Tony Oursler, Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some) NYC Version, 2005, installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

The most surprising thing when Tony Oursler greeted me at his door was that I’d never seen him before. We hadn’t previously met, but we had so many friends in common that I was sure we must have been in the same places at the same time, maybe backstage at a Sonic Youth or Tony Conrad concert, but just had never connected, and that when the time of our interview appointment came I would recognize his face and think, “Oh, you’re Tony Oursler.”

Oursler is best known as a “video artist,” but at this point “multimedia artist” would be more accurate. His recent installations, like Thought Forms at Metro Pictures, Sound Digressions in Seven Colors at Nyehaus, and Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some) at the Metropolitan Museum of Art have combined video, sound, music and poetry to create environments that truly reflect the dissolving boundaries of twenty-first-century culture. This is something Oursler has been building toward since his single-channel video works of the late ’70s and early ’80s, and other activities like the band the Poetics he had with Mike Kelley. Like Kelley and Dan Graham, he drew inspiration from punk and proto-punk music but continued to work in the art world, whereas other art students of his generation, like Christian Marclay and Kim Gordon, felt the pull of the late-’70s underground rock clubs and abandoned the galleries, at least temporarily, for the music scene. Studio in particular underlines Oursler’s emphasis on collaboration; inspired by Courbet’s painting The Artist’s Studio: a real allegory in a seven year phase in my artistic and moral life (1855), it includes videos of dozens of his friends and colleagues and even incorporates art works by them. Also notable is a cooperative venture by Dan Graham, Oursler, Rodney Graham, Laurent P. Berger, Bruce Odland and Japanther called Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, initially a live-performance puppet show and now an installation at the Whitney Biennial. An “interview” with Oursler, an artist who has collaborated extensively, is almost by definition a symbiotic endeavor.

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Issue 96 Summer 2006