Tony Oursler
2021The Genius
Emily Breer, Joe Gibbons
Joe Gibbons, Karen Finley
A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to another; he becomes obsessed with an outlaw artist (played by performance artist Karen Finley) who destroys paintings in various galleries as a form of anarchist, anticapitalist protest.
The Genius
Spinout
Tony Oursler
Spinout is an apocalyptic tale of a world spinning out of control to nowhere. Space travel, astrology, spirals, the universe, catastrophe and madness are recurring visual and narrative themes in this expressionistic theater. "Of course we're all a little scared of the dark," says Oursler in his dreamlike narration. Rendered with his signature hand-painted sets and wildly constructed props, Spinout features a voiceover text by Oursler that is metaphorical as well as psychological, universal as well as personal.
Spinout
The Loner
Tony Oursler
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.
The Loner
EVOL
Tony Oursler
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.
EVOL
Imponderable
Tony Oursler
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.
Imponderable
Grand Mal
Tony Oursler
"Oursler’s thematic concerns betray classic Freudian anxieties about sex and death. In Grand Mal, the hero takes a convoluted odyssey through a landscape of disturbing experiences. The video’s free association includes, "digressions about the difference between salt and sugar and a version of the creation myth that is both banal and terrifying." — Christine Tamblyn, “Art Notes,” Scan (November/December 1981)
Grand Mal
Sucker
Tony Oursler
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."
Sucker
Life of Phillis
Tony Oursler
Life of Phillis is one of Oursler's earliest video narratives. In this psychosexual, low-tech epic, Oursler creates an outrageous theatrical world, fashioning characters from unlikely found objects. Willfully primitive, often grotesque, and crafted with an ingenious visual shorthand, Life of Phillis inhabits an ironic landscape fabricated from the detritus of pop culture.
Life of Phillis
Son of Oil
Tony Oursler
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.
Son of Oil