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.

 

---

 

DTAOT: Combine (Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, All Over Again), 2005, installation at the Whitney Biennial 2006 with video, drawlings, notations and sound.

Alan Licht I just saw your video project DTAOT: Combine (Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, All Over Again) at the Whitney the other night. Your attachment of the word combine to the title was pretty timely, considering the Rauschenberg exhibition at the Met.

Tony Oursler Yeah, which I didn’t really know about, or maybe I subconsciously knew. I love Rauschenberg; his collapsing of media space was visionary. But the name was a blip. I like to use dictionaries and software to look for titles, and that just came up. It is such a beautiful word.

AL So it wasn’t a reference to the Rauschenberg show?

TO Not even close. It’s a sprawling collaboration with so many people, even the producers and the Whitney lost track! For DTAOT, Dan Graham had originally envisioned a live rock puppet show, and what we wanted to do was take elements of the project that could never make it into the live show, mostly my new texts and video footage and some live documentary stuff, and make a kind of suburban-mythological-sex-drug chill room. Then it developed into this double-layer projection that was a continuation of a film project I did with Kim Gordon and Phil Morrison [Perfect Partner, 2005]. In DTAOT, there are two high-definition projections that overlap on one screen. The idea of making a double exposure that actually happens with your eyes fascinates me. If you make one in a machine it halves everything, but doing it live has a crystalline effect. And the two channels combine randomly, which I’m really interested in. I discovered that the only way the overlap would work is if you had changing brightnesses in the video; otherwise they cancel each other out. So the whole thing has this cascading effect—things are getting brighter and darker all the time. And that causes a shifting of power from one projection to the other. It was a really fun process to do.

AL You also get this feeling of ebb and flow while you’re watching it; the idea washes over you.

TO That’s partly because we used 5.1 Surround Sound, which makes the music feel sculptural, enveloping.

AL The flow of images relates back to Rauschenberg, his famous quote about operating in the gap between art and life. That seems to be more prevalent now than ever. Walking around this year’s Whitney Biennial is like walking around New York on an average afternoon. There’s some window shopping, you see a little graffiti, and then maybe you stop in to see a movie, or go to a couple of galleries, and there’s a lot of music around. Even stuff like that [Tony’s cell phone rings in the background], the ring tone on your cell phone, so ubiquitous in daily life, has been incorporated into what’s permissible in a gallery or museum environment today. I’m wondering if the art world now is like reality TV. How wide or small is the gap between art and life?

TO That’s a really good question, because the issue in the ’70s was crossover, mainly between art and movies or music—it was everyone’s fantasy. And having done a little crossover myself, I found that the art world’s really not interested in it at all. I worked with Mr. Bowie around his ’97 tour doing the video stage sets and rock videos; it was a very collaborative and experimental moment for me. Also, I have a small part in the current U2 tour, projecting video into smoke live during their UN rights tribute. But somehow for the art world it’s gone too far. I’m sad to say that it may reflect the market side of things—there is no product, the interest stops there. On the other hand, real crossover’s a lot harder than people thought. A lot of artists thought it would be much easier to make TV shows or records or movies, and they found out it’s a much more disgusting environment than the art world, and that it’s much more difficult. But the idea of getting out of the art world to make better art because you reach people outside the class structures implied by the museum system is a dream that’s been embedded in many artists of my generation. Maybe they’ve chipped so much of the structure away that there’s no real definition left, and everything is possible. But that’s an older notion of crossover. What you’re talking about is much more interesting. It’s more about slipping into life, not the artist propped up on a stage in some way; it’s more in terms of public art, getting stuff out where it just flows in with the architecture of the city. I have two permanent projects finishing this year, one in Arizona and the other in Barcelona, that are large-scale public video installations. No one will know how they got there; they will just become part of the place. I think in the end it’s more interesting to be permanently in the twilight of the underground.

 

Perfect Partner, a film by Kim Gordon, Tony Oursler and Phil Morrison, starring Michael Pitt and Jamie Bochert with a live sound track featuring Tim Barnes, Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori, Jim O’Rourke and DJ Olive. Courtesy of Tony Oursler.

AL Reality is the new fantasy. Reality is escapism now, partially because of the political climate, where all these actions have been taken based on what turns out to be fiction. There are also those two memoirs that have come out recently and were proved to be falsified. That guy Oprah was so upset with because she’d recommended his book when parts, if not the whole thing, had been fabricated. People are looking toward reality TV as an escape from a reality that is now based on lies or fantasy.

TO I like that theory, because all that Baudrillard stuff has come true, every bit of it. And Philip K. Dick’s world, he was only 20 or 25 years off, if you can get away from the levitating vehicles. Life is really stranger than fiction.

AL Reality’s something we’re not getting from reality; it’s something people are looking for to entertain them. There’s been this reversal where the powers that be have funneled reality into the entertainment sphere and entertainment has been funneled into the sphere of policymaking.

TO I’d always looked toward pop culture to decipher things as a mirror of the world, and now I don’t at all, because I know who the creators are, and I can see through what they’re trying to do, so it doesn’t work on me at all. I wish it did. In a weird way, I miss it. There was a time when I used to look at pop culture and take it apart piece by piece to figure out how the magic American engine worked. I was very paranoid and full of conspiracy theories. But now I just look at it as a bunch of morons who are barely getting by, just pushing the buttons on this machine that’s rolling forward. The people have the power of production in their hands, yet the good stuff is yet to be made. The most boring things I just don’t get: people who are fascinated by Paris Hilton, phenomena like that, someone who does nothing and becomes a celebrity, or even worse the city destroyer Trump.

AL I never actually watched that show of hers, The Simple Life, but I was flipping channels in a hotel a couple weeks ago and they had a Behind the Scenes of it on the E! channel, so I watched it for a little while, and as I was looking at it, I realized they may as well call it Bush and Cheney. They had one episode where Paris Hilton and her friend go undercover as maids in this hotel, and they’re supposed to be cleaning up a room that’s really disgusting. And they’re like, “Forget this, let’s just call down and have someone clean the room.” They get out of their maid costumes, and they call downstairs and say, “This room’s a mess, can you send someone up here immediately?” So a maid shows up and cleans up the room, and they’re sitting there ordering a pizza, then they get back in the maid costumes and the boss comes in to check in on them, and he’s like, “Good job, girls.”

TO (laughter)

AL It’s the same thing with Bush and Cheney, two rich kids who are faced with this mess they can’t be bothered with, so they call the hired help, who are actually their co-workers, except they still think the maid will take care of it. They don’t realize, like, no, you are the maid, you’re supposed to be the public servant; they still don’t consider themselves in that way at all.

TO As these body bags come back, that’s real. Someone should make a reality show about the families of dead military personnel. The Bush administration probably has another one ready for Iran. My gut intuition is that we’re at a turning point somehow, but things could go one way or the other. They could get more and more conservative, and then this country is going to be a place where I won’t want to live, and probably a lot of other people won’t either—well, maybe in New York City. I tried with the pieces in Thought Forms, my show that’s up now at Metro Pictures, to work with elemental subjects like dust, mercury and water, because all three have temporal potentials: a dust storm could dissipate or turn into a further storm. Every breath we breathe is full of tiny bits of results of ecological and economic policy. Quicksilver, madness, mercury in the water, water running out, a chain of events: each piece is darker than the next because it’s become a very dark time very quickly. Just before Bush got elected, it was an optimistic moment. The Internet was sprouting, and that was my real hope for an answer to all the questions of ’60s and ’70s utopia. The Internet is the light at the end of the tunnel.

 

Tony Oursler, Thought Forms, 2006, sculptures with projections, Metro Pictures, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures.

AL It’s definitely true that we’re at a turning point now, but I think it’s been drawn out over the last two decades. This touches on something else I wanted to bring up that relates to Don’t Trust Anyone Over Thirty, about computer technology and religion and the hippie movement of the ’60s. DTAOT is based on Wild in the Streets, a ’60s film where the voting age is lowered to 14, a 21-year-old rock star is elected president and everyone over 30 is forced into concentration camps: a fantasized hippie revolution. The development of computer technology coincided with the baby boomers and the hippie movement.

I was reading an interview with Arthur C. Clarke in the book Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood, who interviewed him about 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke said he was envisioning a future in 2001 where there was total unemployment and people would just play—well, obviously people had to run computers, so it would never be total unemployment. But to some extent the hippie movement was a very futuristic one: now we can play instead of having to worry about the sorts of responsibilities that our parents were so weighed down with. That’s why 2001 resonated, the whole thing of having to go through the Stargate Corridor and ultimately arrive at the Star Child, implying that technological progress is going to take us to a point where the species is reborn.

Now, computer technology is a binary system, so it relates to the way Christian fundamentalists see everything as either good or evil. With the rise of computer technology, people are transferring the binary system they used to depend on in a religious framework to a technological framework. The Christian Right is afraid that religion is going to be replaced by technology—that a computer can deal in absolutes better than a spiritual leader can. If you think about it, the Moral Majority got firmly embedded in the Republican Party around 1980, which is when computers started becoming more popular. I don’t think it’s a coincidence. Organized religion in this country has been very worried since then that religion’s really going to go out the window. That’s not a theme of DTAOT — hippies certainly weren’t computer literate—but they were sci-fi literate; and it’s a little-noticed social upheaval of the ’60s that I was reminded of by watching DTAOT.

TO I like the feeling of reaching progress through technology; I wish it could be true. I hope so for my son. When I wrote my timeline on virtual media around 2000, I realized that as a video artist there was no art history written for me. All this stuff that plugged in or moved or had anything to do with light was very finicky; curators, if a bulb broke or something, just put the piece in a box in the basement. It was much easier for them to put paintings and photographs on the walls, so those of us in video were left with no history of virtual image production. It goes all the way back to the first mention of the camera obscura in a Chinese poem around the year 1000. The image was upside down and associated with the dark side of human nature from the start. Anytime there’s a new kind of technology there’s this association with evil or death, so I think your theory is correct. It’s true of every human invention: rock ’n’ roll, it’s the devil’s music; photography, there was spirit photography; the radio, it was Constantine Raudive who did that tuning into the dead radio; and television, there are lots of examples, but the people who believed they could communicate with the spirit world through technology were really rebels. They took the tools and put them to personal radical use rather than be sublimated by them.

 

Tony Oursler, Sound Digressions in Seven Colors, 2006, installation at NYEHAUS, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

AL I want to talk about your installation at Nyehaus, Sound Digressions in Seven Colors, where you videoed seven musicians (Tony Conrad, Lee Ranaldo, Jim Thirlwell, Kim Gordon, Ikue Mori, Zeena Parkins and Stephen Vitiello) performing solo and then combined them as an installation, which made for an interesting, aleatory layering piece that I really liked. It seemed to me that it was almost like a dinner party; the musicians you included went boy-girl, boy-girl. I was wondering if that was something you thought about, because the social aspect was such a big part of your “Studio” and “Climaxed” installation at the Met too. To what extent were you thinking about the musicians’ personalities when you were selecting who would be in it?

TO I wanted to have a male-female breakdown in the music because it’s often a male-bonding deal, music fantasy band or whatever. I also wanted to have a balance between male and female energies, to use a new-age term. Some of the people I didn’t know at all, but some I knew really well, like Tony Conrad and Kim Gordon, both of whom I’ve known for 25 years. Ikue Mori I knew for a few months, and Zeena Parkins I didn’t know at all, but I wanted a harp. Little did I know the harps she played didn’t sound very much like harp. So there was a range of musicians, and I liked that about it. I thought it would be really good to have some people that I don’t know at all because that expands the project into a random or new, exciting field of discovery. It wasn’t necessarily more positive to work with someone I knew for a long period because there were preconceptions based on our friendships.

Tony Conrad, whom I’ve known the longest out of that group, I thought was going to play violin, since that’s what he usually plays, but it just so happened that he started to get obsessed with these bells. In the end that worked much better because they’re percussive. Had there been much more drone stuff in the mix of seven, it would have really brought the piece down instead of up. It was very much about chance, rolling the dice at the moment. The show at Nyehaus, DTAOT and the Metro Pictures show all have a lot of chance elements in them.

AL When did you hear Tony’s music for the first time? I’m assuming that you first met him as a video maker.

TO Well, I actually had heard his album with Faust before I met him. I had the good fortune of being Jim Shaw’s roommate for a couple of years, and he had such a big record collection. Jim really gave me a cultural and a musical education. I didn’t know much about Conrad, though I may have known his Flicker Films. I think they were already being shown in art schools. But when I met him, he asked me and Mike Kelley to be in a film of his and we have been friends ever since. I was very impressed—his music history was incredible. The fact that he knew John Cale and had done all this stuff with him. I didn’t know anything about La Monte Young at that time, but I did know the Velvet Underground. And then after that the drone stuff like Terry Riley, and Steve Reich, and early Philip Glass. Phil Glass played at Cal Arts, and John Cage was in residence there, giving talks and hanging out with students. To me, it was somewhat normal; I didn’t understand that some of these people were very important historically. But Tony’s a figure who in my mind has always added things to the world rather than remaining in a stasis where he just takes from it. A lot of his generation were all about staking out territory and capitalizing on it. He was more about making a distinctive body of work and then moving onto the next one. That’s very unusual, and he paid a lot of dues for that. People can’t follow someone who goes from one thing to the next. I think artists can, very easily—I think you can see all the connections over time—but the curators and the art administrators can’t. That’s what’s weird to me, he is an artist’s artist. Even the more radical curators have a hard time, as the ’70s are dissected. But I think his moment is coming.

 

Tony Oursler, Climaxed (Detail), 2005, installation at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

AL Well, in a way it’s taken so long for people to just connect the dots between the stuff that he was involved with in the ’60s and ’70s—experimental film and experimental music, and the whole rock thing with the Velvet Underground. All these worlds were sort of touching on one another, but there’s so little graspable evidence of it. It’s much easier now for people to connect everything up. This takes us back to the Biennial, where you have older people like Ira Cohen, Tony, and Michael Snow being exhibited alongside more recent people like Daniel Johnston or Jim O’Rourke, who work between experimental art and music and film.

TO That whole question of whether music is art or art is music, it’s something I’ve always been interested in, since the Poetics project. I did a series of interviews that spun out of that called Synaesthesia, and really the exhibition at Nyehaus grows out of that: is this a musical composition, or is this an art piece? And does it matter? Just take it as material. Organizing a piece around seven colors was a part of it, and there’s also a strange appropriation thing happening. It’s like sampling but on a grand scale, because I commissioned these pieces from people that are like enormous samples, the shortest of them being 12 or 15 minutes and the longest about 45. I wanted to connect the music to the body of each of the performers, because there’s something about music and the body. To focus on the generation of sound by the performers’ fingers, hands, muscles . . . music is so often disconnected from the physical, somehow this connects it to the space of the viewer as they move through the installation. It’s a one to one scale relationship. The Metro show is really about voice and language compositions. At Nyehaus, it was all musical, but still the body being present through the projections, performing it and making the gestures in synch. I was trying to dig into where the visuals and sounds meet physically as much as I possibly could. In a way it’s impossible, because they’re different holes in your head.

AL But a lot of times they’re not as unrelated as you might think. This is something that comes up in Text of Light, my experimental film and music project with Lee Ranaldo where we do live improvisations with other musicians while experimental films, usually by Stan Brakhage, are screened behind us. The story I was going to tell in relation to that is when I was in college, they were showing D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance, and for whatever reason the print didn’t have a sound track on it at all. It’s a silent film, but usually they have some sort of music. And people were a little restless. So there was some random classical music cassette lying around the projection room and we just put it on, and it was uncanny how often things completely synched up with the visuals. Of course, there’s all sorts of rhythms being suggested by the editing and also the storyline. But that’s the thing about the way Text of Light works with the Brakhage films, because even though they do have their own rhythm that is created by the images and the editing, if you put any kind of music with it, certain synchronizations and polyrhythms develop just by the juxtaposition. I was listening again to this record I did with Run On, which was one of my bands in the ’90s. And there’s one track [“Surprise”] we were actually recording live; it was like seven or eight minutes, kind of a jam, where I remember I hung the microphone outside the window of the studio, because I wanted to record everything that was happening outside in the same seven or eight minutes to see if anything interesting would occur. Well, sure enough, a thunderstorm started, and right at the climactic part of the song, you hear this big thunderclap, which we mixed into the track.

TO That’s funny because Kim called me up right before Sonic Youth did this set of tours three or four months ago and said, “Would you be interested in doing projections for the show?” And I was like, “Yeah, that would be great. How long?” She said two hours, and I asked by when she’d need it, and she was like, “The end of the week.” (laughter) I happen to have this ongoing series that I call my ambient series, that I will show sometime somewhere when I find the right moment, where I just set up cameras, kind of like what you did, where I feel like something good is happening, and I just let it go. Sometimes there’s camera movement, but usually not. It might be a water theme park, and I just find a frame where there are people in fluorescent inner tubes going off a slide, and shoot that for 20 minutes. I’ve been doing this since the late ’80s, since Hi-8 introduced two-hour tapes. So I took a lot of these things and cut them together with Josh Thorson, my editor, and gave them to Sonic Youth for their tour. When I went to see their show at NorthSix in Brooklyn I was totally moved by the experience, it blew me away. They turned off the lights, and the stuff that was happening was just totally insane. It was projected right over the band, with a white wall behind it—birds were flying across the stage, images like liquid appeared on people’s faces. And I couldn’t believe the complexity of the relationship between these randomly put together clips and the music. We had no idea what their playlist was; it probably would have ruined it had we known because as soon as you start to illustrate any kind of music, it’s horrible.

 

Tony Oursler, Performance, 2006, mixed media, 35×25 x 1 1/2”. Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

AL Yeah, I had the same realization at one of the early Text of Light gigs in Philadelphia. We had done our show a couple of times before, and up until then I had thought of them as regular improv gigs, where a bunch of name players come together and see what happens. I looked up at some point to see what was going on up on the screen, and the drummer, William Hooker, who was right in front of the screen and couldn’t see it, was doing something with his hand on the drum that corresponded exactly with what was happening on the screen.

TO Fantastic.

AL That’s when I realized this is a lot bigger than a normal kind of improv concert, that we were really onto a whole new chapter of the way we look at films, and making that an element of improvisation, as opposed to doing a “sound track.”

TO So the question then is, What is the new thing? You have this whole history of strategies to get to where we are today, which is that anything is possible. But what seems most interesting is to get to the impossible, which is to let go, through some random processes, and with luck, end up with some magic moments. Do you think about that?

AL It’s probably more like synchronicity. I don’t know if people realize it or not, but they’re much more attuned to it now since elements of society are not as discrete. Everything’s blending together, and that’s accelerated things so that an even greater degree of synchronicity is happening. Maybe random isn’t as random as it used to be, because things are much closer than they were 20 years ago. Even in different art worlds or art circles, it’s not as unusual for someone playing in a rock band like Sonic Youth to be working closely with artists in video and different kinds of media.

TO Well, I first came across that idea with the man himself. That’s the weird thing, that John Cage was a teacher in a way. But then all my installations, from the beginning, that had more than one channel going were random. What determined that initially is that there was no way to synchronize decks unless you had a lot of money. With the entire budget of an installation like 1,200 bucks or something, it would take the whole amount to synchronize a couple of decks. Plus I felt it deadened the experience, so I never synched my installations, and that operated on the sound track as well as the visuals. So it’s something I’ve been doing since the early ’80s. Being a hyperactive person, I like that the sound track can always be different. I plug it in, which is really cool, because I’ve always made ridiculously long tracks, so the combinations are many and varied, and make long loops. I can walk into the space and be surprised by my own work, like, Oh that’s interesting what you’re coming up with today. It has a life of its own.