* (restored)
—-

 

‘Blob is a funny word, an ugly thing. It’s alive and nobody knows why. Maybe it came from outer space or it came from a science experiment gone bad or from pollution or from the sea or out of a really sick body. It never stops moving, moving all around with no place to go. When will it die. It can’t die by any means known to man at this moment.

‘What’s your gut reaction? “Gut reaction” is an American term for your first response to things before you examine the facts intellectually. When you see the blob your gut reaction is: you want it to be gone, you want it to die.

‘The blob’s movements are alien yet oddly familiar. Pulling and stretching. Like peristaltic movement. Like the way things move through your body by contractions which result in locomotion. You understand this is linked to your bowels and intestines because even though this motion is involuntary, it is conscious on some level. It is essentially a wave, the universal form of energy transmission divided into peeks and troughs like a bad ocean. Unending waves, wave after wave, wash away your shape. Now formless. You are the blob.

‘Now, you want to help the blob.

‘With its transparent skin, the blob exposes its muscles, organs, blood flow. The banal workings of the organism are revealed in fragile detail. How embarrassing. To encounter the blob is to see the simple, low ambitions that sustain life with no greater purpose. The blob can only and merely exist, it is useless. Whatever happens inside the blob should be hidden, should remain private.

‘The blob can be funny like any mutation, a dead end creature in the chain of evolution. And in the food chain, it has no niche, no other life form feeds on the blob. It’s a disturbing creature because it is unique A Monster that could kill you like a cancer, a devolution of cells. Here is the nightmare scenario: a terratoma analogous to you, an evil negative offspring replaces you the host. A formless double, the blob kills you when it takes up residence within.

‘When you gaze at the blob, your eye no longer has a focal point because the blob has no focal point. You see right into it. You may keep loosing your sight in a myopic blur. In this way the blob can escape even though it moves very slowly and with no apparent direction.

‘In the movie, “The Blob,” the ruby colored nemeses could be a sign of the counter culture, the erotic, psychedelic, loud, political, chaos impending into the serene, the anxious cold war America of the 1950’s.

‘The blob is scary because we do not understand it nor do we easily recognize it. Always changing shape, it’s more like a spill than a sphere. It’s like part of a fat person that escaped and came to life. It’s like Jell-O or slime or mold.’ — Tony Oursler

 

______
Further

Tony Oursler Official Website
Tony Oursler @ Metro Pictures
Tony Oursler @ Lehmann Maupin
Tony Oursler @ Electronic Arts Intermix
‘The Uncanny World of Tony Oursler’
Carlo McCormick ‘The Pathology of Projections & Cynical Spiritualism’
Tony Oursler ‘Sixth Wall’
Philip K. Dick & Tony Oursler ‘Psychomimetiscape’
TO interview by Alan Licht @ Bomb
Tony Oursler’s ‘The Presence Project’
Re: Tony Oursler’s ‘Mud Opera’
Re: Tony Oursler’s ‘The Influence Machine’
Tony Oursler books @ Amazon

 

______
Bowie/Oursler


David Bowie/Tony Oursler Where Are We Now? (Official Music Video)

‘My first actual contact with David was like a shock of energy, fully charged with the magic of media, music, and glamour. It was as if he had somehow bilocated between our world and one of myth and didn’t fully exist in the same space as ordinary earthlings. Of course, this was all in my mind, and my reaction said much about the delusions of popular culture. Somehow this giant I’d been listening to and watching with such admiration since forever was in my studio in person. It was hard to reconcile fantasy with flesh. Later, I would notice that this was a common effect of David’s presence, sometimes with hilarious results. I remember seeing a Jasper Johns exhibition at MoMA with David, his wife Iman, and the artist Linda Post. David sauntered through the show, busily discussing the art and holding forth like we were in a bubble, while the focus of everyone around us shifted from the art to him. Finally, as we were leaving the museum, a group of women surrounded David and began touching him, as if in a spontaneous frenzy of admiration.

‘That was in the late ’90s, in the early stages of a friendship that lasted more than twenty years. At that time I was living in a hovel of a studio at 175 Ludlow Street, on the Lower East Side. During David’s first visit, it took me at least an hour to calm down. As it turns out, behind the star power, he was almost a regular guy. Except that he was David Bowie, after all, who appeared to have different-colored eyes and who had that voice. I still remember fragments of our first conversations: We both agreed from experience that drugs are bad. While he was chain-smoking and sipping coffee, his thoughts ricocheted, much like his career, from music and film to books, art history, and comics, and back again. He was humble about his accomplishments (saying of his work, “One can pluck a few peppercorns from the shit”), and his humor was unforgettable, as was his deep laugh, often accompanied by a conspiratorial sideways grin. Friends asked me why he came to my studio, and at first I honestly didn’t know. It took me a while to understand that he loved art, from discussing how it was made to seeing how artists lived and worked. And it turned out that David wanted to interject some of my work into his lexicon. Much of what we did together became very public—videos can be found on the Internet—but some has never been seen.’ — Tony Oursler, Artforum

 

___
Etc.


Excerpt from ‘Perfect Partner’ by T.O., Kim Gordon, & Phil Morrison (2006)


Early T.O. film ‘The Loner’ (1980)


Tony Oursler on the art of video projection

 

_______
Interview
from designboom

 

In video art, what is ‘projection’ for you?

Tony Oursler: Physics tell us we see light, not objects. For me projection is ‘inner thoughts projected outward onto the world’ and the viewer is a collaborator of the artist. The exposes the gender of reaction to the artwork, finishing it.

Please describe an evolution in your work, from your first projects to the present day.

TO: My projects are more focused now than they were in the past. I’m comfortable with a lot of different mediums that I wasn’t so comfortable with early on. I’m sort of claiming back certain things. I started twenty years ago with photography, drawing and painting and now I’m trying to round them back into my work. It’s been an interesting elliptical process. I think an artist’s life is kind of like a snowball, picking up stuff as you go. everything’s on the outside of the snowball and sometimes you have to burrow in to get the old stuff.

Reality’s something we’re not getting from reality; it’s something people are looking for to entertain them. There’s been this reversal where the powers that be have funneled reality into the entertainment sphere and entertainment has been funneled into the sphere of policymaking.

TO: I’d always looked toward pop culture to decipher things as a mirror of the world, and now I don’t at all, because I know who the creators are, and I can see through what they’re trying to do, so it doesn’t work on me at all. I wish it did. In a weird way, I miss it. There was a time when I used to look at pop culture and take it apart piece by piece to figure out how the magic American engine worked. I was very paranoid and full of conspiracy theories. But now I just look at it as a bunch of morons who are barely getting by, just pushing the buttons on this machine that’s rolling forward. The people have the power of production in their hands, yet the good stuff is yet to be made. The most boring things I just don’t get: people who are fascinated by Paris Hilton, phenomena like that, someone who does nothing and becomes a celebrity, or even worse the city destroyer Trump.

What books do you have on your bedside table?

TO: That’s a good question. I’m a bibliomaniac, so I collect books. At any given moment I might have one book about spiritualism, another like a thriller and one about the military. There is one about the alternative new-age military culture that happened after vietnam when they introduced psychic activities to warfare, trying to kill people through thought.

Describe your style, like a good friend of yours would describe it.

TO: My friend once said I was like the Picasso of video and that was a very flattering, stylistic comment. My other friends probably call me sloppy… and insane.

The Christian Right is afraid that religion is going to be replaced by technology—that a computer can deal in absolutes better than a spiritual leader can. If you think about it, the Moral Majority got firmly embedded in the Republican Party around 1980, which is when computers started becoming more popular. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Organized religion in this country has been very worried since then that religion’s really going to go out the window.

TO: I like the feeling of reaching progress through technology; I wish it could be true. I hope so for my son. When I wrote my timeline on virtual media around 2000, I realized that as a video artist there was no art history written for me. All this stuff that plugged in or moved or had anything to do with light was very finicky; curators, if a bulb broke or something, just put the piece in a box in the basement. It was much easier for them to put paintings and photographs on the walls, so those of us in video were left with no history of virtual image production. It goes all the way back to the first mention of the camera obscura in a Chinese poem around the year 1000. The image was upside down and associated with the dark side of human nature from the start. Anytime there’s a new kind of technology there’s this association with evil or death, so I think your theory is correct. It’s true of every human invention: rock ’n’ roll, it’s the devil’s music; photography, there was spirit photography; the radio, it was Constantine Raudive who did that tuning into the dead radio; and television, there are lots of examples, but the people who believed they could communicate with the spirit world through technology were really rebels. They took the tools and put them to personal radical use rather than be sublimated by them.

What are you afraid of regarding the future?

TO: I guess death, taxes and fascism. Actually I don’t know.

 

____
Show

___________________
Part. 1: works at a (relative) standstill

 

________________
Part 2: works in motion


Guilty (1995)


Slip (2003)


Cigarettes (2009)


Star (2003)


Pain (2008)


Switch (2010)


Vampiric Battle (2009)


Judy (1994)


various works (2008)


Cave-in (2010)


Untitled Work with Money (2008)


Frog (2005)


E*Nel (2016)


Caricature (2002)
—-

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Laura, Hi. Plot is like too much skeleton unless the film just wants to be a fun ride. That’s what chopped means? Good to know. Yeah, I guess if someone was chopped (up) they’d be rather ugly at least in a conventional sense. When guys are well built people will say they’re cut, and maybe that confused me. The translation thing isn’t that interesting. Maybe if we had managed it would have been. He’d translate then I’d fix it and then he’d fix it and I’d fix it again. No struggles or anything. We understood each other because even though he was Dutch he spoke perfect English. There’s now a remote possibility that the visa mess can salvaged, but I won’t know until next week. Robert Pollard/GbV is my favorite living artist and I hear a giant amount that would take far too long to even begin to list. But I don’t hear Placebo. GbV and Sebadoh were lo-fi colleagues, so that’s a connection. I’m going to close my eyes at some point today and try to feel your zen. Thanks. I’m too antsy to transmit zen, and you don’t want my antsyness, trust me. xo. ** lotuseatermachine, Hi! Oh, that’s okay. Coming and going here at one’s own idiosyncratic pace is highly doable for me. You’re in the new SCAB! Great, excited to see/read it. Thanks for reading ‘Closer’, and I think that sounds like a good haul on the selling stuff front. Carsten did a good job of pointing out how to do a mss. submission formally. You basically just want it to look like a simplified version of the potential book. There’s not really a required form at this point, I don’t think. Readable and clean looking. I’m happy to address detailed concerns if you have them. ** Dominik, Hi!! Yes, it’s pray or rather ‘pray’. I don’t think our fascist monster can legally cancel the mid-terms, but I’m about 90% sure he’ll try. The great majority of film venue people are too lazy or chickenshit to just say no and just ghost you instead. It’s ugly. I think the Viennese festival is very soon. It’s a ‘horror’ festival, so he probably didn’t think we qualified even if he did like the film. My guess. There is a chance the visa thing will get fixed, but I won’t know for a while. So I get to keep living with the stress for a bit, oh boy. I didn’t realise that people could have boring dreams. But why wouldn’t they, I guess. Love wondering why five people sent him happy birthday emails yesterday, G. ** _Black_Acrylic, People sure are talking or at least posting about that Manosphere doc. I guess I should investigate the fuss. What did you think? ** Carsten, Kier was nothing compared to Faye Dunaway. I’ve seen her throw outrageous diva meltdowns and hissy fits in public that were absolutely jaw-dropping. I don’t know anyone connected with Raoul Peck, no. I can check, but I don’t think he’s in my sphere of friends and contacts. There’s usually a way to track people down if you’re driven enough. ** Thom, You’ve gotten some golden stores there, yeah, but then that’s my experience to some degree and certainly fantasy about Portland. Hope you like ‘Dear Dead Person’. He’s great, I just wish he didn’t take decades to put a book together. Nice: old British folk tune. I used to be really into 70s progressive UK folk or whatever one would call it: Incredible String Band, Pentangle, Bert Jansch, Fotheringay, Sandy Denny, etc. Were you happy with the recording? ‘Bee Thousand’! Thirty minutes of God himself. xo. ** myneighbourjohnturturro, Whoa, hi man! What a pleasure to see you. What up? Yes, yes, about Zwartjes. I only know that Grandieux is working on something. He did a talk here recently, but I was out of town, so I might’ve been able to know more. Interesting about the script. With Littell, wow. I had coffee with his producer once and she said that one of the reasons it’s so hard for him to get his financed is because he refuses to write a script first. So that’s a switch. Huh. I’ll see if I can find out anything. Thanks! I hope you’re extremely more than good. ** fish, Thank you. Oh, hm, nothing immediately springs to mind re: interesting internet set or directed fiction. But there must be. I’ll have to think. Yeah, I spend tons of time on the internet, in no small part looking for things to make blog posts with. Otherwise, pretty normal: social media, news, listen to music, watch films or weird videos, go down rabbit/black holes re: something or some artist I’m into at the time. You? Are you thinking of writing about the internet? ** Steve, Thanks. Like I said above, there may now be a solution to the problem after all, but I won’t know for a while yet. Ugh. French bureaucracy is legendary for a reason. Do dolphins enjoy said drugs, or perhaps the question is how we can we sure if they do or don’t? ** Adem Berbic, I’m strong on Burroughs ‘Naked Lunch’ -> ‘Wild Boys’, but that’s it. I mean, honestly, if you’ve read one great Burroughs, you don’t necessarily need to read another one because, essentially, they’re all the same book except maybe for ‘Wild Boys’ which has a little clearer narrative. ** HaRpEr //, When I was a teen and just post-teen and going to see experimental films a lot I tried to make it a point not to be high when I watched them because I wanted to see what they could actually do to my brain and senses on their own, and because I was kind of studying them. Glad you liked ‘Godlike’. I think that’s Richard best prose work. I’m going to copy and paste what you wrote and send it to Richard if you don’t mind because he would be very happy with your read. ** Minet, Hey there! Lovely to see you! Oh, shit, your Paris dates are during the time that I won’t be in Paris. I’ll be in the US from April 2-9 showing Zac’s and my film. So … urgh. I’ll be here otherwise. That really sucks. My agent is Ira Silverberg. He was my original agent, and I just recently went back to him. If you or someone needs his contact, email me or hit me up on Insta and I can pass it along. Thanks! I hope we can sort out the Paris neat-miss. Love back. ** Uday, Wow, I think I wish I was that me in your dream, although that Pied Piper adaptation sounds a little dodgy. Or, actually, maybe not. Wow. Happy for the most part is pretty best one can expect, I think? ** Okay. Today I decided to restore an old exhibition in my galerie featuring the wacky but moody but poetic art of Tony Oursler. Fun galore possibly. See you tomorrow.