Tony Oursler

Metro Pictures, New York
Through June 2

Tony Oursler has come a long way in the development of his peculiar video assemblages. Gone are the strangely belligerent dolls trapped in realistic tableaux for which Oursler made his name in the ’90s. In their place are works that explore the concept of communication in the context of the new media mix currently transforming world culture.

In this exhibition, titled Antennae Pods Transmissions, Oursler gets more technically explicit in his assemblages, and more self-consciously arty and abstract in the audio and video aspects of his work. The sculpted elements utilize TV antennas, whose wide variety of arrays offer Oursler a rich “canvas” onto which he attaches cut and colored sheets of plexiglas. With the DVD player and small speakers generally mounted at the base of the antennae, and the plexi sheets clamped on in tiers above, one finds oneself exploring the path of the projected light as it winds its way through and beyond the assemblage.

Such is the case with works like End Fire Array, where three different talking heads are cast onto plexiglas and walls. The nomadic action of this curious effect serves as a metaphor for the process of transcendence that Oursler seeks to symbolize in his art. In Buzz, for example, the DVD projects a blue face across half the gallery onto a plexiglas screen, which rotates on a large, gridded antennae. A voice recites a list of words and phrases such as “good vibration,” “plug-in,” “high altitude,” but their literal meaning is filtered out by the visual allure of the assemblage as a whole, and the words become nothing more than an ambient idea of “voice.”

The abstract quality of this voice, enhanced by the babble of the installation’s myriad voices, suggests a transcendent, spiritual, even alien-contacting code. Indeed, it seems as if Oursler has “got religion.” Of the Nam June Paik sort, however. And, like the master, Oursler too now strives to find a means to convey the idea of transcendence through media-based art.




Robert Mahoney