Hallucinating with the ears

New York artist Tony Oursler with his work 'Galactoid'. Picture / Kenny Rodger

The installations of New York video artist Tony Oursler often involve creepy, muttering mutants that could probably do with some psychotherapy, but Oursler himself is laidback and jovial.

He has exhibited all over the globe and has work in most of the world's major art museums. But his rambling conversation steers quickly away from art history and swerves from pulp sci-fi to punk rock to virtual pets.

One of the works in his exhibition at Jensen Gallery is projected on to a sculpture that has the primeval rounded form reminiscent of early fertility goddesses, but is inspired by the digital companions that inhabit your computer. "These began somewhere in between a friend or a pet or a lover or a fantasy entity," says Oursler. "I was very captured by that idea of this virtual thing that you had to feed in some way and this empathic bond."

The entity looks like a genetic mishap with only eyes and a mouth, which move independently. It burbles and coos in an infantile way, which Oursler says can resemble pillow talk.

"It's embarrassing, because when you talk to a baby or a pet you talk in this very private way that's just between you and the other. And to take that and make it public, I thought was an interesting idea, and that kind of sparked this series to coalesce."

Having such a curious, multi-faceted perspective is probably not so surprising for someone who attended the radical California Institute for the Arts (Cal Arts) in the 70s and forged a distinctive path in the then-fledgling territory of new media art.

"One great thing about art is that you get to travel, discover new things and new people that you didn't know, because I never trust the history books at all," he says, referring to the fact that his work has as much to do with the development of psychedelia, science and pop culture as art history.

Developments in technology have made sophisticated multimedia available to anybody with a computer.

"It makes me feel very optimistic because, having been educated in the utopian 70s, there was a lot of talk of cross-over, of free media, of everyone having equipment to use," he says.

"That was the kind of dream that was lived at Cal Arts and probably many art schools at that time, and film schools or whatever. Then that really tightened up and didn't exist because it was really difficult," he adds, referring to the then-exorbitant costs of making video art.

Oursler, who played in a punk band called the Poetics, has an exhibition in Italy titled Sound: Digressions in Seven Colors. It features life-size projections of musicians, including Sonic Youth's Kim Gordon, and is inspired by John Cage's ideas about random actions.

"He was at Cal Arts and this whole idea of chance operations and randomness in music has always fascinated me," says Oursler, who feels that Cage's ideas still hold much potential.

"There is a scratching of the surface when it comes to what can be done. Especially with the computers that you have now, you can control or muck up systems or however you want to play it ... like the idea of having a band that was like a deck of cards. So you could just deal out the musicians and make a super group."

It is not the first time Oursler has worked with New York avant-rock group Sonic Youth, and he has created videos for their forthcoming world tour. He has also created video material for David Bowie and is working on a project that compiles interviews with people who have backgrounds in both art and music, including David Byrne (Talking Heads), Alan Vega (Suicide), Tony Conrad and Laurie Anderson, who taught him at Cal Arts.

Like Anderson, Oursler uses text and voices in much of his work. And he doesn't mind that the appalling acoustics of most art galleries render the dialogue barely intelligible.

"What I like is that people don't understand this but they hallucinate auditorially - people mishear things. If you were doing that visually that would be called a hallucination. But they do that with their ears all the time, they mishear things and they change one word to another.

"I kind of like the quality that happens where you have to strain a little bit to hear the pieces because you may make up your own text or fuse with the text. And that's kind of my goal, to get with the audience to meld into a kind of co-operation with them.

"I try to make the pieces interactive in a way that they are incomplete without the viewer."

In an era of mass-media blockbuster entertainment, Oursler says this kind of interaction is vital.

"You are left with a denuded landscape that is sort of a Marxist nightmare of people mostly consuming stuff that is escapist. And one of the few places left in the culture is music and art and certain forms of creative endeavour that leave a space for the audience.

"So I'm a real believer in art in a political sense, if you can call that a political sense. It's super-important for people to find a place where they are validated, and that exists less and less."

* Tony Oursler at Jensen Gallery, 61 Upper Queen St, to Aug 12

On the web: www.tonyoursler.com