The New Generation of Shadows: Mediums, Automatons, and Liminal Insight in the Work of Tony Oursler

By Thyrza Nichols Goodeve
Published in Kunstverein Hannover
May. 1, 1998

"Sharing in the trickery of the automaton is merely another way to define ourselves as human, that is as both being and nothingness, presence and absence: the automaton is, in another way, our mirror...or our evil eye." 
- J.C. Beaune

"All our ideas about life must be revised in a period when nothing any longer adheres to life: it is this painful cleavage which is responsible for the revenge of things..."
- Antonin Artaud

At the end of the 19th century, in the period after the Civil War continuing well into the twentieth century, a liminal figure appeared in American culture. Part charlatan, part bridge between the phenomenal world and the one that eludes and mystifies, Mediums were shadow-figures believed to channel and speak with the dead. Masked in elaborate scientific systems, religious manias, technological wonders, mystical reveries, endless therapeutic investigations and a whole arsenal of theatrical visions, the Medium claimed to receive messages from an other world. Translator and trickster; analyst and magician, he or she knew how (and when) to manipulate and conjure. Gimmicks, bells and whistles, and whimsy bred of profit and technology were the tools of this seer's trade.

Tony Oursler is a latter-day Medium, a channeler and seer of media. He serves as a conduit to the past lives of the many forms he employs (for example, puppetry and burlesque in regards to video; theater in sculpture; cinema in CD-Rom), and allows such forms to speak, act, and animate the corners and doorways of a gallery or museum space with whispers and directives such that solid (physical space) melts into air (virtual). His video projection automatons are alchemists operating in a nether world, not of a technological unconscious, but the unconscious of the technological. They represent an entire matrix of spirits and zealots; repressed, inanimate material that has yet to be recognized in the interstices between video, sculpture, cinema, performance, virtual technologies and physical reality.

And yet, there are people who view the media he works in as just dumb, inanimate mediums. Such means are perceived to be mere matter - or tool (like technology) - deployed in the service of imagination, intellect, brute ambition, or madness. They serve but do not think or act. But Oursler shows us how such things imagine and move. Working across media, and with the technological, Oursler uses sculpture, painting, photography, video, drawing, video projection, CD-Rom, audio technology not for what they are but for what, indeed, they may not yet have been. The area of his expertise, the zone that animates his work, is the liminal as opposed to the fundamental, the space where a medium "Is" not. Under his spell, video is less about time and more about space - theatrical and staged; sculpture less about volume and more about narrative; drawing about painting and painting about motion and mass (but not gesture). The term he has invented for this is "meta-media" by which he emphasizes his interest in extending the definition of any one medium beyond its conventional use.1 His aim is to stretch an art form, bring it to life, not preserve some programmatic formalist ontology. We might call it liminal insight, a world where talking lights do not illuminate so much as yell and comment, where video art performs like abject puppet theater and documentary photographs turn New York garbage (Trash (Empirical), 1998) into allegorical sculptures.

Yet if any one convention could be said to link this seemingly disparate work, it is the theatrical as theorized by Antonin Artaud. For Artaud "the domain of the theater is not psychological but plastic and physical."2 It is also "not confined to a fixed language and form" but is about the "question of naming and directing shadows" to not only "destroy false shadows" but to prepare "the way for a new generation of shadows...."3 The shadow is a boundary figure caught between light and absence. It is a third form produced between the edges of the material and immaterial. In the new generation of shadows the theater is less the stuff of sheer drama or expression than of effort where "everything that acts is a cruelty." And, as Artaud put it, "it is upon this idea of extreme action, pushed beyond all limits, that theater must be built."4

Hysterical (1993) is extreme. It acts on the viewer. But it is not about the expression of human psychology. "Our" psychology is not on view but rather the squawking turmoil of a hybrid creature. Such odd little beings as those that appear in Flock (1996) are more than the sum of wood, paint and a video projection system. Familiar but uncanny (uncanny because familiar) they take us on a trip to the future, via the past (wooden mannequins) to a time where appliances and architecture will tell us how they feel. "What are you looking at?!?" shouts one of his video projection pillow heads (Getaway, 1994) as it glares out from underneath a mattress that crushes it into the floor. Such techno-theatrics are less about human inferiority and utterance than cyborg expressionism where the spaces between technologies are forced to speak, indeed even retaliate, against the position society has put them into.

THE ELECTRONIC FRONTIER, SHOOT THE GUN, 
DROP THE BOMB, FEED THE PIG...SHADOW, ORAL, 
LOW, CHANNEL...TIME, THINK...ALL OF A SUDDEN
SOMETHING NEW, UNKNOWN, COLD, VOLATILE5

Such articulate automatons are a new breed of actor. Part sculpture, part theater; part cinema and shadow they revolt, they comment, they give in, they require us to focus on the ruptures in our contemporary environment from their point of view.
In this sense Oursler's art is a techno-theatrics of cruelty. Not because it possesses "our" psychology but rather because he invents a psychology that is not ours, one predicated on the revenge of things. The disembodied, discrete beaming, breathing eyes - pupils darting about - in his 1996 show at Metro Pictures in New York, scan the world upon which they "feed" (as Oursler once put it). They are not anthropomorphic but living eyebeams; not reflections but entities that act on their own, extremely. The viewer walks among, around, into them- as though in the valley (or gallery) of death experiencing a new generation of shadows bred, as with Artaud's theater, of danger and laughter, rigor and cruelty. The double of Oursler's theater, its subject and object, is this techno-social landscape.

Listen to the Talking Light at Muenster (1998):

BRIGHTER! BRIGHTER! BRIGHTER! BRIGHTER! BRIGHTER!
100 PERCENT!
DON'T BE A DUMMY DIM WIT IDIOT BURN OUT
HAHA AAAHHHH HAA
LIGHT, SHADOW LIGHT, SHADOW LIGHT, SHADOW LIGHT, SHADOW...
LOOK AROUND YOU
EVERYTHING IS ALIVE IN THE LIGHT
LOOK INTO THE LIGHT
FOCUS ON THE LIGHT

A simple bare bulb, index of the moment of industrial invention, when electricity was first channeled in the service of man. Insight bred from the liminal gap between such a bulb and a room and a sound organ kit. In the hands of Tony Oursler you become the Medium, as the light responds to your movement. It tells you, ACCOMMODATE YOUR BODY. WHATEVER HAPPENS NOW IS BEAUTIFUL.6 Spirits return - vengeful, cruel, enlightening - ushering in a new generation of shadows.




1 Judith Bumpus, "Video's Puppet Master," Contemporary Visual Arts. Issue 15, 1997, 38.
2 Antonln Artaud, The Theater and its Double (New York: Grove Press, 1958 c 1938), 71.
3 Artaud, 12;51.
4 Antonln Artaud, The Theater and Crueltv in The Theater and its Double {New York; Grove Press, 1958 c 1938), 85.
5 Tony Oursler, Flock. 1996.
6 Tony Oursler, Talking Light at Muenster.