All photos credited as: Installation view: Tony Oursler: High, Lisson Gallery, London 3 September, 3 October 2008. Photo: Ken Adlard. Courtesy of the artist and Lisson gallery
Tony Oursler portrays a growing 21st century phenomena in a witty and sometimes dark surrealist manner. Delving into the cheap industries built around our modern life, polluting our society and our brains, the ‘quick fix’ highs that are part of everyday existence.
The Lisson Gallery has placed key old works alongside 16 new ones to present Oursler’s fantastic ‘all senses covered’ spectacles in the right context.
From Internet gambling, downloading girls on your mobile, to cigarettes and beer. A load of seedy junk, is summed up in Scratch which projects four film snippets rotating on three white panels. Someone scratching out an instant lottery card, a finger repeatedly pressing the delete button on a keyboard, a tongue swallowing some sort of prescription pill and a hand rearranging a sad lot of possessions which amount to a couple of keys, one family photo, some cigarettes etc.
These anonymous hands represent anyone’s hands.Mr Joe Blog’s hands, whose life is mundane and should really get out more.
The brilliant Winston,Camel,Salem,Marlboro is an arrangement of different sized columns each with a cigarette projected onto them, burning and un-burning. The ever-present addiction of the ‘three-minute-fix-life-killing’ beauty that is the modern day cigarette. Here it is in all its’ oversized glory. The unfaltering stupidity of the cheep fix exposed.
Sex and seduction too is part of our throw-away society. Cropping up in 121 a huge Magnum ice cream being seductively licked by tongue and lips (sex as advertising fodder), or Cherry Nokia a mobile phone with scantily clad girls prancing around (sex as a quick moneymaking scam). Remote, tacky and unsatisfying. Or the bizarre. Liquid, is a video of a woman with red liquid poured down her throat till she chokes and ungracefully splurts it out played in rewind on a loop. Or perhaps this film is more to with consumerism.
Consumerism is an issue constantly tacked by artists; here Oursler puts a sometimes eerie and sometimes cheeky spin on things.
Money talks or at least the queen does on a projected oversized ten pound note. “Fair exchange is all I ask” she garbles, “increased tolerance slowly over time”, if the queen could talk on a tenner I’m sure this is exactly what she would be saying.
But this is not the full story. You can’t neatly put these works pigeonholes without untidy bits falling out.
Interwoven in this general premise are some works that are perplexing and incomprehensible. Take ASL; floral wallpaper with a ghostly clown figure projected on it – talking in random broken sentences, a separate projection of an ear, and on the wall behind the huge profile of a woman’s green face also talking. Are they having a conversation? If they are only they can understand it. Oursler poses these questions with no real answer. Perhaps this conversation has no meaning and that is the point or not the point. If that makes sense. Perhaps as humans we search for meaning where there is none?
His use of projectors gives his work a purposely-illusive quality. If you walk in front of a projector your shadow breaks the picture up, it is all a front, a hallucination, a sham. Exactly like these cheap highs.
Is this possibly a comment on today’s subversive art too? There are several collages, which combine painting on wood, scratch cards, photos and LCD monitors. Beer fizzes up on one while the painting suggest money; one has the eBay logo and words from an email site painted on them and uses imagery of someone eating food seductively.
These are painted with the standard of a GCSE student – surely a purposeful thing? Is art not about consumerism too? Physically cheap products are combined to create what we call art and are sold for millions – perhaps the biggest con of all?
1 Comment
September 22, 2008 at 4:36 pm
Awesome! I love the light effects! Especially the cigs – they incarnate death