Tony OurslerKaleidoscopic Art

5 men with dramatic facial and physical poses
Members of The Poetics (from left: John Arnheim, Bill Stobaugh, Mike Kelley, Tony Oursler, and John Miller), Los Angeles, 1977. Photo by Jim Shaw.

Tony Oursler began making experimental single-channel videos while studying at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in the late 1970s. He and a group of CalArts peers shared a “kaleidoscopic” approach to artmaking—a kind of interdisciplinary enterprise that encompasses music, text, images, sculpture, and performance.1 For his videos, Oursler wrote scripts and constructed characters from modest and often strange found materials—like kitchen spoons, bits of toilet paper, or painted cardboard—animating them within handpainted sets. The school’s outmoded Sony Portapak video cameras yielded fuzzy images with ghostly streaks that intrigued Oursler.2 Amusing, disorienting, and with an intentionally low-budget aesthetic, his surreal videos challenge the seamless editing of Hollywood productions, which slickly dissolve the distinctions between reality and media image.

  1. Tony Oursler, “Image of the People: Mike Kelley (1954–2012),” Artforum 50, no. 9 (May 2012): 330. ↩︎

  2. Michael Kimmelman, “A Sculptor of the Air with Video,” New York Times, April 27, 2001. ↩︎