My name is Tony Oursler, and we are in my studio in the Lower East Side, Manhattan, New York, USA, the globe. My studio functions in a unique way in that it’s a mix of a lot of different things. It’s got a lot of functions, because I’m constantly going from one thing to the next, which is what keeps it exciting for me. I’ll give you a little tour around, show you the different places where I make things and tell you what happens here, what kind of junk I have laying around to inspire me.
Let’s see. Here’s a glass of wine. Here’s an anthropomorphised root. Projection is one of the things I’m mostly known for – being able to project into different materials and spaces opened up a whole new language for me, and opportunity to develop installation and kind of fuse two things which generally were juxtaposed, and now kind of create a third space. And I’ve been working in that third space for many years.
[Trumpeting noise]
That’s a spirit trumpet – it’s collapsible – and it’s used to listen to spirits. My characters tend to exist in kind of existential spaces, somewhat tortured, struggling, and I suppose I struggle through the work and through the world to various understandings. Keep in mind there is a lot of humour in the work as well, so I’m not really a pessimist, you know.
And I do some drawing and painting over here. Here is something in progress. These are new … these are the miniature, some of the miniature things that I’m working on. The new work, really are kind of physical embodiments of a thought pattern, in a way, so I thought of them as little flow charts, and the more I worked on them with the rhythm of editing and the materials together to create these little worlds, in a way, they started to get the feeling of almost like a physical embodiment of a thought. So I like the idea of a flow chart, and this one is pretty funny. It’s how to solve problems. Does the damned thing work? Yes or no. Don’t fuck with it – or, did you fuck with it? If so, you’re a dumb shit. I love the idea that you could somehow technically describe human behaviour, I mean, essentially in this project. There is an absurdity to that, but also something fragile and human about the desire to understand ourselves.
