Optic nerve - video art, Tony Oursler, Metro Pictures, New York, New York - Cover Story

Art in America, June, 1996 by Holland Cotter

Magnified eyes blinked and shifted and stared around the darkened gallery in Tony Oursler's recent Metro Pictures show. One floating in a corner was red and swollen and wept unconsolably; another, at floor level, looked fixed and vacant. A third, suspended high overhead, darted restlessly in its socket as if tracking a moving target. The sound of a faint static crackle filled the air.

The eyes - 13 in all - were color video images projected onto large, hollow, white-painted fiberglass globes; the noise issued from a variety of accompanying taped sound tracks. Together they marked a forward step in the career of a 37-year-old New York-born artist who presented a related and much-praised series of installation combining video, sculpture. conceptual and performance art in the same gallery two seasons ago. Those earlier video-sculptures, which quickly became fixtures on the international exhibition circuit (Oursler's work has so far enjoyed a higher profile in Europe than in America), were lively, garrulous, theatrical affairs. Composed of stuffed cloth dummies onto which talking heads were projected, each was accompanied by a taped script written by Oursler himself.

The result was art that commanded attention, literally. "Hey, you!" shouted one male face to no one in particular from across the room. "What are you looking at?" snapped an angry woman trapped under a mattress. "I can't tell whether I'm alive or dead," moaned a male face picked like a laboratory specimen in a glass jar. Each character was trapped in its own Punch-and-Judy sitcom, apparently beaten into submission by malign fate.

The often assaultive tone and jumped-up volume of the work owed a big debt to Bruce Nauman's video installations, while its mock-pathetic content made bow to Mike Kelley, a friend and collaborator from Oursler's student days at the California Institute of the Arts. All three artists share a their target late-20th-century American culture, and all three find their distant source the gene pool of European Surrealism.

Oursler's new installations continue to traffic in Surrealist weirdness, but they also move in a new direction. Visually stripped down, verbally less assertive, they rise above the level of anecdote and buttonholing immediacy to the cooler, more suggestive realm of metaphor.

The figure has been reduced to a single eye shot close up in brief video loops (several of the eyes belong to artists - Gary Simmons, Kiki Smith and Constance DeJong - while Oursler's regular performer, Tracy Leipold, appears more than once). When one stood among the eyeballs they had the look of a single installation: a technological Argos, maybe, or a watchful galaxy. In fact, each sphere was a discretely conceived and titled piece and, as a query to the gallery revealed, each eye's pupil and iris holds a flickering reflection of what the sitter was looking at when filmed.

In most cases, the object of attention, it turns out, was video or film itself in one form or another - a television show, a porn movie, a video game. In the piece titled Daytime, Simmons channel-surfs through a string of TV cartoons and reruns@ canned laughter and theme jingles make the installation tape a lunatic hash, though his eye seems barely to register the rapid changes of fare. In Trance, Smith watches a video performance by the rock group Sonic Youth, her impassive gaze contrasting to the heated music. Some of the performers, responses are more animated. Kristin Lucas's glance skitters around frenetically as she follows the Atari game in front of her, and William Trembly's underlighted eye in Eye Witness alternately squints and widens as he switches from one adrenalin-pumping TV news report of violence to another.

Retinal activity is also lively in the three pieces which take multiple personality disorders as their theme. In one the watching eye reflects a TV screen playing a 1957 Hollywood potboiler about schizophrenia, titled Three Faces of Eve@ another concentrates on Sally Field's performance in the made-for-TV Sybil, whose title character alternates identities with dazzling alacrity. The results are funny but also vaguely disquieting. The repeated but understated hints of violence and the emotional distancing of aural and visual sensation received at second (and for the show's viewer, third) hand through the filter of technology suggest that "vision" in Oursler's reading has complex meanings.

As part of a generation of artists that grew up on a steady diet of television, Oursler is keenly aware of the way that medium shapes our perception of the world. The eyes in his installations are anxious or dull or entranced, but in almost every case the stimulant they're reacting to is artificial. Whether the subject is an evening newscast or a movie about psychosis, fact and fiction blur; reality has the flavor of a mini-series peppered with commercial breaks. And as to the notion of the eye as the window of the soul: does that weeping eye in the corner belong to a friend in distress or to an actor trained to cry on cue? It is impossible to tell.