"New York 1996"
"Eyes 1996"
Research Tony Oursler's projection sculpture to identify some of the ideas and methods he uses in his work.
How do you think the Enlightenment concepts of Science, progress, reason, individualism, empiricism, universalism, freedom and secularism can be applied to Oursler's work?
Refer to pages 96 and
Tony Oursler was born in 1957 in New York City. He grew up on New York’s Hudson River. He is married to the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries and still resides in New York City. Oursler is well known for his multimedia and installation art.
ReplyDeleteOursler work deals with such concepts and topics of mass media, personality disorders, and corporate power. He is best known for his unusual and cutting edge videos of weird painted dummies and manikins. Oursler’s work interacts with the viewer’s sense of compassion and feeling with the way he has created the piece and the images he has used. Most if not all of Oursler’s insulations are consistently disturbing which lead to them having immense popularity and critical compliments. Oursler’s work covers a range of artistic mediums such as
• Video
• Sculpture
• Installation
• Performance
• Painting
Oursler uses a range of different media and mediums in various works that this work becomes interesting and appealing and draws interest to the individual viewer. In many of Oursler’s work he has taken a main idea or objects such as eyes, mouths, and peoples faces and projects then and transforms them into very disturbing and irregular two or three dimensional objects and pieces of work. It is seen that Oursler takes common items that the individual would view daily like faces, and use them in his in my opinion unusual and strange work.
Individualism is a key concept from the enlightenment which means, “The individual is the starting point for all knowledge and action, and the individual reason cannot be subjected to a higher authority”. This can be seen in most of Tony Oursler’s work as each of his work uses various media such as video, projection image, or painting but his subjects of personality disorder or corporate power are all used even though the key media is different.
Reference:
http://tonyoursler.com/text.php?navItem=text&subsection=All%20Text&page=1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VBkLpcPJP-E&feature=related
http://www.csw.art.pl/new/99/ousler_e.html
Extract from: Hamilton, P. (1992). The Enlightenment and the birth of social science, in Hall, S. & Gieben S. (eds.)