Eye Machine

Raymond Bellour

2005

Why did Tony Oursler one day undertake a chronicle of the dispositifs of image and sound ranging from high Antiquity to each new present-day? In order to recognise that his body of work, haunted by stories, materials, memories, situations, clichés, tends more and more to develop like a succession of dispositifs. And that the elements of which his work is composed and recomposed find their justification in arrangements without which the work would not have the sufficient force to be internally coherent or to confront the historical and technological realities of our times.

If the dispositif of cinema, despite the thousand and one minor variations it has known since its origins, has remained largely unchanged, it is the art specific to installations, above all to image-installations, on each occasion to invent a singular dispositif. Hence the choice of transitivity for ‘System for Dramatic Feedback’ (1994) in this growing number of dispositifs. To project the image of a group of cinema spectators on a wall, and then to arrange in tiers, as if in an echo of their gazes, a swarm of machine-beings scattered in a heap of ruined material, and further back still a tiny being alone and in distress, this is to respond to the dramas that cinema still sustains, in its unique way, homogenous and flat; and by which to show what the art of ‘new images’ can dramatically elaborate in heterogenous spaces, always more or less transformable, and above all ceaselessly remodelled according to the movements of their visitors.

To inhabit space, to architecturalise it, sculpt it, incorporate it by means of projections ranging from the spectacular to the miniscule, is to place the eye at the moving centre of an endless multiplication and which also makes it one organ among the many others of the innumerable bodies on which all dispositifs depend. To the point where the eye becomes a dispositif, a mise en abyme emphasising how vision, in our Western cultures, remains always with itself held in view, all the way up to the illumination of thought, that eye within.

In 1996, when he undertook his ‘Eyes’ series, Oursler had already been immersed for 6 years in the prolific invention of his “dummies”, dolls or mannequins of different shapes (variable, baroque, evanescent), whose massive heads made from neutral materials received the video projections of faces filmed beforehand. This tragic and unstable inflation of the human face brings with it, in each of its examples, a proven micro-dispositif made to the scale of the portion of space occupied by the singular creature doubled by its video-projector. The virtually limitless multiplication of such a process of invention will go to assure the metamorphosis, across the years, of the pop, trash and caligaresque world specific to all the tapes and to the first installations by Tony Oursler (‘Spheres of Influence’, for example, in 1986, this cavern swarming with images, voices and signs.) What emerged was a very particular installation-world. One made up of objects, elements of decor, and lots of empty spaces, all chosen for their power to attract, their capacity to acclimatise these new types of actors whose performance, simultaneously fixed in the mutability of their image and bought to life by the infinite flux of language, opens onto so many stories, dramas, injunctions, visions, problems. To the extent of giving shape to a sort of remodelled cinema: a second(-ary) cinema, in situ, born from images of America from popular literature, comics, commercial cinema and television.

One can’t make too fine a point of how these heads, eyes, organs, these creatures with their endless talking, monologuing, dialoguing, incarnate the daily life of the media and culture of their time, but also whole slices of scientific culture as well, carried along by the flux of language captured, woven, fragmented, mangled which has always made up the sound element of Tony Oursler’s works. Nobody has spoken better about this than Constance DeJong, Oursler’s stalwart friend and his accomplice in so many works made more or less in collaboration. She recalls its antecedents: the surrealists and automatic writing, the writings of the Beat Generation and improvisation, the ‘cut-ups’ of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin. She says, for example: “Continuous language is Oursler’s style; a consistency of words, each one equally charged, a procession without ending … or starting over. […] Oursler’s language records ‘the self’ as fluctuating, polyvalent and/or conflictual, dealing less with a pathology than a general condition. […] The invader and the invaded, the sender and the receiver, these are the roles that Oursler depicts, interchangeable roles which interpenetrate each other – an ‘I’ for an ‘I’, for a ‘you’, a ‘him’, a ‘her’, a ‘we’. […] Oursler tells us: skin, walls, organs, eyes are only semi-permeable instances through which come the thoughts and the personae of others, in the same way that light emits the particles that make up vision.”

Hence “Judy” (1994). Imagine a line diagonally bisecting a large rectangular room from one end to the other. In the angle, stuck atop a pile, there is a tiny doll, dressed in flowery nightdress, shrieking. Then, laid out in tiers on the ground; a mini-dress, a heap of crumpled fabric (which, like all the others in this drama, is flowery); a vertical panel, hung with cloth, like a partition. Next, mounted on a tripod, a vast bouquet of flowers in which there is a loop of the face of a woman ranting (I don’t care what you smell, just eat it!). Then, a slender cushion; and a raised couch under which is a body in a dress, head wedged, prone, its voice mingling with the others’ shrieks (Eh! Fuck you!). Another cushion; and, in a dress tossed onto a peg, above which a pair of slim trousers of the same material are hung on the ceiling, revolves the tiny image of a slender, naked body, an image of a foetus caught in movement. Finally, from the opposite angle, the visitor (whom Oursler calls “the viewer/participant”) can take their place in a small padded armchair in front of a table covered by a tablecloth and can participate in the drama via a microphone. A monitor with a remote control broadcasts images whose effects could be felt outside on entering the Salzburg Kunstverein: passing cars, the gardens and citadel in the distance, images emerging from a large figure in a green dress hanging along the length of the museum’s façade, at the head of which is attached a camera that scans the landscape and via which speaks the voice of the microphone within – which could be her, Judy.

Oursler has commented on this plural fiction more than on others3. It owes everything to the schizoid phenomenon of MPD (Multiple Personality Disorder). “Judy” is a “Multiple”. Her three names here are those of the three dolls: “Horror”, “Boss” and “Fuck You”. These “Alters” incarnate the personae that issue from a violent trauma (often mostly of a sexual nature), through which the subject protects their core-self by projecting into as many roles as necessary through dissociation, which has caused it to be said that the Multiple would be an expert in self-hypnosis. As usual in such cases, the reciprocity of effects and causes circumscribe a black hole. Oursler reminds us that stories of MPD have fascinated American audiences since the film which set the trend “The Three Faces of Eve” (Nunally Johnson, 1957, with its three Joanne Woodwards) followed, on a similar wavelength, by “Psycho” (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960) and “The Exorcist” (William Friedkin, 1973). But he also recalls the following hypothesis, which he makes his own and which, as soon as one considers it, stands to reason: the case of MPD, this particularly American product, is quite simply a product of a mirror-effect implied by the very structure of the media, the turmoil of images induced by the sudden multiplicity of channels and the systematisation of ‘zapping’. And in this, “Judy”, supported by Oursler’s commentary, the same year as “System for Dramatic Feedback” which it barely anticipates (the two installations have the ravaged character of the “Horror” doll in common), equally marks a turning point in the odyssey of the “dummies” developed as so many micro-dispositifs. For these creatures are called on to enter into a multiplicity of stories in proportion to their capacity to make emerge the conditions of the stories’ possibility. That’s to say, for them to understand themselves and to produce the stories between themselves as dispositifs of projections, as vision-machines, as calls that vibrate between feeling and thinking. 

Consequently, at the same time as these mise-en-scènes multiply, inscribing slender dispositifs of bodies and motifs according as much to the arrangements favoured by the exhibitions, the process also turns in on itself, towards its bulging centre, from the body to the head, and from the head to the eye. The eye as pure organ, depicted as an ideal ball-like shape. The sketch that Oursler made for ‘Eyes’, as for all his installations, ably conveys the variety of sources (TV, rock video, porn, computer games, etc) affecting this population of eyes set on the ground or hanging from the ceiling like dimly-lit globes. For each of these eyes, which seem to see you with a gaze that gives nothing back, is animated by a spectacle that fixes itself in its trembling iris (one of the captions in Oursler’s sketch indeed says of one of them: “each has the reflection of a screen”). Together they testify to the insane accumulation of images that organises a travesty of civilisation (“1975: one estimates that an 18 year-old adolescent has spent 10,800 hours at school and has watched 20,000 hours of television”). It is difficult to make out the details of the image, even if one examines the tiny screens reflected in the iris close up, but one senses its matter in movement, its hypnotically organic quality and one can hear its sound, which a native spectator can make out better than anyone else. And one tells oneself that it is indeed the interior of a mind ravaged by this memorised pulp of the imperceptible vision captured here in a doubled flicker: this little rectangle which trembles as it receives the gaze of the gaze and this projection of the unrecognisable actor’s human eye cast onto the naked form which it encompasses.

On one occasion, thanks to a happy circumstance of location, the ‘Eyes’ were exhibited in a highly singular way that further emphasised their central symbol: in Istanbul’s Citerne Basilica for the VI Biennale (1999). In the vaulted room with its 336 columns which, for 15 centuries, have reflected in the still water where the hanging eyes were doubled, the multiples multiplied. One had to leave the eyes behind, go right to the end of the visit and turn round in the vast room to experience what it was that made them more even more intensely lethal: under two columns of which they enigmatically formed the plinth, one found – one inverted, the brow touching the ground and its eyes appearing to be closed, the other tilted to the side and perhaps opening its eyes – two wonderful, gigantic heads of Medusa.  

So, from eye to body, from one setting to another, the human creature doesn’t stop multiplying and splitting. Right up to the pure horror of the organ, eye on mouth, or a mouth inserted between two eyes, vertically or horizontally. Or, further still, details of eyes, barely moving, isolated one by one, delineating a fissure in plain surfaces with unexpected contours which resemble paintings.

“I saw there, all at once, at last, the creatures’ real eyes, all of them! […] And they started move, for they had a life of their own. […] Some as big as footballs, others high up on legs, others no larger than the eyes of ants.” If Henri Michaux’s teratology come naturally to mind to evoke that of Oursler (just as one inevitably thinks of Bosch, of Goya’s drawings, of Kokoschka’s ravaged faces …) it’s also because, as far as painting is concerned, it is the head that will be Michaux’s enduring and dominant motif, just as in Oursler’s work, it will begat dispositif after dispositif. The head between eye and body, as its own inalienable monstrosity. Perfectly oval heads, smooth and egg-like, or like an eye. A frozen memory of the human, in its so distant otherness.  

Hence, ‘Untitled MPD’ (1998). Where twenty-five heads are laid out horizontally in five rows of five, like so many chickens threaded on a grill in a market, or like skulls arranged in catacombs. The impact of this wall of heads, of which two versions exist (one for which Oursler was the model, the other modelled by Tracey Leipold), resides in the fact that the heads appear here as, at the same time, absolutely individual and yet, in part, identical, so that a single glance cannot take in all their movements at one time. Here, the ‘Multiple Personality Disorder’ reaches its extreme point, concentrated in the changing expressions that all together, and one by one, is communicated by these dull black and white heads.

Or, a head that looks like it has been abandoned among many other things in a corner of an exhibition, tilted towards the ground, with two chiffon ears added to its fine oval form. A head invaded by programmes that substitute themselves systematically for its despairing features. 

Or another, quite other, immense face hung, like Judy’s effigy, under the exterior arch of a museum (‘Untitled (Meteor)’, 2004). The particularity of this hastily-made plaster form is to show a damaged face that just as soon recalls the torn faces of the criminals in Michaux’s ‘Pays de la magie’ as it does certain enduring images from cinema: the burnt face that emerges from beneath the wax mask in Michael Curtiz’s ‘The Wax Museum’, or that of the final painting in Albert Lewin’s ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’. Its particular fantastical quality comes from the fact that each of the eyes, like the mouth, is treated autonomously, each having a life of its own; and so the disjunction between heads and bodies that is common to Oursler here takes place with atrocious impact in a single entity.

I think of two further heads (‘Shock Rock’, 2002). White, naked, lovingly oval, identical, luminescent, each set on the ground, one on its side, the other upright, pressed against each other, all alone, in a park, under a white arch. They moan, talk, possibly to themselves, from the very depths of their identity. People sit on benches set out as if for a small open-air theatre. Others circulate, passing by.

As we see in these previous examples, and as had already been suggested by an element of the dispositif for ‘Judy’, Oursler’s art of multiples and of populated worlds is also an art that looks out from the museum towards the city and public spaces. In their very principle, his installations already tend towards occupying institutional spaces in order to arrange their elements so as to create between the visitors and Ousler’s figures a complicity of surprise and projective recognition that ranges from amusement to dread: one recalls ‘Switch’ (1996) with its creatures scattered throughout the Pompidou Centre, its “Twin Philosophers” speculating atop a girder, and its “Emotion” doll stuck recumbent beneath the escalator; or the elements of “The Watching” (1992) whose sexual violence set them tumbling down the staircase of the Kassel Fredericianum for Documenta IX. One might also cite, more recently, a dispositif destined to doubly attract its spectators (‘Braincast’, 2004). 

Were one to ride the escalator of the Seattle Public Library, one descends the length of a partition which for a large part of its length was opened up, partly shredded, in order that Oursler was able to arrange, in something between a grotto and an aquarium, the figures towards which one moves: two extremely naked, feminine egg-shaped faces, an eyeball, a gaping mouth, an ear, a ghostly head. In the deep background faces are also projected onto the internal partition that becomes visible. Finally, right in the middle, a large round window allows one to make out, on the other side of this group of figures, other spectators who, from an adjoining corridor, gather at the window to see from their side the spectacle from a completely different angle as well as its spectators filing past and occasionally talking to the fictional creatures.

As a call towards the outside world, prepared for by such complicities, ‘Window Project’ (1993) was a turning point. Tony Oursler was emphatic about this, about the desire to escape the video-spectator’s passivity, to reach a different public, to find a substitute for the frozen images of advertising by bringing them to life with sound and movement. So, one must imagine three women, three models (Constance De Jong, Karen Findlay, Kim Gordon) whose large, blue-tinted images, in turn either close-shots or close-ups, play on a window-screen giving directly onto the street and who talk to the visitors, asking all manner of questions. Here one discovered all over again, paradoxically, obviously because of light conditions, the reality of the night-time screening (playing from dusk to the middle of the night) but open and aleatory. 

Such is the perspective that is redeployed in what is the most ambitious and above all most synthetic of works among all the dispositifs so far imagined by Oursler, ‘The Influence Machine’ (2000). For it is the city itself, via two prestigious locations (Madison Square Park in New York and Soho Square in London), which becomes the multiple screen and the sound-space (with music courtesy of Tony Conrad) of a gigantic happening openly intended to cover the programme of ‘An Optical Timeline’ and to present it by every possible mise-en-scène to the visitor-cum-stroller who, by chance or volition, converged there. The relationship that Oursler established, among so many other connections, between two ‘influence machines’ clearly illuminates his artistic project: on one hand, Francis Hauksbee’s machine, at the beginning of the 18th century, which was destined to produce static electricity and whose mysterious frozen luminosity prefigured the cathode tube and hence television; on the other hand, a mechanical machine, whose origin has been described by Victor Tausk, but taking the form of psychic projection conceived by the schizophrenic in order to explain the long-distance control of which he feels himself the victim. It’s a similar back-and-forth that is crystallised, this time over several years in the middle of the 19th century, in Samuel Morse’s invention of the telegraph and the alphabet derive conceived by Kate Fox capable of putting her in contact with the spirit of a dead person and which thus inaugurated the era of American spiritualism. But in the elementary and subtle articulation that Oursler makes glimmer around the word ‘medium’, between psychic communication and telecommunication, there are in fact three series: technological inventions, mind-body imaginings and dispositifs of spectacle (becoming with cinema and then video and beyond, art forms also). And it’s in this way that his own influencing machine - as much through what its texts say as through its projected images and its development of sound and music - combines the Fantasmagoria of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson which, from the end of the 18th century was characterised by its movement of images and smoke, and the real-virtual space-time of the internet in a new form of ‘expanded cinema’ that the inclusion the spectator-stroller transforms into an unexpected genre of living spectacle. 

It’s no use wanting to describe too precisely what one could see and experience in the two hours of the spectacle between 6pm and 8pm over thirteen consecutive evenings thanks to the five installations combined in Madison Square Park. But the main part of it was as follows. On one hand, the faces of effigies, projected following the path of a camera manipulated live, incorporated into the landscape of the park. When, after long sweeping paths across the ground, these faces merge with the trees and reach their apex where they stop moving, they present their supreme character: the ghost. On the other hand, two of these faces (Tracy Liepold and Sidney Lawrence), in a reactivated memory of Robertson serially invoked, are projected on to two screens of plentiful smoke: these already well-known images are among the most inventive and troubling to have been cast onto a screen, because they take shape through the same process which continually leads to their own disappearance. The words, for example, pronounced by their giant lips are swallowed by their mouths even as the sound continues. The staging in depth of the faces is striking; as if two images could dialogue with each other through their insubstantiality in an inconceivable form of shot/counter-shot. In short, these images, passing through indescribable states, are just as much shots full of emotion. But let us also note, the head in profile knocking, with a dry sound, at the trunk of a tree, an immense fist beating at the side of a building at a roadside corner. Spirits from beyond; images from the here below. Finally, giant words, in a visible echo of those already audible, among an intense confusion of voices, scroll interminably suspended above the ground. ‘The Influence Machine’ is a kind of total work of art whose modesty as well as its playfulness that is offered to the passive but free participants, defend it against the worn-out concepts and poses of art.

It is a specific property of dispositifs to be of variable size, made to the measure of their organising abstract ideas and to the fullness of their possible reality. Thus Dan Graham’s ‘Cinema 81’, a model of 57 x 57 x 61cms, with its mini-Super 8 projector just as easily rhymes and echoes the biggest cinemas in the world. In Oursler’s work, where the model has a function which has expanded in the present, because of its projective capacity and new links with architecture, one is captivated by the energy linked to the changes in scale, just as much by the capacity of migration from one mode of the work to the other. One moves here, with no discontinuity, from the tiny doll to the giant, as much as from the installation-city to the CD-Rom. And this latter is itself the example of an accentuated migration, since ‘Fantastic Players’ has been, alternately, a live radio programme, an installation and a web site, before finding its final virtual form as a CD-Rom. 

The agony of Oursler’s work is fiction, or rather narration, the story on which the fiction could depend, which at the same time as being credited is continuously destroyed. Each effigy thus has its own story, scraps of personal-impersonal stories torn from the array of feelings and human events of their socio-cultural formation. “Evidence of a Narrative Meta System. The function of the NMS can only be described by its effects on the lives of its hosts and by the traces left of its adjacent ebb and flow (flux and reflux) as they emerge through psycho-mimetic technologies. The NMS, combined with these technologies, acts like a constructive acid and dissolves the psychic boundaries to form the Screenworld. “What’s happened to my body?” The Screenworld has enabled the natural ecosystem to be taken over by the artifical ‘Echo-System’”

The CDRom “Fantastic Prayers” could be the programme derived from such a statement. Conceived with Constance De Jong (words) and Stephen Vitiello (music), it presents itself as “the description of an urban landscape into which is inscribed the memory of lives lived, objects possessed or abandoned, and places inhabited.” It can appear as somewhat in the margins of the oeuvre, in the sense that we see little of the “dummies” and “dolls”, little of their modes of appearance, of their worlds, except for the icon of the eye on which one must click, the programme doesn’t lead to properly identify the characters or situations in the scenario of the CDRom; rather, across its “saturated environments”, in a sort of grand game often at the limits of enigma, it involves its manipulator in a multiplicity of points of view determined by transformation of places, irruptions of micro-events and the ways in which the images are composed. The ‘Ludlow Street’ sequence, for example, exhausts all the possibilities offered by a crossroads on the East Side of New York. Depending on the movements of the mouse, one advances suddenly and chaotically in a certain segment of the street, towards a certain passer-by, towards a certain house, door or window. As if the programme was miming the possible actions of an embodied look captured through fragments of the reality of this stretch of the city. When one learns that, for ten years, Tony Oursler had his studio in a store on Ludlow Street, this moment of the CDRom becomes a self-portrait in disguise in which each of its visitors at that time might recognise themselves, for example, through their own movements in getting their bearings on leaving the subway. In a completely different way, the seventh sequence, “Narratorium”, involves its looker in superimposed layers of many varied images, building themselves up and breaking themselves down via the small squares on which one has only to click to bring forward another layer through a stacking that seems never to end. 

The eye machine is guided by the hand. It  thus becomes the active partner of these eyes of fiction which across so many dispositifs make of Oursler’s innumerable creatures the heroes and heroines of an immense documentary epic on contemporary reality of which technology is the fabric and the abstract heart. His friend Tony Conrad has defined well this force of redoubling and multiplication of corporeal and psychic individuality forever lost in the neutrality without end of its objects – as happens in Michaux, Beckett, and in the Gombrovicz of “Cosmos”: “The way in which Tony has succeeded in something unique in the history of representing the individual is to have offered to perception the individual as, at the same time, heroic and totally mutant, so that it can be played by a shadow or a condom or a ball of paper or a doll.”. Two of Oursler’s best commentators have been able to say to what extent this process, involving a continual conflict between the human animal and his machine, underpins the ethical dimension which is perhaps proper to a systematic exposure to the dispositifs: “Tony Oursler’s ghostly characters could thus constitute the body’s last attempt at revenge on this technology – the last battle in the war between nature and culture.”

There is an image that might form the nucleus of all those images, and that thus acts as a mise-en abyme of the entire body of work. The final section of “Fantastic Prayers”, “Empathy Wheel”, confines itself to an image made up in its centre by the vertical oval of a little face wreathed in a blur on which converges fifteen oblique sections making up a beam of colours. In each section of this beam there is a little ball which, when they are all taken together, describe a discontinuous horizontal oval. Point to each ball and the expression changes on the face of Tracy Leipold, who has long been Oursler’s model or favourite actress. Clicking provokes a mimed development of the chosen expression. As if she held, there, all at once, every role she has incarnated over so many years through so many figures and dolls, in so many installations bought to life by her multiple personality. For, to play the full range of the game, or just to follow - with a little skill, as fast as one can – the outline formed by the balls, amounts to arranging a gamut of human emotions.

Translated by Chris Darke