Please join EAI for a special evening with artist Tony Oursler.
Focusing on Oursler’s single-channel video works, the screening program will follow his wildly inventive exploration of narrative, visuals and sound across four decades, from his rarely seen, earliest video pieces of the late 1970s to recent work created in collaboration with musicians such as Sonic Youth, David Bowie and Beck. Following the screening, Oursler will appear in conversation with EAI Executive Director Lori Zippay.
Admission $ 7.00 / Students $ 5.00
Free for EAI Members
RSVP: rsvp@eai.org
Please note: Seating is limited.
Reservations are required.
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EAI is pleased to present a screening of the single-channel video work of Tony Oursler, who forged a singular form of low-tech, expressionistic video theater. The screening program will trace Oursler’s ingenious deployment of objects, narrative, sound and moving image over thirty years, beginning with the almost unknown black-and-white videos that he produced as a student at Cal Arts in the late 1970s. In these first, low-tech forays into video, Oursler casts disposable inanimate objects, body parts, and even household pests as protagonists—their lines voiced by the artist—in short, darkly comic episodes that evoke the madness and psychosexual delirium of life in a media-saturated culture.
Oursler’s earliest videos already show his distinctive use of found objects with lo-fi, hand-crafted and painted sets. This strategy came into vivid, color-soaked maturity in the idiosyncratic fictions Oursler made in the 1980s, which prefigure the video sculptures and installations that have become his signature works. Taking the form of bizarre narrative odysseys, these post-punk horror-comedies evoke Caligari by way of Eraserhead. The Weak Bullet (1980, 12:41 min) is a grotesquely humorous psychodrama in which the trajectory of the eponymous bullet propels a narrative of social rupture and sexual paranoia. In Son of Oil (1982, 16:08 min), a cautionary tale about the decline of Western civilization as only Oursler could envision it, he employs actors alongside his puppet-like props and objects in a critique of the cults of money and power.
Oursler’s exploration of sound has led from stream-of-consciousness narration and voiceover of inanimate objects to collaborations with acclaimed musicians and sound artists. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he experimented with sound and collaborated with Mike Kelley and John Miller as part of The Poetics, an “art band” that united the artists’ interest in music and performance. Tunic (Song for Karen) (1990, 6:30 min), a music video made in collaboration with and starring Sonic Youth, merges Oursler’s distinctive visual strategies with Sonic Youth’s rock critique of the relation of celebrity, gender and body image. Oursler will also screen two recent works for the first time in New York: Pop (1999, 3:28), a video portrait of musician Beck, and Empty (2000, 4:22 min), featuring David Bowie voicing text by Oursler. AWGTHTGTWTA (Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?) (2008, 6:22 min), is part of a recent body of work involving choruses.
After the screening program, Oursler will appear in conversation with EAI Executive Director Lori Zippay.
