studies of a troubled world: The drawings of tony oursler

Ian Berry

1999

Losing control, whether by drugs or other chemical contaminants or through the influence of advertising and television, is a thread that weaves through much of Oursler’s eerie and engaging artwork. Drawing has served as an integral part of his multimedia output from I’ll Get You, a loose pencil sketch on a torn-out page of notebook paper made in 1970 when the artist was thirteen years old, to collaborations and several different series. The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of Oursler’s interest in his works on paper, inspired in part by the artist’s first drawing retrospective exhibition held at the Kasseler Kunstverein in Kassel, Germany. The accompanying catalogue, which resembles an artist’s book, was conceived and designed by Oursler as a visual record of the many forms of work the artist considers drawing. As an introduction to the plates, Oursler selected quotes from influential figures such as John Baldesarri, Otto Dix, William Burroughs, and Marshall McCluhan to be printed amongst his own writings. Oursler writes, 

Oursler continually makes drawings to serve a variety of functions such as storyboards, sketches, props for videos, and simply to record ideas, much like a diary. His drawings are more spontaneous and less controlled than his painting, sculpture, or even improvisational performance and video. In their immediacy, his drawings manifest what we consider to be the medium’s most recognizable function and feel: drawings exist as the product of the most direct connection between mind and hand. Roughly executed and unencumbered by the need to be finished works, these pages are where Oursler’s mind is most laid bare, most open to the inner spaces of creativity—and in his case, the farthest reaches of the psyche. 

Common elements of drugs, money, sex, and obsessive fears revolve around a central autobiographical voice. In one scene two anxious, disembodied eyes watch as two hands pull at a wishbone; the caption reads, “Wait—don’t crack it, I’ve got a wish.” Two cartoonish thought balloons float above, one with a naked female torso and the other with a handful of dollars. Another page includes, “You may never know what will become of your actions—let’s say you leave a sheet out on the clothes line and you live on a corner. This may cause an accident at your intersection.” The captions provide us with glimpses at the over-the-top paranoias that help uncover the dysfunction of the world around us: “Sanity is suspect.” Television, advertising, and both physical and psychological poisons invade our world. Oursler chooses to dive headfirst into the abyss. He enters as an artist-observer taking notes on our everyday maladies but occasionally gets dragged so far undercover that it becomes difficult to decipher where control begins again. 

During the late 1970s, while a student at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, Oursler began forming his mature body of work. There he was first introduced to the work of William Wegman, who taught at California State University at Long Beach and who also saw the rich connections between video and drawing and delighted in the immediate play afforded by both: “By drawing I could deal with really far-fetched content, subjects that were awkward for photo or video recording. Drawing opened up the realm of possibilities.” Wegman’s quick one-liners with their subtle critique of 1950s America and 1960s minimalism engaged Oursler by both their style and content. 

Fellow artists Raymond Pettibon and Jim Shaw have also exploited drawing as a means to create powerfully twisted visions of our world. Pettibon’s captioned sheets and early punk album covers and comics and Shaw’s lengthy compilation of pencil-drawn dreams include what critic Benjamin Buchloh recently referred to in Pettibon’s work as “the vast pandemonium of sexual disorders, pathologies, and phantasmagorias.” The fractured subject matter of their drawings reflects the cacophony of contemporary culture that similarly drives Oursler’s images of characters in distress.

Oursler comes from a family of writers; his grandfather Fulton Oursler wrote The Greatest Story Ever Told, and his father, also Fulton, is a former editor of Reader’s Digest and continues to edit journals. This lineage is exposed in his own penchant for creative writing, often incorporated in his many pages of sketches and notes. One page alone includes Dreams, Death, Religion, Ghosts, Hallucinations, and Psychic Experiences. The stories underneath each category form the outlines of narratives that may be developed further and acted out in single-channel video, or remain as notes unrealized in any other form, such as “Problems of a Man,” “Join the Paranoid World,” and “Things Tony Has Done in Other’s Dreams,” all from the early 1980s.

Oursler’s works on paper remained as loose sketches, writings, ephemeral painted cardboard props, and more refined storyboards until the early 1990s, when he embarked on several watercolor series: Designer Drugs, Closet Paintings, and Camcorders. All feature finished studies of single objects, often without accompanying captions or texts. Designer Drugs is a pun on the recreational drug fad of the 1980s, with images that mix floral stencil patterns and chemical diagrams of the drugs. Heroin, for example, is paired with a brightly colored country border pattern and suggests the activity that might be occurring behind the faade of a smartly clean New England home. Closet Paintings is a large series concerning poisons or things hidden away, such as PC-7 epoxy, prescription pill containers, shoe polish, feminine wash, spot remover, Wild Turkey whiskey, and Coca-Cola. Prominently featured is the packaging of each product, with brand name and logo; advertising is just as poisonous as the corrosive chemicals in soft drinks and the toxic solvents in shoe polish. The Poison Candies series, also created in the early 1990s, similarly features brightly copied logos and packaging but adds almost-hidden details of tampering and decay. Each piece is a wooden, three-dimensional object, hung on the wall or placed along the floor, that reveals some sort of creepy disintegration, alluding to Halloween candy scares and drugstore product recalls. The Camcorders series is a more sober, monochrome series of watercolors of then-current models of video recorders. Each camera floats on the page like the catalogue advertisement from which its image was taken. 

Drawing is often the best means for Oursler to visualize the collided and morphed images made by mixing television, movies, science-fiction, historical research, advertising, and all the other sources that flow in and out of the artist’s consciousness. The collaged nature of his influences manifests itself physically in two recent drawing series, created by taking carefully chosen images from encyclopedias, manuals, and newspapers and projecting them via overhead projector onto twenty-by-twenty-four-inch sheets of paper. The images are painted or sketched one at a time onto the paper with acrylic, pencil, or pen, alternately by the artist and an assistant. 

One of these most recent series includes images of nineteenth-century projection devices superimposed over skulls; the other is a monochrome series of six of these early projectors. These drawings are born from the artist’s current research into the history of projection and the curious reappearance of devil imagery found in these sources. As in the Camcorders and Poisons series of the early 1990s, single objects are presented head-on or in profile in the center of the page. But in the recent drawings, these central objects are overlapped by other elements—maps, electrical grids, and TV news anchors—that swim together in a new mass of imagery, symbolic of the media onslaught we wade through each day. The seemingly random combination of images from unrelated sources mirrors Oursler’s interest in channel surfing and in the proliferation of public-access cable television programming. 

Oursler has described his drawings as attempts at “capturing an idea.” Viewed separately, his sketches and notes form a hallucinatory stream of stories, fantasies, and dreams; taken together, they reveal the tension that fuels his work in other media. Oursler’s own heading from an early 1980s notebook illuminates this tension: “Deep psychological creativity and underlying themes of essential human hopes and fears.”

Ian Berry received his M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and is currently assistant curator at the Williams College Museum of Art.