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PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.1 (2008) 15-30

Video Presencetony 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
Since 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 three-dimensional objects, including dummies and mannequins, flowers, spheres and abstract sculptural forms. Overtly theatrical in their negotiation of place, presentation 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 psychological 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 expression 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 identification with a "media entity" whose perceived "presence" may challenge the integrity and stability of the onlooker's position.

A meeting with Bluerealisation with Head (2008), 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 [End Page 15] 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 (2008) 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 (2008), (Usually) Black Anythingyou want (2008) 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...

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