Tony Oursler at Metro Pictures - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Jan, 1995 by Michael Duncan

Tony Oursler presented a show packed with strange and funny sculptural portraits and still lifes, all employing projected video images of close-up faces or tiny nude figures. As anthropomorphic sculpture, these talking dolls, flowers and body parts are like Pop twists on the psychological eeriness of Gary Hill's Tall Ships, spiced with the Grand Guignol jokiness of horror movies like Re-Animator and Evil Dead II.

Oursler's terrain is the alienated physical body, familiar from the work of artists such as Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy. Oursler is more likely, however, to celebrate the physically discombobulated. The perpetually cranky girl in Getaway #2, her head stuck under a twin-bed mattress, snarls at everyone who walks by to leave her alone. The wariness of this stay-in-bed is justified by the plight of the projected video character in Broken, who stares out forlornly from under a pile of smashed-up chairs while emoting with a kind of sexually ecstatic pain. In another piece, a tiny nude figure projected onto a shroudlike cloth continually spins and falls, clumsily whirling her way into a state of dizziness. Also on view was a work in which a small video doll recites deadpan one-liners--"I never have stomach trouble"--taken from the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a test still used to diagnose psychological disorders.

In several outrageously perverse pieces Oursler revitalizes the genre of still life. Onto a bunch of silk flowers he projects a face that seems to struggle to escape from this culturally sanctified symbol. Ridiculously at odds with the usual meaning of a bouquet, this absurd floral arrangement hisses insults at the viewer: "You suck.... You weren't meant to be born.... You don't exist." In Organ Play #2, mayonnaise jars holding preserved animal internal organs are animated so that they appear to be having a conversation. A male mouth projected onto a heart argues with a pair of female lips that appears on a talking kidney; they debate the limitations of the physical body and provide an insider perspective on transplants and decomposition.

In Oursler's latest piece, Movie Block (Sony), he projects urban video footage onto two sides of a small white cube, thereby playing with the Minimalist sculptural tradition of the geometric solid. Cars speed along one side of the cube and zip around the corner in a kind of diptych Cinerama. Turning a Tony Smith into a cityscape is a bizarre and fascinating notion, and a demonstration of Oursler's wide-ranging sculptural invention.