It is a great pleasure for ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum to be able to present the American video artist Tony Oursler’s spectacular sculptures. Tony Oursler (b. 1957) will be familiar to many on account of works such as “Unk”, which Oursler created for The 9 Rooms in ARoS in 2004. In the exhibition Face to Face, visitors to the museum can come face to face with the New York artist’s remarkable universe, in which Oursler, using humour as his tool, balances his art works on the borderline to madness.
The exhibition, which has been conceived in close collaboration with the artist as a result of a desire to explore the most important aspects of his seductive universe, presents 34 of Oursler’s masterpieces - large and small, old and new, together with works created specially for the exhibition in ARoS.
REMARKABE EXPEDITION
With Tony Oursler’s singular, almost living objects, we are presented with an untraditional exhibition of video art focusing on the interaction between public and work. Face to Face takes the visitor along on a remarkable expedition in the spirit of Alice in Wonderland, who is suddenly and unexpectedly drawn through a deep hole to emerge in a world in which everything can happen. We can be captured by the clinical interior of the exhibition in which white corridors lead visitors into a world of completely crazy, disturbingly amusing and fantastically impressive video installations. The staging of the exhibition mimics Oursler’s two-sided and slightly schizophrenic universe by being constructed in the form of a labyrinth in two sections. One section has twisting passageways clad with clinically white vinyl, rather like a mutated padded cell, while the other section is a dark but stringent labyrinth hiding fantastic secrets and reminiscent of a cross between a garden labyrinth and a rat laboratory.
EXPRESSION AND MIMICRY
The title of the exhibition, Face to Face, refers to the fact that a large proportion of Tony Oursler’s work is about the face and his interest in the way in which the face communicates feelings.
When his faces lack a nose, hair, ears or neck, it is because of a desire to discover how few of the elements in a face are necessary for us still to interpret it as a face – and for it still to be able to be expressive. By using the face, Tony Oursler opens the way to a large number of allusions ranging from elements deriving from areas ranging from the media via mass communication to psychology. It is about expression and mimicry. The focus of much of Tony Oursler’s work is thus our ability to read other people, to feel empathy or the lack of it.
BETWEEN HUMOUR AND MADNESS
Tony Oursler’s video art differs from much other video art in that he abandons the traditional screen and instead takes a leap out into advanced visual, performative and sound experiments inspired by visual art, the theatre and music. Tony Oursler has become known for the way in which he combines video with an array of physical objects encompassing such things as dolls, furniture and organic fibreglass forms. With the help of an effective series of images and sounds, these are brought to life by allowing speaking faces to emerge on the objects. This is a quite unique artistic tactic that is characteristic of Oursler’s huge range of works. By both visual and the auditive means, Tony Oursler has created a form of life that is both magical and humorous and at time frightening, in which dolls and other objects are brought to life. In this way, his art achieves a fascinating balance between humour and madness, reason and schizophrenia.
CATAGLOGUE
The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue of 178 pages in Danish and English with a foreword by the museum director, Jens Erik Sørensen, and an introductory text by the exhibition curator Lise Pennington. Ansa Lønstrup, Lecturer in the Institute of Aesthetics and Communication, writes about the sound aspect of Tony Oursler’s works, while Michael Amy, Professor of the History of Art in the College of Imaging Arts & Sciences in the Rochester Institute of Technology, writes on the attitude to the face in the light of the history of art. Tony Oursler himself writes a collage-like text on sources of inspiration for his work on “the face” and thus provides an insight into his long-standing interest in psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia and MPD (multiple personality disorder) and on the influence of television and the Internet on our view of the world and ourselves.
Tony Oursler has had a large number of solo exhibitions all over the world, most recently in venues including the PAC in Milan, the Jeu de Paume in Paris, MOMA in New York, Magasin 3 in Stockholm, the Whitney in New York and the Sammlung Goetz in Munich. He is represented in collections in for instance the Cartier Foundation in Paris, the Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, Los Angeles County Museum of Art in Los Angeles, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the MOMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Saatchi Collection in London and the Tate Gallery in London.
