Introjection: In Oursler's World, No One Escapes Its Unbidden Influences

Deborah Rothschild

1999

Part I

If you’ve ever noticed how people can start to look like their dogs, or how friends who have known one another a long time begin to act alike, you’ve seen introjection. Meaning literally “to throw within,” it is a psychological term for the unconscious absorption of one person’s qualities by another. We all pick up mannerisms, speech patterns, and quirks of personality from others and incorporate them into ourselves. Tony Oursler is engaged in exploring various aspects of introjection, from the basic psychological “copy function” we all share to the absorption of toxins in our environment through chemical osmosis and ingestion. He sees that our bodies, our minds, our very souls, have been infiltrated by technology and its by-products. Oursler is particularly interested in a subtle form of the phenomenon that might be called media introjection, i.e., our assimilation of thoughts and behaviors from television and film. 

It’s not that he shares in the simplistic assumption that television is bad, but rather that he sees the profound power it has to insinuate itself into our lives and even into our subconscious. So much information is filtered through it, so much experience formed by it, that television has become as real as anything outside itself. Through introjection, the power of the screen extends from linking us to international events to telegraphing shifts in social conventions, so that we know what is moral and acceptable. He believes that the “Disneyfication” of our culture, which contributes to a simplified, prettified, and commodified view of life, is due largely to TV.

The fact that “so many of us perceive the world through television” has been a major catalyst for Oursler’s work. “My main focus is the position of the individual in relation to the mass of information we are fed and the manipulation we undergo by the powers that be, such as large conglomerates. That is one reason I want to understand the language of movies and TV, in order to see what causes—and then how to break—the hypnotic thrall media systems have over us. Introjection, this ‘copy function’ we have, can be applied to televised images, and we have to have some awareness of their power.” 

Admittedly, in a country where each home averages three TV sets, the idea that life imitates and blurs into television is not exactly startling. It has inspired such movies as the Truman Show, EdTV, and The Matrix, as well as studies such as Neal Gabler’s recent book, Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality. David Cronenberg’s paranoid science fiction films Videodrome and eXistenZ, where video mechanisms are inserted into the human body, illustrate literally the idea of media introjection in the extreme. What differentiates Oursler’s work from more preachy variations on this familiar theme is his nonjudgmental stance and playful approach. He does not sneer at television but instead uses droll amalgams of research, humor, and art to make us see and think about its immense effect on our lives. 

Oursler explores another definition of introjection—the assigning of living characteristics to inanimate objects—through his video-projection sculptures. We see in Oursler’s evolution how he gradually squeezes the TV out of the tube by using first reflection and later effigies to do away with the TV monitor. In this way media entities become tangible as they occupy physical space. By relinquishing the monitor and “the immaterial transmission of the screen with a projection in real space,” he eerily gives life to the technically inanimate. 

Empathy—an ability to feel for others—can be seen as a precondition to some kinds of introjection, and Oursler’s work has always been noteworthy for the empathy it is able to arouse. His repertoire of characters, including those of his single-channel works and his video-animated sculptures, engage us through their very human neuroses and confusion. The marginalized and forlorn, those rejected examples of humanity who don’t belong or are looked down upon, are Oursler’s usual protagonists. 

This exhibition provides an overview of Oursler’s career that allows viewers to trace his evolution, but it also points up recurring themes in his work—paranoia, superstition, and an awareness of introjection by devices that convincingly represent reality and influence human behavior. Issues of identity crop up frequently: Oursler often asks, What makes us human in a mechanized world where androids are no longer entirely in the realm of science fiction? He finds the answer in our capacity for empathy and in our individuality, expressed through quirkiness, unpredictability, fallibility, and refusal to fit the mold. In Oursler’s universe, a creature that resembles a bouquet of flowers or a lump of clay may qualify as human even when something that looks and talks like a man does not. He says, “What concerns me most deeply is individuality and creativity surviving in the culture, and I think artists are and should be catalysts for that.” 

The exhibition begins with a survey of Oursler’s early single-channel videos that span 1976 to 1999. It also recreates three large installations from the early eighties—Son of Oil; Diamond: The Eight Lights; and L7-L5—and includes later experiments with mixed media and monitorless video. Oursler’s signature sculptures using video projection onto effigies are represented by such pivotal works as The Watching, Judy, and Getaway #2. The largest gallery has been loosely divided between those works that deal with psychological introjection, as in “media-induced” dissociative identity disorders, and those that treat chemical introjection via mutation and environmental poisoning. 

Represented too are early paintings, drawings, and props, some dating back to Oursler’s youth, that foretell later preoccupations. A devil drawn when he was thirteen is a surprising precursor of the glass demons that punctuate Optics, the newest work on view. A fly described as “sent from the devil” in a sketch from 1978 crops up again in the video still life, Aperture (1998). An ink sketch depicting a dagger-wielding hand emerging from a television set and threatening to slit the viewer’s throat provides hints of the media paranoia to follow. Order Obsession (1976) (fig. 00), a small painting by the nineteen-year-old Oursler, is prophetic of the cast of projected-video neurotics and psychotics that appear in the 1990’s. In it, Oursler’s trademark recipe of humor mixed with pathos is evident as a man crouches in horror inside a doorway; his frightened eyes focus on the bottom of a businessman’s suit. Through an enlarged detail we see the cause of distress: a tiny loose thread on the man’s pant leg. 

A persistent hallmark of Oursler’s work—that is also characteristic of much contemporary postmodern art—is his method of moving his audience from passive viewers to participants in the work he creates. Through his confrontational video-animated dummies of the nineties that verbally attack, ask questions, and give orders, we are amusedly and bemusedly drawn into an active dialogue with TV. The dummies stir empathetic reaction as we project ourselves into them, and vice versa. In other earlier works Oursler combats passive viewing by rousing our imagination to fill in the blanks—fleshing out stick-figure protagonists and imagining scenarios that are verbally described rather than shown. In Optics he takes us through a personalized history of media technologies, beginning with the camera obscura, that explores its own process while telling its story.

The irony of using video to critique other media is not lost on Oursler, who is acutely aware of the mesmerizing powers of moving pictures as well as viewers’ disposition to be seduced by them. Exploiting the medium he knows is undeniably effective, he packages serious content in video designed to amuse and engross. Throughout his development he has acted as a persistent gadfly, entertaining us while pointing out how pathetically addicted we are to being entertained.

Single-Channel Videos

As a child growing up in Nyack, New York, in the 1960s, Oursler watched a lot of television. At some point in his teens he became aware of TV’s ability to induce emotional identification with its broadcast images. As Oursler says, “We bond with these electronic entities. As soon as we sit down before a movie or TV screen, we are willing to suspend disbelief and empathize with images we know are not real.”

While a student at the California Institute of the Arts, Oursler began experimenting with single-channel video in order to see just how far a character could be reduced and still induce empathy in the viewer. He wondered, “What constitutes a media entity? Would a moving dot with a voice attached be accepted as a real actor? What makes something animate?” The results of these experiments can be seen on several single-channel videos in which anything from a square of toilet paper to a spoon can function as the lead character. In Diamond (Head) (1979) (fig. 00), for example, the heroine is a crudely painted triangle of cardboard that a voice-over tells us “was beautiful as a young girl. Many men came calling on her.” We watch this “woman” find a mate and give birth to a “good son”—a small fetus-shaped balloon. Enacted largely by characters of string and cardboard, Diamond (Head), in Oursler’s funny/serious way, does cause us to suspend disbelief, engaging our emotions as it tells a tale of suburban malaise and its source in greed and lust. As the narrative takes us in, we involuntarily agree to imagine the triangle of cardboard as a beautiful woman.

Embracing an anti-aesthetic that was part of the late seventies and early eighties California all-media, “post-studio” movement and intended as a critique of Hollywood’s slick production values, Oursler’s early single-channel videos have a deliberately adolescent Wayne’s World, made-in-the-basement look. Like his California “funk art” contemporaries such as Mike Kelley, Raymond Pettibon, Jim Shaw, Paul McCarthy, Kim Dingle, and Charles Ray, Oursler early on made work that seemed anti-intellectual and sophomoric but that was theoretically and philosophically informed—usually by postmodern thinkers (Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Jean Baudrillard) and by the teachings of John Baldessari. By combining cool theory with material excess, these artists developed a counter-canon characterized by an aggressive search for taboo subject matter that was designed to disturb, baffle, and amuse. Recalling their dada precursors earlier in the century, they thrived on “defamiliarizing” the familiar and refuting commonly held assumptions regarding human nature and culture through shock and humor. For example, Paul McCarthy’s satire on abstract expressionism, in which the artist impersonating a tube of paint makes a disgusting mess, deflates illusions of the fifties and sixties by lampooning the so-called “heroism” of action painting. Along the same lines, Mike Kelley’s thrift-store crocheted stuffed animals in pornographic positions call into question cultural assumptions about both childhood and grandmotherly innocence. In a like manner, Oursler’s single-channel playlets, with their kitsch, pop, and folk references and funhouse sensibility wed to high art concepts, yield an anti-intellectual yet college-educated style analogous to the derisive humor of media icons such as David Letterman or Dennis Miller. 

Oursler’s videos with their miniaturized, hand-constructed sets colored with poster paint, their somnambulant voice-overs, and their disorienting sound evoke post-punk spectacles via German expressionism—The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari by way of Eraserhead, as one critic has noted. They celebrate the personal touch of the hand and are free of the hyperrealism that characterizes much tech-media. Clay and cardboard props as well as Oursler’s fingers, hands, and other body parts, painted and dressed, serve as characters and sets along with whatever objects he finds at hand. 

Oursler’s low-budget fakery is ingenious. For instance, water dripping from a plastic bag simulates the protagonist’s tears in the 1980The Loner (1980) (fig. 00), thereby stimulating our compassion; and a canister being sprayed serves as a sick man’s sneeze and enables us to feel his germs spreading. Two rolls of toilet paper, representing breasts, illustrate the toll time takes on beauty; as they unwind, the breasts fast-forward from firm to saggy. As artist Tony Conrad has noted, “The most startling thing that hangs in his work as a through theme [is] the way almost any tawdry bit of fluff can become the protagonist . . . ”  One striking prop from EVOL (1984) is the intertwined wire couple (fig. 00)—evol is love backwards—that inadvertently reprises Max Ernst’s 1927 painting One Night of Love (private collection, France). In both, the idea of two lovers’ bodies merging and mirroring each other is given visual form as a single line.

The Life of Phillis/Part II: Revenge (1977) (fig. 00) taps into modern tabloid sensationalism. In it Phillis, a mass-murderer played by a pair of fingers dressed in white go-go boots and short shorts, walks along a small-scale city block. She then waits in an alley for an unsuspecting victim to round the corner. There is a splat of dark paint on the wall, and we understand that Phillis has killed again. 

The single-channel videos (see Oursler interviews by Mike Kelley, p. 00, and Elizabeth Janus, p. 00) present layered and disconnected images and stream-of-consciousness voice-overs that create an interrupted and fragmented effect, echoing the modern person’s experience of fracture and dissonance. These multivalent sensations—largely an urban phenomenon earlier in the century—are now part of our channel-surfing culture. They mirror the contemporary electronically bombarded mind as private thoughts flit from one subject to another, overlap, and mingle with snippets of overheard conversation, newspaper headlines, and broadcast phrases. While maintaining a narrative structure (which he would later discard), Oursler in his early videos rejects linear logic in favor of this more experiential mode. He notes, “In the early tapes I was working to try to make something I knew people would understand. More of a voice inside your head, the way the brain sees pictures and arranges them. The mixture of memories, sounds, images, collaged together, which is really the way that I felt I thought—I’m looking at one thing and I hear a voice in my head say something else. I felt that those people [TV and movie producers] really underestimate how the brain works in terms of associations and understanding the world in simultaneous ways. I wanted to create anti-Hollywood work, in which the editing and the narrative worked in opposition to preconceptions of how films should operate. So I ignored the accepted structure of a beginning, middle and end with long shot, mid-shot and close up.” The resulting density may be one reason why, even though story lines are roughly followed, the single-channel tapes are often best viewed in five- to ten-minute stretches. 

Among the themes tackled in the single-channel videos are teenage loneliness, paranoia, sexual alienation and a confused sense of self; corporate/political control of the environment and society through chemical and media tampering; and an overall sense of the individual’s helplessness. Oursler notes, “I was trying during the seventies and early eighties to make things that were edgy or irritating or infantile. I was reacting against the concept of beauty and instead was interested in the juxtaposition and balancing of ideas and what might take hold in the mind of the viewer, so that he or she might have new thoughts or look at things differently.” These substantial and often dark intentions are masked and made palatable in the early tapes by Oursler’s off-the-wall humor and playfulness. A mix of black comedy, lurid cartoon, and paranoid theological melodrama—the latter a remnant of his Catholic schooling—characterizes his work from the late seventies and early eighties. 

Son of Oil

In 1982 the props used in the single-channel videos began to spill over onto real space, and Oursler’s first public installation, Son of Oil (fig. 00), was born. First shown at P.S.1, the contemporary art center in Queens, New York, and re-created for this exhibition, the work includes a thirty–foot canvas, painted to look like a blazing orange/yellow sunset or an oil field on fire, that serves as the background for cardboard gravestones and gas station pumps festooned with strings of mini-mart flags. This set also appears in the video, which features human actors in addition to the usual puppets and props. The video is projected on a monitor embedded in one of the grave markers. In part as a reaction to the previous generation of artists like Nam June Paik, Dara Birnbaum, and others who tried to convert the TV set itself into an art object, Oursler began manipulating “the video image to remove it one step from its physical origin into another space or dimension”—usually by reflection.

In free-associative fashion, Son of Oil links America’s romance with machines that drill or drive to sex, violence, money, power, corruption, and insanity: “Go faster, go deeper, joy ride, a dummy ride, a nightmare, just having too much fun. Oil, oil, oil, sex. It’s under pressure, and drugs—a hole is needed—are depressing—to relieve this vile, smelling fluid . . .” There is a mix of references to early 1980s American celebrities such as the Son of Sam killer, David Berkowitz; John Hinckley Jr.; and Howard Hughes (“the old driller himself”). Allusions to the La Brea tar pits and the prehistoric animals trapped there intersect with references to cows killed from drinking water polluted by oil refineries. When Oursler narrates, “Small as it may seem, a little nut is born into an important position, and without it everything grinds to a halt. . . . First generation was crude. Second generation was refined. . . . ,” he is ambiguous about whether he means the heir to an oil fortune or the machinery of drilling itself.

Son of Oil continues poetically to address abiding Ourslerian themes— the violation of the earth, the corrupting power of money, and the impotence of the individual against mega-corporations and conglomerates. It also hones his essentially unpretentious cinematic technique, with its background noise, cartoonish sets, and virtual absence of post-production editing. A Pirandellian shattering of narrative illusion—where we see the actors breaking “character” or hands popping in and out of the camera’s sight line to adjust props—enhances Oursler’s desire to implicate and involve the viewer. He continues to use this device today. In his recent work Optics a segment of the installation is a silent-film-type battle between an angel and a devil. In addition to the “narrative”—studio assistants Lilah Freedland and Tom Hines dressed as angel and devil wrestling like a good and bad conscience—the video includes footage of them putting on makeup, standing around waiting for direction, receiving a “high five” from Oursler, and other off-stage moments.

Oursler regards Son of Oil and his other video installations from the early eighties as a hybrid form hovering between conceptual and object-based artwork. Usually constructed from ephemeral materials like cardboard and poster paint, they “went right in the garbage after an exhibition was over.” Thus they would be reconfigured and changed in subsequent incarnations. For example, Son of Oil, while remaining essentially the same in theme and concept, was modified in later showings in Toronto, California, and now here. 

L7-L5

When Steven Spielberg’s film E.T.: The Extraterrestrial was released in 1982, the story of the lost little alien who befriends a ten-year-old boy touched millions, but it only irritated Oursler. It struck him as “a trite simplification” of more complex ideas circulating in the culture as expressed by science fiction writers such as Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, and Robert Heinlein. “I felt Hollywood was taking the public’s real interest in extraterrestrials and Disneyfying it. I had looked on science fiction as a new frontier where larger philosophic and metaphysical questions mingled with pop culture, a place where the imagination ran free, and so I was dismayed to see these notions codified, sentimentalized, and simplified in E.T. and the Star Wars films [1977, 1980, 1983]. With movies like Star Wars, the media was replacing fantasy with stereotypes. A lot of my interest in fringe- and subcultures comes out of wanting to give voice to people who function outside the mainstream, who break away from the pressure to conform to social norms. These people take culture into their own hands instead of having it spoon-fed to them by whatever streamlined cultural manufacturers are out there.” 

In part as a response to Hollywood’s treatment of the sci-fi genre, Oursler set about finding someone who had personal experience with outer space phenomena. He placed an ad in the Village Voice that read, “Looking for first-hand accounts of sightings of UFOs or meetings with aliens, $15/hour paid for your story.” As a result he met Gloria, a secretary who refused to be photographed, except for her hands, who told of her experiences with aliens. Oursler’s videotape documenting Gloria telling and drawing what she saw is the centerpiece of L7-L5, a room-size installation with four components, first exhibited at The Kitchen in New York in 1984 (fig 00). L7 is 1950s hipster slang for someone who’s “a square,” and L5 is the location between the earth and the moon where an object can be placed in perpetual orbit. The reference is that as our culture, like science fiction, is increasingly simplified and commodified, independent souls will more and more be like square pegs that cannot fit into round holes. “The piece is basically subversive,” Oursler notes. “It’s about people trying to be heard, understood, and respected who don’t fit the conventions of society.”

In a rudimentary model of a house, shards of glass reflect a TV monitor’s video image: Gloria’s hand drawing her bedroom as she describes waking up to two glowing figures, one very large, one gray (or dressed in gray), standing totally still (fig. 00). She gets out of bed and they dissolve into little squares of light before her eyes. She does not remember anything after that but wakes up in the morning and notices she has marks on her feet and a one-inch cut on the back of her leg. She goes on to describe other inexplicable puncture wounds and midnight apparitions of tall, broad-shouldered beings and hairy animal-like creatures in the weeks that follow, ending her account with the sighting from her bedroom window of a spaceship parked in the middle of her New York City street. Some weeks after these experiences, she sees the faces of two of the aliens in the newspaper; they turn out to be Houston serial killers who have tortured and murdered twenty-seven young boys. Gloria is convinced that these men are really aliens, but she knows her ideas sound crazy. 

What to make of this testimony? Oursler reserves judgment and leaves the decision to the viewer, who probably alternates between thinking Gloria is mentally ill (or at least delusional) and giving some credence to her story. This is in part because her matter-of-fact delivery, tinged with a Brooklyn accent, and her admission that her story sounds nuts, make her seem “normal.” 

In addition to the shattered glass house and Gloria, who represents the true believer—someone who has actually experienced aliens—L7-L5 has three other parts. Through a peephole in a cardboard casing resembling a video arcade game, the viewer can watch another reflected video (fig. 00) of children playing with spin-off toys from movies like Star Wars or The Return of the Jedi. Oursler was interested in tracking introjection by observing the ways children—signifying the unwitting consumers and interpreters of Hollywood’s science fiction—incorporate movie characters into their play. He found that they filter the films through their own sensibilities, personalizing the stories and imagining their own plots. Oursler notes, “Even though these movies are packaged in a conglomerate setting by studios, it’s fascinating to me how they are changed by the individual, reinterpreted by memory and re-formed into something singular and idiosyncratic. This experiment showed a positive kind of absorption or introjection of media roles.” 

The other elements of L7-L5 include a TV image reflected onto a starry night sky, and an uprooted, upside-down flagpole flying a red and green American flag in which a TV monitor replaces the field of stars (fig. 00). The monitor’s video contains a poetic parable—a battle between two colors enacted by Claymation figures: flesh, standing for humans; and green, standing for aliens. Formally, in L7-L5 Oursler frees the moving image from the monitor by reflecting it onto glass or water. In this way he seeks to take the image off the screen to create a sculpture of disembodied television.

Diamond: The Eight Lights

The third early installation in this exhibition, Diamond: The Eight Lights (fig. 00), was part of a larger piece entitled Spheres of Influence, which was commissioned in 1985 by the Centre Georges Pompidou MusŽe National d’Art Moderne in Paris. The city of Paris is the setting for this multi-channel work, which centers on a soap opera/crime story about the trials and revenge tactics of the rejected and lovelorn. “A lot of the work that I have been doing throughout my whole career,” notes Oursler, “has to do with media critique in one way or another. Traditional narratives are more about brainwashing than developing the brain or collaborating with the brain. In Diamond: The Eight Lights I looked at some of the clichŽs television uses—the soap opera, the sitcom, the cop show, the game show—these are all formulas that are repeated and which easily lead to a of type of addiction. In other words, I believe media clichŽs have addictive qualities.” 

In a critique within a critique, Oursler’s anti-narrative video for Diamond, with music by Edward Primrose, is reflected from two monitors onto some forty small mirrors set at different angles into a template in the shape of a diamond solitaire. From a distance these reflected video images look like the glinting facets of a brilliant gemstone. As we draw closer, a fractured drama is revealed. The video begins with an off-screen narration that parodies the pseudo-philosophical baritone introductions to soaps such as The Guiding Light or As the World Turns: “When a heart is broken, a mind snaps, and a shattered world comes tumbling down around it. Reckless, reckless, caprice—right up to the end you can’t hurt someone who no longer cares, but you can try. . . . If only there were a little guiding light.” From there we are taken on a psychedelic ride through the aftermath of the breakup of a romance. 

The rejected hero, who is gifted with paranormal/telekinetic powers, is able to visit his ex-lovers and experience their troubles. A series of mishaps ensue—he is falsely accused of murder and has no luck with a video dating service. In one scene a woman’s disembodied mouth announces in breathy French, “I have returned . . . I have waited to take my revenge with your death.” As others have noted, this isolated mouth recalls the character The Mouth in Samuel Beckett’s 1973 play, Not I. It is a motif that looks back to Oursler’s interest in reducing a character to its most expressive minimum, and it appears again in later works such as Joy Ride and Organ Play, where a detached mouth struggles, as Beckett’s does, to make sense of her experience.

Several other scenarios follow—including a “hate triangle” of three forlorn men walking backward in a circle—that relate to jealousy, gossip, and scandal. From this theme Oursler segues into a scene of a diamond mine, with a voice-over describing the unbearable working conditions, followed by an above-ground scene when we are told, “A symbol is needed, something rare and wonderful. And what better ambassador between now and the future than the versatile diamond. It is one of the strongest materials on earth, and when hewn by man it possesses extraordinary properties. The diamond’s ability to refract light into a spectral array of colors is highly aesthetic. Millions of people need these stones; they have attached a deep significance to them. But there is a conspiracy adrift on the winds of romance and finance.” This portion of the narrative is accompanied by the image of a woman’s hand sporting a giant cardboard “diamond” ring. In his typically splintered and imaginative way, Oursler points up the symbiotic relationship between the diamond industry and advertising—how together they manufacture desirability by promoting gems as status symbols and romantic collateral. 

Meanwhile, those unlucky in love, who live in “cold and dismal apartments” nursing “broken dreams,” turn to “the congregation at the TV show,” where orgasmic dreams are rated and rewarded for their entertainment value. Here Oursler sends up “confession television” and the phenomenon of people revealing on shows like Jerry Springer or Sally Jesse Raphael intimacies that would normally be kept private. A machine that projects the thoughts of contestants at the moment of orgasm illustrates in the extreme the notion that pornography is not the exhibition of sex but the exposure of our most personal thoughts. The philosopher Jean Baudrillard observes that obscenity occurs when everything is on display and nothing is private: “This opposition [between public and private space] is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media. . . . Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle [public space], no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication. . . . Unlike the organic, visceral, carnal promiscuity, the promiscuity that reigns over the communication networks is one of superficial saturation, of an incessant solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and protective spaces. 

In Diamond: The Eight Lights Oursler examines the phenomenon of television as surrogate family, friend, therapist, and confessor, a theme revisited later in the single-channel videos ONOUROWN,Toxic Detox, and The Watching. In Diamond he also probes just how impressionable or pregnable our consciousness and our most intimate zones are, and he dissects identity as something we adopt by mimicking what we see on our screens. As Oursler continues to explore the nature of our relationship to a synthetically created society, media introjection remains a central theme. 

Chemical Introjection: Kepone Drum and Molecular Mutation

In addition to exploring the idea of television as a drug, i.e. something addictive, Oursler in the eighties became interested in other ways our minds and bodies are altered, invaded, or colonized. Acknowledging the benefits as well as the liabilities of chemical advances, he noted, “There is a fine line between a compound that can end up being good or end up killing you.” One area that absorbed him was environmental pollution and by extension the toxic effects of a number of man-made chemicals. Here he introduced another kind of introjection—that of one substance permeating and altering another. In the course of researching, Oursler was inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), one of the earliest calls for public awareness and environmental action against the use of insecticides. 

In Kepone Drum (1989) (fig. 00), a fifty-five-gallon oil drum deceptively decorated with homey colonial American stencils of fruits and nuts leaks the deadly chemical kepone onto a simulated spill on the floor. This glass puddle serves as the screen for a video, projected from within the drum, that details the destruction of the town of Hopewell, Virginia, by kepone, a highly toxic chemical used as an insecticide that was produced there from 1966 until 1992. Noting that petrochemicals were redirected toward agricultural usage after being developed for the military during World War II, Oursler chronicles the breakdown of responsibility that resulted in the illness of thousands of Hopewell’s citizens, as well as in the ruin of the town’s fishing industry, the lifeblood of its economy. He reports as well how many townspeople resisted attempts to shut down the chemical factory in an effort to save their jobs and sustain the financial boom that kepone’s production had created for the local economy. 

Oursler’s proclivity for research results here in a mini-documentary grounded in factual data and primary source material. Against an Ourslerized video backdrop of crude props and screaming heads, a printed text scrolls the information that in 1961 “kepone was demonstrated to be carcinogenic in male and female rats.” In 1964 “experiments with quail show ‘heavy’ death rate, tremors” and other symptoms of poisoning. Yet despite knowing it was highly dangerous, Allied Chemical Corporation began manufacturing kepone at its Hopewell plant in 1966. In 1974 researchers concluded that kepone “interferes with the reproduction of birds and mammals.” That same year Life Science Products, a subcontractor of Allied Chemical, produced 3,000 pounds of kepone per day in Hopewell.

In general, residents relied on the government and Allied Chemical to protect them, but like the sick and devastated townspeople of Woburn, Massachusetts, chronicled in Jonathan Haar’s A Civil Action, their faith was misplaced. It did not take into account corporate greed or the arrogance and irresponsibility of regulating agencies and individual specialists who lacked the knowledge to anticipate and contain kepone’s toxicity. As one kepone victim told his doctor, “I never believed that the government and state would allow something like this to occur. I believed them when Life Science told us it would not hurt us . . . . I went back to work.” Such workers later suffered severe chest pains, abnormal eye movements, disorientation, and severe tremors known as the kepone shakes. In references to colonial America—the tape shows a demented fife and drum corps, an allusion to Archibald Willard’s famous 1876 painting, The Spirit of 1776—the artist seems to draw a line between the drive for economic independence that galvanized colonists and the drive for short-term profits that motivates practitioners of the free enterprise system; it’s as though he asks, When did America move from a country of idealists to one of self-interested cynics? 

Molecular Mutation (1987–89) (fig. 00) can be viewed as the other side of the “individual versus corporation” coin. Like the tale of David and Goliath run amok, the narratives relayed within this piece tell of individuals terrorizing corporate monoliths. Three video interviews are set into glass globes that are part of a diagram of a molecule mutating after being struck by ultraviolet rays. Two of the interviewees recount, in English and Japanese, incidents in which multimillion-dollar corporations were damaged by rumors of product tampering. One woman describes the Tylenol scandal that forced Johnson & Johnson to spend vast sums on repackaging after their painkillers were repeatedly tainted. Another person tells of the Gulico scare, when candy was contaminated as part of a plot to bring down the stock price of the Japanese candy giant. The third account looks into drug introjection and the way media can be personalized. A narrator tells of a friend who viewed The Exorcist while on LSD and believed that Satan moved off the screen to sit beside him in the movie theater. This person remained tormented by the devil until he was given another dose of LSD and taken to see 2001: A Space Odyssey, which returned him to “normal.”

Originally part of a larger installation entitled Spillchamber, Molecular Mutation merges Oursler’s interests in toxicity, the individual pitted against corporate might, and the potentially destructive nature of rumor and legend. An insidious type of introjection takes place when trusted mass-marketed products are infiltrated and tainted. Similarly, rumor itself is viewed as a poisoning agent, and language as a potential means for destruction and mutation. As Philip K. Dick, one of Oursler’s favorite science fiction authors wrote, “The basic tool for the manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words.”

As the progeny of literary forbears, Oursler has a healthy respect for the power of words. His grandfather Fulton Oursler Sr. wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told, and both paternal grandparents (his grandmother was Grace Perkins) authored books and screenplays. His father, Fulton Oursler Jr., was an editor at Reader’s Digest for thirty-four years and now edits a magazine on angels. Tony writes most of the scripts for his single-channel and projected videos. In addition to writing essays, poetry, and dialogue, he often composes, surrealist-style, from found material such as phrases from a television show, questions from a psychological test, or a book’s index. An indication of his part scholarly/part whimsical style is presented in his optical timeline (p. 00).

Part II

Ground Zero

As Oursler’s video techniques became more elaborate, he began to introduce human actors into increasingly complicated sets. This development is illustrated by EVOL (1984), which Oursler calls his Busby Berkeley video for its relatively slick production values, and Joy Ride, a 1988 collaboration with Constance DeJong. But he felt he had taken creating sets and props for his videos as far as he could and was ready to move in a new direction.

The single-channel video ONOUROWN (1990), made in collaboration with the artist Joe Gibbons, is without fabricated backgrounds or painted props and is basically an acted film. In it and its sequel, Toxic Detox (1992), Oursler and Gibbons play two delusional paranoids who are prematurely released from a mental institution due to budget cutbacks. Forced to live on their own for the first time, they make a video diary “about our struggle to exist in a crazy society.” This footage, shot in an auto-documentary style, describes their encounter with real and imagined threats such as toxic Halloween candy, simultaneous castration fantasies, and murder plots. Oursler’s fear of chemical contaminants plays out in a supermarket scene in which Joe injects poison into a carton of yogurt and then reads aloud the frightening ingredients on a package of candy (fig. 00). 

Later, in a scene that brings to mind William Wegman’s 1974 video Spelling Lesson, Gibbons lectures his dog Woody (Oursler’s dog in real life) about wasting time (fig. 00). Woody listens intently as Joe asks, “Did I ever talk to you about death? How old are you, four or five? You’re getting on in years. You’re feeling good now and you think it’s always going to be like this. But you’ve got to make the most of it. You sleep too much. You need a project.”

While Joe scolds Woody, Oursler is shown making phone calls trying to get a job. When asked if he could hold the line, he answers desperately, “No, I can’t wait. I need a job and I need it right away!” Thoroughly unqualified and clueless, he tries for a position advertised as “a chance to meet and greet the elite.” But when told it’s a receptionist position, he balks, saying, “I was looking more for a business position.”

Other delusions follow. The two begin to suspect each other—Tony sees the Underwood Devil in Joe’s face, and Joe asks his television shrink, “Should I kill Tony? Should I put him back in the hospital?” In the end, what they think to be personal counseling is actually a videotaped, platitude-laden pep talk from their doctor, played by artist/composer Tony Conrad.

ONOUROWN revisits familiar Ourslerian themes such as psychological malfunction, fear of chemical contaminants, and the phenomenon of television as surrogate family, friend, and therapist. In it and in Toxic Detox Oursler uses a standard narrative structure to film mental psychosis and neurosis. Instead of the fragmentation of his earlier videos, he uses a straight narrative to present fractured characters. 

After ONOUROWN and Toxic Detox, Oursler felt he had gone as far as he could with single-channel video. He found himself at an artistic impasse, which he calls his personal “ground zero” in terms of image making. “I had a meltdown. The natural next step after almost feature-length videos like EVOL and ONOUROWN was to make movies. But by 1991 I decided that I didn’t want to do that. Instead, I turned to sculpture and asked myself the biggest clichŽ in the art world—How am I going to make a figure? It was a bit overwhelming, but I had been prepared for this challenge by the whole learning process and experimentation that went into the previous ten to fifteen years of making videotapes, where I dealt with the issue of what constituted a figure or really the spirit of a figure.” 

Instead of looking to classical art history, Oursler turned to folk and outsider art. “I had found this beautiful book of photographs of New England scarecrows, and that did it. . . . So I went to thrift stores and bought suits and tried a hundred different ways of manipulating them. . . .They were very Frankensteinian. I was stuffing and sewing figures, but the problem was that the elegance and movement inherent in the suits was convincing, but when I put faces to them, they became too static (fig. 00). So the first figures had no heads. I made them as surveillance pieces. There were these headless figures in the gallery and one had a lens coming out of its fly like a penis, another was draped over a monitor that was a closed-circuit system with camera. They were about power situations; one figure was watching and had the power of the camera. Another was seeing itself on the monitor. I did things like that until I discovered the miniature liquid crystal diode (LCD) projectors.” 

The advent of the small video projectors led to a breakthrough for Oursler that enabled him to animate his scarecrow effigies and finally free the TV image from the monitor. The projection figures were uncannily convincing as living beings and entered viewers’ minds much as TV characters do, but more effectively, because instead of being confined to a box, they inhabited real space. The effigies consisted of a stuffed doll anywhere from ten inches tall to life size, suspended from a tripod or laid out on the floor, with a little projector a couple of feet away that throws a videotaped image onto the effigy’s face. Oursler soon realized that his video creatures had enormous potential for arousing empathy—a goal that had engaged him from the beginning. 

Crying Doll (1993, Collection of Metro Pictures) is Oursler’s first experiment with this hybrid form that is both a physical object and a media object. He began by searching for someone who could cry indefinitely on command, and his friend the composer Stephen Vitiello suggested the actress Tracy Leipold, who had studied at the Actors Institute in New York and worked with the Wooster Group, a Fluxus-style free-form theater collective. She and Oursler developed an immediate rapport, and over time she has become his most frequent “lead.” 

The first experiments were what Oursler terms “sublingual”: they projected Leipold’s face in a continuous, never-ending loop of crying, sighing, growling, laughing—i.e., emotions expressed without words. Oursler says, “I wanted to just take the most potent, most manipulative moment out of a narrative and put it in video to see if an audience would be affected by it out of context. I was trying to create an experience that bypasses language and directly penetrates the subconscious.” He also notes, “The emotive works came first. For me these works became the embodiment of the link between media and the psychological states it is capable of provoking—empathy, fear, arousal, anger.”

Earlier, in his single-channel videos, Oursler had dropped the use of narrative, replacing it with a more fragmented and nonlinear structure in order to pursue the cataloguing of emotional states. Now, for his first projected videos, he further mined this vein, testing how we react to someone (on videotape) in distress—especially a tiny, helpless, and suffering figure. How long can we watch? How do we move into feelings of empathy and then out of them? How do we react when we come upon extreme emotional states but have no context or story with which to make sense of them? Oursler notes, “What makes the Crying Doll effective is its superhuman ability to never stop weeping, which in turn becomes horrifying for the viewer, who eventually must turn away. It is that moment of turning away which the empathy test is all about.” 

While the single-channel videos combine visual inventiveness with pop cultural and sociopolitical content, their convoluted structures and hermetic narratives can try the viewer’s attention span. Oursler had come to realize that most people are not willing to stand or sit before experimental video installations in the same way they do for the mesmerizing images presented by commercial television and film. The non-narrative video-animated sculptures, which are without beginning, middle, or end, allow visitors to engage and disconnect from a piece at will. 

The projected dummies were an immediate popular as well as critical success, making Oursler’s work familiar to a much larger audience. Requiring less viewing stamina and patience than the earlier videos, they tapped into the fascination we innately feel for puppets, dolls, ventriloquist’s dummies, and automata. Such mannequins provoke doubts about “whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not in fact be animate.” Through the uncanny simulation of life they surprise, captivate, and frighten. The uncanny, usually defined as “fear caused by intellectual uncertainty,” is what most viewers of Oursler’s “dysfunctional peanut gallery” experience as the mental rug is pulled out from under them; first they are unsure whether his creatures are living or not, then they subliminally question what it means to be alive in the first place. 

Oursler’s video personae are part of a long tradition of automatons, dolls, and dummies from both the high art and popular sectors. Medieval polychrome statues of saints that could weep, and eighteenth-century automatons that could write are but two examples. Dada and surrealist practitioners such as Marcel Duchamp and Hans Bellmer capitalized on the fetishistic potential of dolls, while waxworks and store mannequins aimed at verisimilitude. The explosion of artists today who use human surrogates—as opposed to classical representations of the human figure—is probably a response to hyperreal technologies such as virtual reality, cyber sex, cryonics, and even plastic surgery. Artists such as Charles Ray, Robert Gober, Kiki Smith, and Cindy Sherman, as well as Oursler, seem to be inquiring into society’s desire for artificial transformation and its influence on our culture as we approach the twenty-first century. Often their investigations yield hybrid creatures—alien monsters that are the strange fruit of scientific technology coupled with erotic fantasy.

The Watching

The Watching (fig. 00) was originally shown in 1992/93 on five landings of the stairwell at the Fridericianum, as part of the international art exposition Documenta IX, in Kassel, Germany. An enigmatic and complex work, it uses both the earlier headless surveillance effigies and the new LCD projection technology. It takes as its theme the movie industry’s preoccupation with sex and violence. Oursler has noted, “Our culture is obsessed with the whole horror-sex-violence thing. It’s a weird form of refinement, like bonsai; it has a ritual dimension. Whether the media is performing a positive service for the public or whether we are involved in some kind of sick cycle, I don’t know. But we love to watch it, and I’m obsessed by the fact that we love to watch it.” The Watching not only is about film—it actually unfolds cinematically. As the viewer walks up or down the staircase, the point of view changes, and each element of the piece is gradually revealed. 

The two main protagonists in The Watching are movie insiders. F/X Plotter, the main male character—suspended close to the ceiling (fig. 00)—is a special effects expert who describes the plot of a high-tech sci-fi thriller, pausing to relate the way each gruesome effect is achieved. Sex Plotter (fig. 00), the main female character, is a set decorator/art director for a different film—a generic lover-comes-back-from-the-grave romance. Her “shrunken head” contrasts with F/X Plotter’s overblown one, and as Oursler has noted, she “appears to be melting like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.” She also owes something to the distorted figures of Picasso’s drawings from the teens and twenties, in which a figure’s large legs seem to be a city block away from its pin-size head. As these characters describe in uninflected tones fictional movies and how certain effects are achieved, the viewer imagines each scene and fills in the blanks of the sketchy plot lines. This conceit for The Watching grew out of Oursler’s feeling that it is often more interesting to hear someone tell about a movie than actually to see it. Again the idea funnels into his desire for our relation to media to be interactive instead of passive. He says of the project, “When a viewer visualizes scenes in his/her head, a real collaboration takes place. I felt my job is not spoon-feeding images but having the viewer do some of the work.” A reaction to the industrial monolith of the film industry is also implied in the personalized, idiosyncratic description of the films. 

Other elements of this complicated piece conjure a variety of movie tropes: science fiction aliens in Instant Dummies (fig. 00) (add water, and these foot-long glass capsules stuffed with scrunched-up clothes, a wig, and a dildo look as if they might expand into synthetic humans); mob or horror movie murders in Bucket of Blood (fig. 00); and high tech robotics in the mechanical Effigy Eye that “watches” a movie of a burning figure projected onto the wall in the shape of a cross (fig. 00). Additional components include Model Release Forms, painted on fabric in English and Japanese (fig. 00). Using the language of standard legal documents, Oursler indicates that in signing away the rights to their images, models and actors may be signing away more of their identity than they bargain for. Totem (fig. 00) consists of swaths of red thrift-store clothing hanging twenty feet from the atrium crosswalk. Like the pile of shoes, clothes, and bric-a-brac in “The Place Where Lost Things Go” in Fantastic Prayers, the 1999 CD-ROM by Oursler, DeJong, and Vitiello, these used garments bring to mind specific eras and memories. In this case, their redness evokes blood and lust in keeping with The Watching’s sex/violence theme, while their 1940s and 1950s provenance evokes the Black Mask–era detective fiction of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Reflecting Faces, two TVs painted silver, provide reverse images of three circles that read as a rudimentary face, indicating “an empathetic feedback bond.” In Kassel a television monitor on the top floor was wired to a surveillance device on a lower level that allowed users to watch, listen, and talk to visitors without their knowledge. A similar surveillance system, part of another piece entitled Judy, serves the same function in this installation. 

Watching and being watched are dominant themes in Oursler’s work. The hypnotic viewing of TV or cinema, when we passively absorb what is on a screen, contrasts with active viewing through surveillance devices, when we observe or are observed by someone screened from sight. In Oursler’s paranoid world view, both states may threaten individuality through fostering conformity. He not only questions what is being programmed into our brains while we sit mesmerized by moving images but, conversely, asks questions about who is monitoring our lives—finding out how we spend our money, what our political views are, the kind of medical care we seek, and so forth. The danger of a computerized police state becomes more of a possibility as technology is ever more able to penetrate our lives. Thus, both watching and being watched constitute potential intrusions into our collective psyche and individual identity. Big Brother, in the form of an omnipresent surveillance monitor in George Orwell’s novel 1984, was always watching, and Oursler brings home the point that in certain ways this vision of the future has come to pass. Through the panoptic technologies created in the last half century, we may have unwittingly sacrificed a critical human need—privacy. 

The Watching however, is not a dreary discourse about the evils of the media. Instead it possesses a Halloween mock-goulishness that mixes fun with creepiness. Typically for Oursler, elements of play and creative childlike activity are used to produce a cinematic tableau that poses open-ended questions as it involves participants in media issues. As Regina Cornwell has written, The Watching “allows for the play of the imagination, puzzling together the props, sometimes under the watching eye of a camera. . . . What unfolds in its space does so over the course of our own time and in whichever order we choose to attack it. Oursler gives us no answers and allows us to construct our own scripts from the props and fragments, as well as the space in between, which he makes available to us.”

Keep Going

In the life-size effigy Keep Going (1995) (fig. 00), Oursler continues to explore the idea of suggestibility in the form of a character describing situations that the viewer then recreates in his/her mind. A mismatched plaid suit hanging limply on a tripod provides the armature for a pillow head onto which is projected an unscripted videotaped performance by Tony Conrad. Using facial expression and lens distortion to great effect, he takes on the role of a megalomaniacal Hollywood-style movie director who constantly changes his mind while barking out impossible commands. In the space of twenty minutes he calls for an erupting volcano, a wheat field on fire, electronic hail, an alien landing, a train/bus crash, alpine horn music emanating from trees, and the script line “rhubarb, rhubarb, rhubarb.” In quick succession our brains conjure this series of incongruous and ridiculous scenarios. For example, Conrad—his eyebrows shooting upward in perpetual alarm or consternation—orders the romantic leads to kiss. As we begin to visualize this, he screams, “No, not each other! Kiss the thing!” What are we to visualize now? 

Conrad is brilliant at lampooning American filmmakers’ addiction to pyrotechnic special effects—after the volcanic eruption is not sufficiently stupendous, he tries a train/bus crash and an alien landing. Nothing seems to meet his grandiose expectations, and he maniacally alternates between poking and stroking his crew—“We have to get some energy going today, people! There’s nothing happening here. . . . You incompetent boobs, I’m going to fire you all. . . . No, I take it back. You people are good. You stick with me, and I know I change my mind. I love you . . . .”

With Keep Going, Oursler moves further toward his goal of active audience involvement. At times viewers have been seen attempting to carry out Conrad’s directives. Children in particular have responded to his commands to “Be quiet!” “Don’t look at me,” and “You, yes, I’m talking to you, move to the left.” Humor, a constant in Oursler’s work, dominates this piece, which holds audiences captive through its playful hilarity.

Six

Sustaining the watched/watching theme are six oversized eyeballs projected onto white spheres about fifteen inches in diameter; these eyes hang on wire at varying heights from the ceiling or rest in a pile on the floor (fig. 00 ). They dart and stare, disconcertingly blank and without emotion. At first people generally feel discomfited, even violated, by the giant eyeballs gazing at them. It takes closer inspection to realize they are watching not us but TV. The reflection of a televised image can be seen in each of the eyes, further convoluting the watched/watching theme and creating “a self-referencing cyclical loop.” As often happens with his trial and error method of creating, Six (1996) turned out differently than Oursler expected. “Eyes are always talked about as being the mirror of the soul, and I expected them to be expressive. But when you tape just the eye, disembodied from other facial features, it is totally blank. It looks cold and reptilian. Seen alone, the eye comes across as a light-measuring organ devoid of emotion, like a camera.”

Each of the six eyes is watching a movie having to do with dissociative identity disorder (DID)—formerly known as multiple personality disorder (MPD)—which some experts believe may be media-influenced. The Three Faces of Eve, released in 1957, is reflected in one eye, the made-for-television movie Sybil in another, and Dšppelganger in a third. Oursler has always been interested in mental illness. Multiple personality disorder struck him as the perfect mirror of our channel-surfing culture, in which morphing via clothing, hairstyle, and plastic surgery is a commonplace of modern life. As Oursler has said, “MPD was a metaphor for a postmodern persona. . . . If you look at the works of Cindy Sherman or the career of David Bowie, or pick up a tabloid newspaper featuring stories of repressed memory and ritual abuse, or pick up the remote control . . . and switch from station to station, you begin to understand the ubiquity of MPD.” 

Six, which examines the feedback system of seeing and processing imagery, prompted Oursler to further research optics and the history of media structures, beginning with the camera obscura. This investigation into the mechanics of reproducing reality continues in Optics, the most recent piece on view in this exhibition. 

Judy

After interviewing Gloria for L7-L5 in 1984, Oursler gradually became interested in studying mental disorders. Judy, initially shown at the Kunstverein in Salzburg, Germany, in 1994, was Oursler’s first work to grow out of his research into dissociative identity disorder, and it remains among his most powerful works to date. DID or MPD is a psychosis (some say pseudo-psychosis) diagnosed in victims who claim to have experienced extreme violent, sexual, or psychological trauma, usually in childhood. These people develop other personalities or alter egos to protect their “core self.” Although the installation is a composite of many cases Oursler studied, Judy is the name of an actual MPD sufferer who reported, “I only experienced isolation as I flew above the room, watching below me as the invaders tortured the bodies of the other children I had created so that I could survive.”

Arranged on a diagonal in the gallery, a feminine but trashy-looking flowered dŽcor contains a number of characters or “alters” (short for alternative personalities) that express and recount the trauma that caused Judy’s personality to split (fig. 00). The benign flowered fabrics belie the violence and terror that takes place in the domestic setting. The trail of gaudy floral fabrics, including a pile of clothes, a curtain, a couch, and an armchair, works both as a transition between the personalities and as a passageway into Judy's world.

First encountered, hung from a tripod, is the victimized Horrerotic Doll (fig. 00), a fifteen-inch-high stuffed effigy which, terrified, screams endlessly. Similar to Crying Doll but a step up in development, the Horrerotic Doll differs in that she is not totally “sublingual,” or nonverbal. Using the expressive face of Tracy Leipold, the doll-sized figure looks around in abject fear of unseen dangers, sometimes contorting her face in utter torment while she screams and wails laments such as “Oh no! No, not that! Oh God! Noooo! Stop!” It does not matter that the means of animation, the projector, is in full view; she is still convincing as a suffering being, and serves as an empathy test in her own right. Below her lies a tiny doll’s dress that seems to stand for Judy’s diminished self. Next along the diagonal line is a large pile of shapeless clothing, perhaps suggesting an amorphous identity. 

A flowered yellow curtain separates this group of three from the next section. Here a bouquet of artificial flowers is attached to a tripod onto which is projected the contemptuous face of The Boss, also enacted by Leipold (fig. 00). With her mouth projected over the stamen of a lily, this alter takes on the persona of an abuser who shames and defiles while yelling orders and threats such as: “Eat this! Eat this now! . . . I got you, you little bitch. I said take it off. . . . You disgust me. God, you are stupid, you’re an idiot. You’re a worthless piece of shit.” After moaning and groaning as if experiencing an orgasm, The Boss threatens: “Don’t tell anyone. Remember what I said would happen. I’ll just do it again and no one will believe you. You can’t tell anybody. I’m going to stick your head in the toilet again. I’m going to get the hairbrush again. I’m going to stick the hairbrush up your ass—you know I will.” After about twenty minutes of such chilling vilification, the tape loops so that the torrent of abuse is relentless and unending. 

Next to The Boss under a raised couch lies Fuck You (fig. 00), a deflated figure that emits a constant stream of obscenities. Its large “pillow” head, attached to a limp pile of flowered clothing, mutters angrily but powerlessly, trapped by the couch, the lack of a body, the inability to move, and the projector that is its existence. The incongruity of being accosted by a figure that is at once aggressive and impotent makes the encounter both amusing and disquieting. It is analogous to the urban experience of coming upon a ranting homeless person. As in that situation we must decide, should we be afraid? should we try to help? or should we just walk on—the usual choice.

Next to the couched Fuck You stands Fetal Figure (fig. 00), a headless scarecrow effigy wearing a garish, hot pink muumuu onto whose belly is projected the nude figure of a writhing woman in a fetal position, turning and twisting as if in a pool of amniotic fluid. She suggests that even in utero Judy was distressed and traumatized. Oursler’s use of an adult figure is especially poignant, poetically suggesting that Judy’s unfortunate fate or future was determined before her birth. Hanging from the ceiling above Fetal Figure, a pair of little girl’s flowered leggings is suspended upside down. They bring to mind one of the tortures Hattie Dorsett inflicted on her daughter, recounted in Flora Rheta Schreiber’s book Sybil. According to the book, which some believe is apocryphal, Mrs. Dorsett would fill Sybil’s bladder with water and then string her up by her feet.

The final element in Judy is a remote-control camera hidden in the body of an effigy situated outside the gallery (fig. 00). Viewers are invited to manipulate the hidden camera—in effect a surveillance system—and talk through the speakers to unsuspecting museum visitors. Termed “a simulacra system” by Oursler, this device tends to bring out “hidden personalities” in its operators who, screened from sight, often jeer, harass, and insult those in the camera’s view. The fact that users act in ways outside their normal behavior demonstrates that we all have alternative sides to our personalities that only await the right opportunity to emerge.

In Judy, Oursler again seeks to engage viewers as active participants in his art. His empathy-inducing dolls and effigies go one step beyond the figures in The Watching or Keep Going, who relate narratives that viewers can visualize. Upping the ante, he elicits in Judy a visceral response to the suffering or abusive video-animated characters. Moreover, the remote-control surveillance device is entirely viewer-activated, providing a game-like, hands-on experience that is still rare in a museum setting. But on a deeper level the hidden camera and microphone encourage firsthand insight into the mechanism of personality change.

MMPI (Red), Let’s Switch, and Side Effects

MMPI (Red), Let’s Switch, and Side Effects are three other projected-video sculptures that deal with dissociative identity disorder. Oursler responded to the phenomenon of someone’s being able to shift from one character to another in part because it fed into his long-standing interest in demonic possession, paranormal states, androids, and other identity introjection themes embodied in horror and sci-fi genres. Some of these fascinations, such as possession, can be traced back to Oursler’s Catholic upbringing, with its emphasis on mysticism and the supernatural. Since there is a debate within the psychological community about whether or not DID/MPD is a media-generated disorder, his interest in the illness also ties into his obsession with probing the way humans are connected to media systems. Oursler has come to the conclusion that TV and film do not cause but can stimulate or amplify natural human tendencies to create alter egos. These tendencies are in effect “internal mirrors of media structures” and have the potential to spawn multiple personalities.

Since the premiere of the film The Three Faces of Eve in 1957, reported cases of multiple personalities have skyrocketed from a handful to thousands. More startling, the number of alters or personalities identified by DID sufferers has also increased, mirroring the proliferation of channels offered to television viewers. Whereas Eve had three alters, today it is not uncommon for those afflicted with dissociative identity disorder to report fifty or more; the switching from one persona to another invites comparison to channel surfing. Further, these added personalities often echo television “types”—another example of media introjection in which identity is absorbed from TV or film. Oursler quotes the philosopher Ian Hacking, “The alters are typically stock characters with bizarre but completely unimaginative character traits, each one a stereotype, or one might say TV-type, who readily contrasts with all the other characters.”

Oursler does not necessarily see multiple personalities as a disorder; rather he is open to viewing MPD as an alternate model for the mind and behavior—a survival mechanism that allows for change and variety. Along these lines, he notes that The Three Faces of Eve can be viewed today as a proto-feminist film, in which Eve White, a bored farm housewife, is able to break out and enjoy life only through her “bad girl” alter, Eve Black. Thus, dissociated identities can be liberating in addition to reflecting our nonlinear, multi-informational age. 

Oursler’s early interest in multiple personalities was fueled by a copy of the Minneapolis Multiphasic Personality Inventory owned by a friend. The MMPI is a test for dissociative identity disorder, and in MMPI (Red) (1996) Oursler recites its contents in a videotape projected onto a seventeen-inch doll in red pants and top whose head is wedged under a red chair (fig. 00). People taking the test are asked to judge the statements true or false, but Oursler delivers the lines in such a way that one is not sure whether he is actually making statements about himself or asking questions. Spoken in a monotone with about fifteen seconds between each line, some of the forty-four true/false statements are: “I’m a moody person.” “Loud noises scare me.” “I never remember things the way others do.” “I like to chat with strangers.” “Trouble seems to follow me.” “I’m a happy person.” “For me to succeed, others must fail.” “I would describe my family as a disaster.” “Sometimes I cannot tell the difference between my daydreams and reality.”

Oursler says about the MMPI test, “What I enjoy about the attempts to codify the human mind, as in the MMPI test, is that it offers a direct way to engage viewers, which is always a goal of mine.” Listening to the questions, visitors can’t help wondering if they are passing or failing the test. At the same time, the little doll, with its deadpan delivery and off-base facial expressions, is both funny and touching. 

The same is true for the twin stuffed dolls that stand closely together, one with its arm around the other’s shoulder, in Let’s Switch (1996) (fig. 00). The flowered clothes key us into their gender—in Oursler’s iconography, floral patterns are for females, while checked, plaid, or monochrome clothing indicates males. Tracy Leipold plays both characters, literally a split personality, but they also bring to mind Persona, the 1966 Ingmar Bergman film in which two characters, played by Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, switch identities. “I’m ready, bring on the pain,” says one. “Shut your face, quiet!” replies the second. Rolling their eyes at each other and making faces, they continue the verbal volley of non sequiturs, and at some point in the dialogue they do seem to swap mannerisms and tone of voice. “I’d like to rip the wall down between us,” says one. “I have parts of me I’ve never been introduced to,” counters the other. They continue alternating: “Together we don’t even make one person.” “Let’s switch.” “I’ve got big plans for us, okay? Stick with me.” “Your mind is my playground. I mean, your body.” “If you want me to help, tell me all your sorrows. After all, I created them.” “How can you tell the difference between me and you?” Some lines in the script, which was written by Oursler, derive from questions on the MMPI test: “I have to do these things to others to feel good about me.” “I come out when there is a nasty job to be done.” “I’m in no way crazy.”

Oursler’s little “Mini Me” dolls are endearingly cute and less scary than the larger effigies. Sitting atop tiny handless and footless bodies, their faces—bereft of hair, ears, and neck—are affectingly homely. With these smaller video-animated sculptures Oursler deliberately taps into the tender feelings of care and protection that dolls traditionally arouse. Even though the little dolls can have nasty personalities, the empathetic bond that he is always looking to stimulate is readily forged between them and the viewer. 

The larger-scale Side Effects (1998) (fig. 00) has no such charm. In this more complex work, Oursler orchestrates a single fifteen-minute tape of Tracy Leipold’s face onto five fiberglass “heads” of varying sizes that are attached to a metal candelabra-like armature. The projections are different colors so that two of the heads are red, two yellow, and one green. The challenge for Oursler was editing the tape so that five different emotions are enacted simultaneously. With its angry and anxious faces, darting eyes, gnashing teeth, and voices talking all at the same time, viewers may well feel like they are in a psychiatric ward. But Oursler’s initial impulse was to make visible an interior mental state—i.e., to show through head size the pecking order among one person’s multiple personalities. Indeed, the sculpture conveys what it might be like inside a DID sufferer’s brain where five alters bicker and vie for dominance. 

The piece is open-ended enough to accommodate other interpretations. One viewer was reminded of what happens before going to sleep, when some thoughts elbow out others as they flutter through semi-consciousness. Another person conjured a room of TVs and radios, all tuned to different stations, where only snatches of sentences could be discerned. 

Leipold varies her delivery in Side Effects so that her voice changes from high to low, slow to fast, calm to agitated. Since there is only one tape that is spliced to overlap, the tendency of viewers to try to peg one face to a certain voice and characterization is thwarted. For example, the high, babyish voice may be thought suitable for one of the smaller heads, but at times a larger head will speak that way. 

While more complicated in this sense than the single-face effigies, in another way Side Effects demonstrates Oursler’s evolution toward a more pared-down aesthetic. Instead of an effigy in limp drapery, the five video-animated heads float free, without drapery or bodies. The plain metal scaffold links the work to 1960s minimalism. In its “molecular,” diagram-like form it compares with Oursler’s chemical mutation pieces such as Molecule Spectre and Molecular MŽlis. Reinforced by its drug-related title, Side Effects combines two of Oursler’s interests—chemically induced abnormalities and psychological ones. Introjection is again the connecting thread in terms of substances or influences that can penetrate and alter our environment as well as our physical and mental selves. 

Getaway #2

Getaway #2 (1994) (fig. 00), perhaps Oursler’s best-known projection sculpture, epitomizes the character that tries ineffectually to assert itself to an indifferent world. With her pillow head trapped under the corner of a single-bed mattress and a floral bed jacket and pajama bottoms spread out on the floor behind her, it is no wonder this figure mutters and rants discontentedly. The head is comprised of the projected video image of Tracy Leipold’s androgynous face appropriately squashed where cheek meets floor. 

Art critic Peter Schjeldahl describes the work: “The face 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, as is understandable under the circumstances.” Schjeldahl goes on to describe his reaction, “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.” This is precisely the reaction Oursler hopes for.

Getaway #2, with Judy, MMPI (Red), and Let’s Switch, marks the next step in the development of Oursler’s video-animated sculptures, a transition from sublingual or nonverbal emoting to scripted delivery. In Getaway #2 the figure demonstrates a form of paranoia. She brings to mind the kind of obsessive inner monologue exhibited by urban neurotics who often punctuate their mumbling to themselves with lashing out at hapless passers-by. People laugh at this piece in part because of the odd (uncanny) sensation it elicits: knowing that the head under the mattress isn’t alive but somehow feeling it is. Also, there is something sadly funny about helpless characters who live on the edge of nonbeing, asking useless questions, powerlessly giving orders, and threatening violence; the result is a strange mix of farce and tragedy. Oursler shares with twentieth-century writers such as James Joyce and Samuel Beckett a feeling for the downtrodden, eccentric, and forsaken whom they nonetheless manage to make funny even as we feel pity and woe. They all are what the scholar Robert Bell calls “jocoserious”—humorous, but with a dark twist. As a character in Beckett’s Endgame says, “The funniest thing in the world is human unhappiness.”

Insomnia (1996) (fig. 00) is another small doll, this time with a green cast to its face, that arouses laughter and sympathy. Lying on its side, princess-and-the-pea-like atop a pile of six pillows covered with worn, flowered pillowcases, the tiny fourteen-inch dummy complains, between stream-of-consciousness meandering, about not being able to fall asleep. This scenario, which most viewers can identify with, accurately mirrors the frustration and panic interwoven with fragmented silly or scary thoughts that often accompany sleeplessness. Wearing avocado green and lavender floral pajamas, the doll, once again animated by Tracy Leipold, opines, “I’ll never get to sleep. I’ll be here forever and ever and ever and ever and ever . . . ” These phrases, which are repeated in high and low whispers and moans, punctuate other discontinuous thoughts: “Try not to think of it.” ”Cheer up, laugh a little, it won’t kill you, will it?” “Are you the bad man?” “Here’s some scenes from the next episode.” “Oh, that smells good. Is it perfume or nature?” “Get off of me.” “Call the police.” Leipold flips through a repertoire of voices and inflections that conjure different interior states of mind from childlike to agitated to cynical. She recites a number of girls’ names, becomes frightened, has night thoughts of intruders and asks anxiously, “Hello? Who is it? Who’s there?” gets angry and chants the word “fight,” and then tries to calm herself by repeating slowly, “breathe in, breathe out.” After spending time with this piece, the viewer may feel like an unmade bed, rumpled and exhausted. 

Underwater (Blue/Green)

The sensation of being trapped that is common to many of the video-animated sculptures is taken to an extreme in the Underwater series (1996) (fig. 00). In them a disembodied fiberglass “head” submerged in a small tank of water is projected with a face struggling to hold its breath. The submerged heads manifest yet another kind of phobia and offer another kind of “empathy test.” Viewers usually have a hard time looking at them longer than they can hold their own breath before they turn away gulping for air. One critic wrote, “The face, desperate for air, puffs out its cheeks, moans through closed lips and looks upward towards freedom. It is only an illusion, but the urge to reach into the tank and rescue this poor disembodied head is overwhelming.”

In Oursler’s world every affliction has its comical aspect. Here fear and spookiness are mitigated by the goofy facial contortions of the suffocating head (performed by the artist himself). The combination of slapstick humor and weird psychological terror in Oursler’s body of work links him not only to Beckett and Joyce but to visual artists like Bruce Nauman and Cindy Sherman. 

The blue light blanketing the face of Underwater (Blue/Green) emphasizes the sensation of being submerged, chilled, and alone. It is details like this that not only contribute to the formal elegance of Oursler’s work but also buttress its psychological effectiveness. It is the type of esthetic distinction that marks even the disjointed mismatch of grunge, thrift-store finds, folk art, and performance that characterize the early props and the first projected-video effigies. 

Composite Works

Molecule Spectre (1999) (fig. 00) is an homage to early cinema. Like Molecular MŽlis of the previous year, the work reflects the discovery of early filmmakers “that film need not obey the laws of empirical reality, as the first motion pictures had supposed, because film was in some sense a separate reality with structural laws of its own.” Taking this notion to an extreme, Oursler projects onto the different-sized nodules of a “molecular” armature a video collage that includes landscape footage, TV static, and close-ups of eyes and lips. These “impossibilities” that compress near and far, part and whole, attest to the magic of the medium, something Georges MŽlis (1861–1938) and the unknown maker of the silent feature The Red Spectre realized early on. They were among the pioneer moviemakers who saw that the camera might be used to make the fantastic and the impossible appear real, rather than simply to record actual events passing before its lens. Oursler’s regard for these trailblazers is understandable, since their most memorable productions concern the outlandish and bizarre. And like Oursler’s videos, MŽlis’s films are acted out before inventive phantasmagoric backgrounds that he himself designed and painted. 

Formally this piece relates to Side Effects in its diagrammatic armature and to Composite Still Life in its combination of close-up and distant shots. The vertical mouths present in both works—presaged in Picasso’s oeuvre of the 1920s—create a particularly unsettling image.

Research has always comprised a large portion of Oursler’s method. For earlier projects his interviewees ranged from government and corporate spokespeople to alleged abductees of aliens. Later he delved into writings, tests, and personal accounts related to mental disorders. More recently he has spent time researching the history of illusion and mimetic technologies. Composite Still Life, Aperture, and Fear Flower, all from 1998–99, are his personal response to the classic forms of still life and landscape representation—painterly illusions that utilized the camera obscura and other visual reproductive devices. In typical Ourslerian fashion, however, a gruesome and nightmarish spin is placed on these standard genres. 

The multiple personalities of dissociative identity disorders and the multiple voices of schizophrenia are given visual form in Composite Still Life (1999) (fig. 00). The piece consists of a large white fiberglass skull, with one eyeball protruding from its socket, that is creepily brought to life by a mŽlange of projected faces and facial features. On the one hand, it harks back to seventeenth-century Dutch vanitas still lifes, in which a skull was the cue to thoughts about the fragility of life and the inevitability of death. But it also conjures up a scientist/cinematographer gone mad—Dr. Frankenstein on LSD—shrinking and then splicing a full face next to enlarged muttering lips, huge teeth, and a detached eye to create a living collage that is at once beautiful and terrifying. Not only is the human form violated, but its parts are out of scale and dislodged from their proper place. Thus, a bared set of teeth sits vertically on the skull’s cheek, while an upside-down mouth speaks from atop its forehead. 

Like Cindy Sherman’s photographic series of dismembered dummies combined with prosthetic devices and props, Composite Still Life takes to a disturbing extreme Oursler’s musings about identity in the age of morphing, cloning, and mutating. Both Oursler and Sherman depict unthinkable variations on the theme of shifting mutable selves, while challenging what is sacred (nothing, apparently) in the representation of the human form. In this way, their video and photographic montages look back to the pasted collages of artists such as Picasso and Hannah Hšch, in whose work of the 1910s and ’20s the rules of proper human scale and placement of features were first flouted. 

The meaning of Composite Still Life is left open-ended. It can read not only as a horror film/science fiction experiment in hybrid surgery but as a physical manifestation of an interior psychic battle. It also accommodates the idea of ghosts returning from the dead to “squeak and gibber” their tales. One might think of Hamlet encountering the ghost of his father, who intones, “I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood, make thy two eyes like stars start from their spheres.” 

Aperture (1998) (fig. 00) also depicts a still life. Here the theme is kissing. The artist has arranged atop a plywood table a motley group of kissing “couples” consisting of objects covered in white plaster: a gargoyle and a skull, a saccharine cupid and a kitsch figurine of a kneeling nude, an ŽcorchŽ head used to teach anatomy and a ball-type mask, a fragment of a face and an egg, and a cherub lying face down, its lips pressed to a decorative rosette. Projected on the wall behind them is the silhouette of a large fly that annoyingly crawls around the screen, and a lens opening—the aperture of the title—also in motion, through which snippets of television programs are glimpsed. In addition, a text projected onto the wall rapidly scrolls disjointed phrases such as “These objects create a retinal image, in order to recognize the objects a relationship must be perceived. . . . Be still, unburied we meet again, instantly whither fly invisible spirits. . . . Beelzebub . . .Lord of the Flies . . . At this hour upside down . . . Camera obscura . . . Corpses did not linger some I know through yon dark grave . . . Light passes through . . . I give myself a pretty little sarcophagus . . .You must be from hell.” 

The phrases suggest themes of love, death, and illusion but remain enigmatic. In his personal cosmology Oursler associates flies with the devil. An early drawing of flies bothering a young boy (fig. 00) is accompanied by the lines, “One fly can cause more trouble. Zzzzz. Sent from the devil, all from Hell, so earatating [sic.]” Earatating is a play on “a fly in the ear.” The words “Beelzebub” and “Lord of the Flies” in Aperture’s projected text thus refer to Oursler’s perception of the evil nature of flying insects. 

The text for Aperture is random phrases taken from the index and bibliography of Walter Kendrick’s 1991 book, The Thrill of Fear: 250 Years of Scary Entertainment (New York: Grove Weidenfeld). In his cribbing of “ready-made” texts from unlikely sources, Oursler looks back to dada and surrealist poetry. Like dada poetry, the lines nevertheless resonate with Oursler’s characteristic mix of introspection and black humor. The latter is injected through the kissing of incongruous figures and also through the fragments of popular television shows seen through the projected aperture—talk show host Charles Grodin, a 1950s crime re-run, someone demonstrating a Stairmaster, a weather report, a cartoon, and so on. It is probably not accidental that one of the film fragments is a mobster flick with Edwin G. Robinson, leading us for a television moment to see the plaster figures as bestowing on each other the Mafia’s infamous “kiss of death.” 

Fear Flower (1999) (fig. 00) reprises the fleurs de mal motif seen earlier in Judy, Getaway #2, Let’s Switch, and Insomnia, where floral patterns deceptively mask sinister conditions. Here, luscious lavender flowers are filmed close-up and projected large-scale onto a wall. The camera homes in on a bee flitting from one flower to another. Standing in front of the wall, looking like a docent describing a big modern painting, an effigy wearing a flowered dress is propped on a tripod. In fact, she recites numbers and phrases that coalesce around the physiological response in animals to fear. Quoting from evolutionist Charles Darwin’s observations, the figure drones, “Terror causes the body to tremble, the skin grows pale, sweat breaks out, and the hair bristles. The secretions of the alimentary canal of the kidneys are increased and they are involuntarily voided. Charles Darwin, 1872.”

Again performed by Tracy Leipold, the video-projected face of the effigy delivers her lines in a robotic, nasal monotone, punctuating the dialogue with the repetition of “zero, zero, one, one, zero, one, zero, one” like some secret code. The bee may fall into the category of menacing insects that, like flies, are to Oursler symbols of evil.

Talking Light

Talking Light (1999) (fig. 00) moves further in the direction of minimalism and provides a distillation of the essential Oursler—simultaneously funny and disquieting, paranoid and empathy inducing. Set into one of a line of museum light sockets, a green bulb pulsates to the vibration of spoken text. Museum visitors are in turn surprised, frightened, and amused to hear a deep droning voice address them as they leave the bathroom. Naturally, they wonder if someone has been watching them while they were in there. A deep voice and light emanating from above evoke not only Big Brother but also visions of the Almighty. The actual script, however, is not that lofty; the speaker whines and moans, making us feel either sorry for him or annoyed.

Optics

Optics, a multi-part installation, marks a new direction for Oursler. It is an imaginative rumination on the origins of media through the harnessing of light for visual reproduction. Another example of what results when this subculture artist goes to the library, Optics provides a mystical and poetic spin on historical information (see Oursler’s optical timeline, p. 00). For Optics Oursler researched the development of optical devices that over centuries have evolved into film, television, and video. Through various elements, described by Laura Heon in her essay (p. 00), Oursler traces the popular distrust of television, which has plagued the medium since its inception, back through time to medieval experiments with the camera obscura, which according to thirteenth-century manuscripts was seen as the work of the devil. A sacred funhouse sensibility pervades Optics; as in most of Oursler’s work, a mix of humor and solemnity as well as visual resourcefulness characterizes the installation. 

Glass devils set beside light fixtures pepper the gallery, making literal the biblical connection between Lucifer (“light bringer”) and light. And they do behave devilishly. One casts a hazy red glow on the adjacent wall, conjuring up hell’s fire and brimstone. Another appears to be crawling into a utility lamp, impishly leading one’s eye directly into the blinding glare. Optical Timeline, a video of the artist twisting as his body is digitally distorted—now elongated like taffy, now compressed like kneaded dough—is projected onto a glass screen. It is mesmerizing to watch the figure’s transformations as it moves through a pipe-like labyrinth, bringing to mind the contorted nudes of the photographers AndrŽ KertŽsz or Bill Brandt. At times the body morphs into a skull as it is pulled and pushed along its path. It turns corners quickly, slows down, disappears, and then, Cheshire Cat–like, shows up somewhere else. At times it looks as though it is moving through a drainpipe, changing its shape like a cartoon character. Through all this, the viewer is simultaneously enchanted by the pure beauty of the imagery and disquieted by the sense that the figure has no autonomy but rather is being jerked and manipulated by larger forces. 

Conclusion 

The mutable pushed-and-pulled animated figure in Optical Timeline can be viewed as a metaphor for the loss of control over our minds and bodies that is the logical denouement of introjection. Modern technology has led us to a point of vulnerable permeability; we are open targets for all manner of co-option. As one critic has noted, Oursler’s “message is that there’s no such thing as a whole, intact person anymore. People who haven’t been colonized by video have had their bodies invaded by aliens or ancient demons; by toxic chemicals or candy that’s deliberately been poisoned.”

Oursler delivers this message, however, with a light touch. His own empathy for bumbling humanity, so apparent in person, also informs his work. The handmade, cobbled-together look that characterizes his oeuvre, even the high-tech CD-ROM Fantastic Prayers, reveals an affectionate regard for Planet Earth in all its makeshift, haphazard confusion. That affection extends to its clueless and eccentric inhabitants, particularly those who creatively improvise life against the grain. Alternating between moments of subtle insight and broad humor, Oursler leavens his warning of introjection, and the diminution of the human soul that may result, by creating works that at once amuse, distress, and enthrall. In his tutorial at the elbow of mass media, he has learned well how to entertain his viewers. His audience pays attention and, wittingly or not, absorbs the message.

Deborah Rothschild, curator of exhibitions at the Williams College Museum

of Art, organized Introjection: Tony Oursler, mid-career retrospective

1976–1999.