A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for transferring personalities from one person's body to...
Blood and transcendence are themes that permeate Sucker, with its incarnations of religious iconography and sexuality. Life and death, good and evil are evoked as the incantatory voiceovers and sordid images make reference to communion, transfusions, bloodbaths, bloodlust, vampires and the specter...
As guardians of the cultural torch, theme parks and museums herd millions of thrill-seekers through a mental haze towards a re-shaped history and a sketchy future. Here objects and environment become one. A souvenir is purchased and relocated in the home; it is used to unlock the crowded and carbon...
In EVOL (love spelled backwards), the audience is voyeur, peering into the delirious and erotic dreams of a young man (Oursler). We drift with him through anecdotes that poke fun at the disparity between the culturally accepted stereotypes of sex and love we are taught as children and the realities...
9/11 is a first-hand, harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath, as observed by the artist. As the tragedy unfolds, Tony Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on the ground in Lower Manhattan. Oursler began...
Heretic is composed from the outtakes of Joe Gibbons's no-budget feature The Genius, set to John Zorn's Naked City "soundtrack" album Heretic, and recomposed as a satire on Psychotherapy. Features original narration performed by Frank Snider. A study of editing and its relation to the mechanics of...
A series of reflections on New York City by key figures of its prominent art scene. The City is considered in light of the history, influence and audience of its art scene and the relationship the artists have with the city. With the participation of Ross Bleckner, Ann Craven, Peter Halley, Donald...
The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in response to the last frame of the previous minute.
As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave the cuckoo’s nest and reluctantly face the...
"Oursler’s thematic concerns betray classic Freudian anxieties about sex and death. In Grand Mal, the hero takes a convoluted odyssey through a landscape of disturbing experiences. The video’s free association includes, "digressions about the difference between salt and sugar and a version of...
Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular haunt of theirs was legendary nightclub...
The Loner is a psychosexual journey through the dark landscapes of Oursler's insular narrative universe. The tape's paranoid, tormented protagonist — who is represented by such objects as a spoon and a water-filled sack — wanders through a hostile dreamspace of macabre obsessions and sexual...
Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, Garage Sale II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfil their desires through prosthetics, masturbation, manipulation and S&M.
Investigates middle class family life, subsuming themes of love, marriage, sex, greed, and mishap under an existential query into values and meaning. The characters, fashioned out of two diamond-shaped pieces of cardboard, become embroiled in a series of rather loosely linked chronological events.
Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?
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AWGTHTGTWTA (Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?) is one of a recent series of single-channel video works in which Oursler explores the idea of the "chorus." Here Oursler asked high school and middle school students in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood, many of whom are recent...
Life of Phillis is one of Oursler's earliest video narratives. In this psychosexual, low-tech epic, Oursler creates an outrageous theatrical world, fashioning characters from unlikely found objects. Willfully primitive, often grotesque, and crafted with an ingenious visual shorthand, Life of...
Spinout is an apocalyptic tale of a world spinning out of control to nowhere. Space travel, astrology, spirals, the universe, catastrophe and madness are recurring visual and narrative themes in this expressionistic theater. "Of course we're all a little scared of the dark," says Oursler in his...
Told with raw eccentricity and grotesque humor, The Weak Bullet is an ironic tale in which the trajectory of the eponymous bullet propels a bizarre narrative of social rupture and sexual paranoia.
