May 1999 - April 2000
Galleries

Tony Oursler has plumbed the depths of psychic fallout from overexposure to television for the better part of his career. His interest in people infected by television led him to infect people himself, using video as a microscope to magnify neurosis and psychosis in his characters. His "video effigies," which may be seen at the Williams College Museum of Art, elicit empathy, laughter, and giddy fear from viewers in part because they seem trapped in the medium of video. As the proverbial "primitive" has been said to fear, the camera has stolen their souls and detains them in the ether. Oursler places little projectors a foot or two away from small head-like orbs onto which he projects anxiety-ridden or psychotic video faces, limiting their existence to a small cone of light.

Oursler's interest in the seeming dark powers of contemporary visual media (television, video, and film) led him to undertake a search for their origins. What was the first time someone's image traveled through a lens and emerged metastasized at the other end? The search took him through the earliest days of movies, to the odd-ball optical contraptions of the Victorian era, to an endless number of books entitled Optics written in the 19th, 18th, as far back as the 13th centuries, and finally to the camera obscura, first used thousands of years earlier.

The standard histories of the camera obscura are usually accompanied by illustrations of an artist using one to make perspective drawings, a Renaissance man pursuing logical, scientific ends. The history that appealed to Oursler, however, begins in the Middle Ages and is shot through with unreason and magic. At that time and for centuries afterward, the camera obscura was used by scientist-black magicians. These proto-video artists, Oursler's artistic forebears, invited viewers into a darkened room to face a blank wall. Outside the room, these men staged pageants of various sorts, which were transmitted through a camera obscura (a small hole in the wall opposite the "screen" wall) for the crowd gathered inside, who may have responded to these projections as we do to Oursler's work today, with nervous laughter and giddy awe.

Many illustrations that Oursler saw of these camera obscuras were populated by devils frolicking in the (invisible) space of the transmission of light - seen by no one, but sensed by all. If early viewers were uncertain about the mechanics of the camera obscura, they were certain that something satanic happened in the process. At last we find a reason for the television-based neurosis seen in Oursler's earlier work, for our unease around the characters he has caged in video, and for the reticence of the camera-shy anthropological subject: dark powers (devils, psychosis, the Lacanian Real) lurk in the light.

Optics is a meditation on the transmission of light, its betwixt-and-betweeness, its invisible transmutation of the visible, and the magic in its mechanics. In one part of the installation, Oursler (mad scientist/black magician) decelerates the transmission of light through a lens to reveal devils in the ether. In another, he presents the exceptions to light's rules: the visible transmission of light in a rainbow, a symbol of change (of gender or fortune) or unattainable portals to other spaces (over the rainbow, at the end of the rainbow, a rainbow of ill-repute). In still another element, a small video figure travels a circuit of objects important to optic history, swimming around in an eyeball like a gold fish, or being refracted by a prism. In a corner of the room, a large, primitive camera, through which one can see and be seen, becomes disturbing for viewers made aware of the perils the journey through it holds.

Photo by Arthur Evans