Tony Oursler: Magical Variations
TONY OURSLER Headless, 2020 © Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London
By Rachel Yanku
Contemporary to Mike Kelley and Bill Viola, and collaborator with David Bowe, multimedia and video installation artist Tony Oursler seamlessly interweaves technology with painting, photography, and sculpture. Overwhelmingly concerned with technology’s impact on the human imagination, Oursler’s Magical Variations presents the viewer with a series of stunning explorations into this constantly shifting relationship. He ultimately teases out a result that is complex, fraught, beautiful, and dire all at once.
“Headless.” depicts an opaque, Halloween-colored landscape with the silhouette of the mythical Headless Horseman. But Oursler situates this traditional folklore alongside footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing, and by virtue of doing so, creates a thematic tension between the imaginary and the historical. By technologically overlaying the circularity of the moon with the circularity of carved pumpkins being smashed by a bat, he highlights the ways that the imaginary can affect our perception of actual historical events, the ways that technologically can blur the two, and the violence implied by such a relationship. The fictitious narrative of the Headless Horseman in search of his head, and therefore his life, has a narrative correlate in the real event of the moon landing as humanity’s search for life beyond Earth. Both the headless horseman and astronauts participate in this inherent seeking, this exploration for life. But to conflate the fundamental facticity of the two is to perform a sort of violence to oneself.
TONY OURSLER Upsidedown., 2020 © Courtesy the artist and Lehmann Maupin, New York, Hong Kong, Seoul, and London
The circular framing of these narratives shows how they are connected in quite fundamental, essential ways. Such stories and events have in common their very shape and form; and by virtue of modern technology, they’re displayed in similar manners within our society. Consider the fact that we can stream documentaries and movies back-to-back, even simultaneously if we so choose. It is possible to watch the movie Halloween and switch immediately to the documentary Apollo 11, and it is the danger of this potential confluence that is evoked by Oursler’s videos, a danger that manifests also in the frenetic pace and ecstatic quality in which we browse and consume information via our TVs, phones, and computers.
Almost as if in response to the technological dangers evoked in “Headless.”, “Upsidedown” features actors striking various pieces of technology with baseball bats and sledge hammers. Oursler juxtaposes the comparatively diminutive scale of a human with the unforgiving presence of machinery, suggesting that the force of technology and its rigid movement is overwhelming and uncomfortable to engage with. Nevertheless it is a daily reality that people have to interact with machinery and technology much larger than themselves. The contrast of the human form with the machinery it encounters is reminiscent of the factory scene in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which Chaplin ineffectively engages with largescale machinery to a point where he is literally consumed by it, eventually becoming entangled in the inner maze of gears.
Ultimately, Oursler’s application of modern techniques to recycled imagery highlights the sheer, overwhelming complexity of the various ways in which technology frames our perception, experience, and understanding. A solution to such problems, his work seems to suggest, might have to be something stunningly simple.
Oursler’s Magical Variations exhibition can be viewed here.
