ONOUROWN

Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons 

1990, 45:40 min, color, sound

ONOUROWN addresses psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. Write the artists: "After years of being cared for in the hospital, Tony and Joe are forced due to budget cutbacks to leave the hospital, seek employment and live, for the first time in their lives, completely on their own. As part of their outpatient therapy they are asked to keep a video diary. Their footage, shot in auto-documentary style, describes the vicissitudes of their struggle to adjust to the so-called real world. They encounter myriad threats, real and imaginary: the mailman, Halloween goblins, their pet dog, a corpse in the woods, ghosts from the past, Plato and Socrates, and even each other, as each imagines the other is plotting to kill him."

With: Tony Conrad, Donald Burgy, Bob Gibson, Woody.