Tony Oursler
The first work is Fiction , a red, rectangular cloth hung on the wall. Printed on it in black is the standard film disclaimer which insists that any resemblance between characters depicted herein and real lift is purely coincidental and not to be taken in the least seriously. Round the corner is its companion, Model Release Form, whose text approximates a legal contract giving permission to use one’s image. There are plenty of blank spaces in this one, but however you fill them in you’ll end up with no rights over our own identity whatsoever. Dummies are dotted around the gallery’s edge, suspended in a corner or slumped on the floor, propped against a wall. There is no stuffing all in Hanging Dummy. It is just a limp assemblage of a boiler suit and, as the caption has it, ‘shoes (human scale)’ topped off with a video camera. Another, Dummy II has a closed circuit monitor stuck into its collar, its head thus filled with images of the person looking at it.
The descriptions most obviously appropriate to Oursler’s creations – sad, pathetic, tragically inadequate – have long been in circulation. Guardians of a territory insofar as they simply occupy it, they can survey their surroundings and be seen by others within them, but are incapable of any kind of self awareness. Oursler has equated the dummies with scarecrows protecting, ‘allowing the farmer to sleep the deep, confident sleep of a man who knows the seed he has sown will grow’, but in the ensemble of his props and effects their status in relation to our humanity is not at all clear-cut. Unobtrusively, because of its relative scale, a miniature version of Weep Doll offers silent reproach to our feelings of superiority. Supported by a short length of thin dowel is a black dummy with a featureless head of stuffed white cloth which forms a screen onto which is projected the face of a weeping woman. At the other end of the scale, Oursler’s own face projected onto a large head suspended high up in a corner of a darkened space animates the effigy in F/X Plotter. Shot from below to accentuate the neck-wrenching required to view the thing, Oursler unemotionally describes a sequence of violent scenarios, the way in which they need to be broken down and enacted, and the tricks and techniques used in filming in order to bring them convincingly and realistically to the screen. Already made accustomed to the demands of narrative flow by works like Fiction and Model Release Form are three Instant Dummies. Over-sized pill capsules, two are stuffed with cloth and objects which sex them while the third remains empty. Take one with water, three times daily, for a surprise effect. U4EUH is a similar capsule, this time wall mounted and containing a little head/monitor that, in such an undeveloped state can play nothing but static.
In ‘phototropic,’ a typically collaged text in Doug Hall’s Illuminating Video, Oursler, almost inevitably one feels, invokes the problematic authenticity sustained by Philip K. Dick’s Bladerunner ‘replicants’ through their ability to think and remember. Elsewhere in the same essay Oursler tabulates some of the elements which retain the characteristics of the surrogate:
A period.
A period screaming.
A hole with language coming out of it.
Effigy.
Six Japanese dressed in black, all operating one small puppet.
A piece of meat moving around in sync with language.
Any evidence of life.
Excrement.
Anything in the foreground.
The whole picture.
Anything that moves.
Anything more interesting than you.
Offsetting the West Coast fantasy-is-reality pitch in much of the work is a harder polemical tone. Poison Candy is three giant point-of-scale mock-ups of confectionery packs. Their captions give the materials used in their making, listing the inevitable wood, paint and resin, and then a little something extra: Johnny Apple treats – iodophenphos, Good and Fruity – difenacoum, Life Savers – bendiocarb. Far from being stabilised by these additives, the packages are starting to consume themselves, their edges dissolving into festering gloops of resin. This theme is repeated, with variations, throughout the show. The Closet Paintings are delicate water-colours of a variety of domestic substances – Liquid Paper, Chivas Regal, Maalox, windscreen de-icer, Vick’s – all abusable in one way or another while Krypt’s mirrored ‘house’ covered in astrological symbols, candle-flame bulbs flicker and lush video images play on its surfaces. The soundtrack mixes facts about chemicals, pollution and drugs with fragments of TV and much else besides. Kepone Drum charts the case against Allied Chemical as a result of the massive pollution caused by the company’s manufacture of the insecticide Kepone. A chemical drum lies on its side, a hardened blob of resin on the floor next to it simulating leakage. The resin’s surface acts as a screen onto which a video concealed inside the drum is projected. Scenes from a psychedelic and already blighted War of Independence are played out, interspersed with scrolled text documenting Allied chemical’s attempts to absolve itself of responsibility. For all his play with artifice and simulation, Oursler’s universe is not one of inconsequence and lack of substance. Illusion and delusion are,a s often as not generated by real conflicts of interest, antagonisms which are at least in part discoverable and capable of address.
