic of Oursler’s “empathy tests,” the virtual head’s projected performance attempts to give meaning to the conditions of its display as it repeatedly acts out its potential suffocation by desperately attempting to hold its breath. Rothschild again reproduces Peter Schjeldahl’s response to this piece: “The face, desperate for air, puffs out its cheeks, moans through closed lips and looks upwards towards freedom. It is only an illusion, but the urge to reach into the tank and rescue this poor disembodied head is overwhelming.”
Underwater (Blue/Green) “acts out” an impossible step from the virtual to the real. However, in its production of the sympathetic anxiety described by Schjeldahl, this “media entity” successfully performs its occupation of the viewer’s space. In turn,
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 the viewer’s emotional identification is expressed in their acting out of the “media space,” an imaginary space of impossible and unacceptable constraint and potential panic. For the installations in Ooze, a similarly disjunctive relationship between spaces underpins the sense of these entities’ “presence.” Here, the positioning of each of these surfaces explicitly before the wall emphasizes their suspension, their fixity, but also their flatness, so constructing “painting” as thetrap , the otherness in which these time-based images are pinned down and restricted. It is a restriction only amplified, too, by the sense of these entities’ attempts to enter the space of the viewer, exchange their gaze, or speak. For Oursler, evidently, these very efforts toward movement, and the possibility of a crossing of distinct spaces, characterizes his investigation of media space, suggesting in conversation with the artist Jacqueline Humphries that “Media space is a conglomerate of virtual spaces [. . .] I tried to make entities [. . .] which have the properties of media space, put them in real space—see how they operate. What happens when the immaterial becomes present?”14
Extending this, from 2003 Oursler initiated a series of projections onto overtly abstracted three-dimensional forms, including Pet (2003), Coo (2003), Big Eye (2003), Baby (2003), and Blob (2004), that articulated this crossing of spaces in relationships between video and bodily space. Rather than invite the viewer to “project” toward the circumstances of the dummy’s dilemma, as in Underwater (Blue/Green), Blob provokes a somatic connection; a bodily identification of internal states. Blob is a body pared down toward a collapse of recognizable features, yet one designed, Ours- ler emphasizes in his essay of the same name, to remain “a character, an irreducible entity.”15 In setting itself apart visually, however, Blob plays out a migration toward the viewer’s bodily space. Blob, Oursler continues, “never stops moving, moving all around with no place to go” in such a way that
The blob’s movements are alien yet oddly familiar. Pulling and stretching. Like peristaltic movement. Like the way things move through your body by contractions which result in locomotion. You understand this is linked to your bowels and intestines, because even though this motion is involuntary, it is conscious on some level. It is essentially a wave, the universal form of energy transmission divided into peaks and troughs like a bad ocean. Unending waves, wave after wave, wash away your shape. Now formless, You are the blob.
Here, Blob’s visual difference acts as a foil to the viewer’s sense of its physical intrusion. Indeed, where this somatic connection takes its effect, so the viewer’s sense of “its” presence is articulated in the difference between the visual and the physical: Blob is seen to occupy the space before, precisely as it is felt to disrupt or intrude upon the viewer’s sense of their own physical distance and integrity. In this sense, too, it is the viewer, in their awareness of these divisions, this distance in proximity, that performs “its” presence, leading to Oursler’s provocation that “we” have become “it.”
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 TIME AND PRESENCE
Oursler’s articulation of the presence of these media entities does not end in this address to the spaces of the image’s display. Indeed, Oursler’s work also gives emphasis to the differences in times marked by the virtual image’s movement toward the space and time of the viewer’s encounter. Here, again, this work foregrounds the material conditions of its installation. Thus, with regard to time, the art critic Achille Bonito Oliva argues in his contribution to a major catalogue of Nam June Paik’s work, Nam June Paik: eine Data Base (1993), that video installation necessarily “documents”
a twofold time. Twofold because of a double possibility of measurement, one dictated by the internal cadence of the technology and the other by the encounter between the technology and materials that are steady in themselves and the public, either still or in movement.
It is in the context of this multiplication that Oursler’s “empathy tests” invariably use time-looped video, so deferring attention back to the material conditions of video itself, its operation in “real-time” recording and playback. In this way, for example, in Getaway #2 and Underwater (Blue/Green), the repeating structure of Oursler’s projections provide for a key part of their effect. Stressing, again, the limits of the virtual image’s occupation of real space, this gesture also sets an important limit, or interruption, to the work’s engagement of the viewer, disrupting the viewer’s identification with the projection, interrupting their “cathartic” experience or antici- pation of closure. With regard to the perception of the media entitiy’s presence, too, this articulation of incongruent times may be read in relation to techniques of presence evident in live performance. Thus, Jon Erickson, writing in The Fate of the Object: From Modern Object to Postmodern Sign in Performance, Art, and Poetry (1998) observes the articulation of the performer’s presence in disjunctive temporal relationships between the body, action, and language, noting that:
“Presence” in the theater is a physicality in the present that at the same time is grounded in a form of absence. It is something that has unfolded, is read against what has been seen, and presently observed in expectation as to what will be seen. It means that the performer is presenting herself to the audience, but at the same time holding something back, creating expectation [. . .] In other words, not only does the notion of presence in performance imply an absence, but that absence itself is the possibility of future movement; so paradoxically, presence is based not only in the pres- ent, but in our expectation of the future.
Here, Erickson concludes, “[p]resence has an inverse relationship to language,” arising in the moment where the body is there and yet “[o]ne is holding back the articulate meaning that the audience is expecting.”16 It is such an amplification of presence in a lacuna produced by silence, or in the gap or refusal, too, which finds an extreme expression in the presentation of animals within dramatic performances. Thus, for Romeo Castellucci of the Italian performance company Societas Raffaello Sanzio, the animal offers a presence that is disruptive of the representational apparatus of
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 the theatre precisely because of its performative alertness yet inability to answer for its own symbolic significance. Writing of “The Animal Being On Stage,” Castellucci remarks that:
On stage, the animal is comfortable (being not perfectible) in the confidence of its own body; at the same time it feels uncomfortable in its surroundings. The device of technique cannot be used by the animal, as it already possesses the greatest device: to be alienated on stage, immobile, in an alert state.17
In Rafaello Sanzio’s performances, the animal’s very lack of “technique,” its refusal of the rhetorical questions its presence raises, interrupts the “theatre itself” by opening a space before its representations. Analogously, in Oursler’s installations, not only do the dummies present a disruptive movement between representational schemes in the interplay between virtual and real objects, but they are continually interrupted, replayed, repeated, and so brought to a repetition or silence they themselves can- not account for. In the viewer’s experience, too, this repetition, which marks the projection’s unreality, its failure to “arrive,” in Underwater (Blue/Green) the failure to suffocate, in Crying Doll, the refusal to rest, heightens the spectacle of its perfor- mance, its effort towards migration. Indeed, it is the loop, the inevitable repetition, that prompts the viewer to move ahead, disassociate, and then return to the effect of presence, an effect that may be amplified, rather than diminished, in this process. Thus, in his response to Getaway #2, again reproduced in Rothschild’s survey of Oursler’s work, Schjeldahl seems to encounter just such a phenomenon, in which:
Even realizing that the looped tape speaks whether anyone is nearby or not, I couldn’t shake a sense of being addressed personally. I caught myself retreating out of intimidated respect for the creature’s feelings. Then I had to laugh at myself. I went back—get a grip Peter!—And sat on the floor to contemplate my own emotional response, a tossed salad of pity and fear.
Here, in these de-synchronizations, the object’s heightened presence becomes the focus of Schjeldahl’s attention and the instrument by which the installation provokes an interrogation of the “self” who views.
SIMULATION AND THE SIGNS OF PRESENCE
Through its attention to the signs and practices of presence, Oursler’s staging of “media entities” serves to interrupt and articulate the viewer’s negotiation and performance of media spaces and processes. In this respect, his work makes a phenomenological exploration of the circulation and exchange of the signs of presence, and so of aspects of self and identity, through everyday practices of media consumption. Suggesting that “media space has transposed realism to create a new space of everyday life,” Oursler’s installations intrude upon the viewer’s sense of their own psychological separation and integrity; their sense of presence before the media.18 Indeed, one of the roots of these projections’ uncanny effect is their exposure of the mobility of the signs of presence and the close link between presence and simulation. Here, Oursler’s work elaborates questions raised also by research and practices in new media,
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 PHOTOS 4-5 ON ONE PAGE (FACING PHOTO 6), CAPTION BELOW. PHOTO 6 ON ONE PAGE (FACING PHOTOS 4-5).
Left: Tony Oursler, Crying Doll (1993); Right: Blob (2004); Opposite: Underwater (Blue/Green) (1996). Photos: Courtesy the artist.
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 telecommunications and human-computer interaction. Writing of “The Cyborg’s Dilemma: Progressive Embodiment in Virtual Environments,”19 in the Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, Frank Biocca argues that
Rather than seeing social presence as a partial replication of face-to-face communication, we should more generally see social presence as a simula- tion of another intelligence. The simulation is run in the body and mind of the perceiver, and models the internal experience of some other moving, expressive body. It is a simulation because the simulation occurs whether or not the moving object has intelligence or intentionality, whether the “other” is a moving human being or an animation composed of nothing more than moving patterns of ink. The definition above suggests that social presence applies to the mediated experience of all forms of “intelligence.” This per- ceived intelligence might be another human, a non-human intelligence such as an animal, a form of artificial intelligence, an imagined alien or a god.
In the context of Biocca’s analysis, these media entities’ approaches to the viewer may be read as “acting out” and exploring precisely the place of such simulations within the mechanisms of presence. Indeed, where the dummy articulates its lack of center, or dramatizes its essential dilemma in attempting to be present, while heightening the sense of its occupation of the space before, so it all the more effectively demon- strates the mobility of these signs, the fluidity between the viewer and the viewed, the achievement of presence in simulation.
In the broader context of video art, too, issues of presence and the fractured and distributed self have been addressed across a range of influential work. Oursler himself has pointed toward the significance for his own work of Dan Graham’s time-delay installations created in 1974. Using combinations of live feedback and five to eight second time-delay relays, Graham’s installations set the viewer’s action and attention between their present time activity (seen in a mirror), a replay of their immediate past activity (seen on screen), and an anticipation of their “present tense” perfor- mance toward a future time delay. The resulting positioning of the viewer, Graham suggested in his documentation of this series in his book Dan Graham: Video/Archi- tecture/Television (1979), confuses the inside and outside of action, reflection and self. Indeed, these installations could be seen as exemplifying Oursler’s proposition that “[p]sychologically, one may view media as an evolutionary facilitator of the fractured self.”20 Such challenges are also presented in the extensive video work of Vito Acconci, and reflected in his essay of 1984, “Television, Furniture and Sculp- ture: The Room With The American View,” in which he concludes that television “confirms the diagnosis that the boundaries between inside and outside are blurred: the diagnosis that ‘self’ is an out-dated concept.” More recently, Gary Hill’s projec- tive installations have further elaborated these challenges to the centered subject in another extensive address to relationships between media and presence.
In Oursler’s work, though, this position is perhaps illustrated most clearly in his series of works in 2001 that incorporated antenna-like forms, as well as references
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 to the hardware of transmission. Following the creation of his major installation and performance, The Influence Machine (2000), that marked a culmination of his TimeStream project, these works projected talking heads onto opaque and translu- cent screens supported by various combinations of antennae. Providing a physical expression of Oursler’s observation in his essay “Pop Dead Pictures,” that “[w]e are antennas, all that stuff moves through us. Different parts of our body, organs, bones conduct themselves differently and can be measured,” pieces suchBuzz (2001), Endfire Array (2001), In The Sky (2001), and Wavefront (2001), articulate mobile relation- ships between the viewer, the physical apparatus and projected, speaking entities, producing a sense of identity and personality in movement. Such work emphasizes exchange, mobility and mutability in the performance of presence, to pose fun- damental questions over the nature of action, identity, and self in the relationship with media forms. Here, again, Oursler’s work has resonance with interdisciplinary debates over the nature of bodily experience, place, identity, and presence, in the context of media and new technologies. Indeed, Oursler’s work prompts similar questions to those with which Frank Biocca concludes “The Cyborg’s Dilemma,” as he examines the effects of “embodiment” in virtual reality. In the “pursuit of pres- ence and the telecommunication of the body,” Biocca suggests, and as we come to observe the “day-to-day movements of our consciousness between the experience of our unmediated body and our mediated virtual bodies,” so we are led to the ques- tion: “Where am ‘I’ present?”
NOTES
1. Mike Kelley, “An Endless Script: A Conversation with Tony Oursler,” in Tony Oursler, Introjection: mid-career survey 1976–1999, edited by Deborah Rothschild, Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1999, 38–55. 2. Tony Oursler, “Sketches at Twilight,” in Tony Oursler, My Drawings 1976–1996, Kas- sel: Oktagon, 1997, pages unnumbered. 3. Kelley, “An Endless Script: A Conversation with Tony Oursler.” 4. Tony Oursler, “Pop Dead Pictures,” in Tony Oursler, edited by Elizabeth Janus, Milan: Electa, 2002, 156–71. 5. Oursler in Elizabeth Janus, “Talking Back: A Conversation with Tony Oursler,” in Rothschild, 70–95. 6. Oursler in Christiane Meyer-Stoll, “A written conversation between Tony Oursler and Christiane Meyer-Stoll.” Tony Oursler Online
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Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/pajj.2008.30.1.15 by guest on 02 October 2021 10. Tony Oursler, “A Conversation about Some Recent Work,” in Malsch, 62–64. 11. Tony Conrad, “Who Will Give Answer to the Call of My Voice? Sound in the Work of Tony Oursler,” in Tony Oursler, edited by Elizabeth Janus and Gloria Moure, Barcelona: Ediciones Poligrafa, 2001, 150–66. 12. Schejeldahl quoted in Rothschild, “Introjection: In Oursler’s World, No One Escapes Its Unbidden Influences,” 12–37. 13. Tony Oursler, “A Conversation about Some Recent Work.” 14. Jacqueline Humphries, “Jacqueline Humphries Interviews Tony Oursler on His New- est Piece: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education Plus Some . . .” Tony Oursler Online
NICK KAYE is Professor of Performance Studies, University of Exeter, UK. His books include Multi-Media: video—installation—performance (2007) and Site-Specific Art: performance, place and documentation (2000). He is Principal Investigator for Performing Presence: from the live to the simulated.
Research for this article was conducted in the context of Performing Presence: from the live to the simulated, a four year collaboration between University of Exeter, Stanford University and University College London funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK. Performing Presence is available at:
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