Science and Progress-Tony Oursler- week 5

Science and Progress-Tony Oursler- week 5

New York 1996 
'Eyes' 1996

Research Tony Oursler's projection sculpture to identify some of the ideas and methods he uses in his work.

Artist Tony Oursler works in several media, but he is best known for his eccentric and groundbreaking videos of eerily painted dummies. His art deals with topics from Multiple Personality Disorder to corporate power and media brainwashing. Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer's sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating and lead to great popular and critical compliments.
I think that Tony Oursler’s work is trying to prove that everything in life, especially art, is a matter of perspective. I think this way because Oursler takes things that people would see hundreds of times a day and that is quite normal for e.g. People’s faces, eyes, mouth and transforms them into very abnormal and disturbing things to see by projecting the two-dimensional pictures onto three dimensional objects such as spheres. Oursler work covers a range of mediums working with video, sculpture, installation, performance and painting. Because he uses different mediums in each work it creates interest for the viewer, as each work is different from the next. This draws the viewer in and I think that’s a reason why his work is so liked by many.

How do you think the Enlightenment concepts of Science, progress, reason, individualism, empiricism, universalism, freedom and secularism can be applied to Oursler's work?

Enlightenment in Oursler's work consists on the different ideas of science, technology and individualism. Oursler is fascinated by how society immerses itself in technologies like movies, television and the Internet. Individualism can be seen in Oursler’s work as each of his artworks whether it be a video, projected image, sculpture etc and because he uses many different media each of his works are different but are based on the same topics [multiple personality disorder and media brainwashing] which I mentioned earlier. The idea of science is seen in oursler’s works through his investigations of the different part of the face e.g. eyes and mouth and experiments with them on different objects to create 3 dimensional works.