Tony OurslerEmpathy Effigies

backwards s shaped sculpture with two eyes and mouth distorted to the s shape by using projection
Tony Oursler, Slip, 2003. Fiberglass sculpture, Sony VPL CS5 projector, DVD, DVD player, and speaker, 43 x 5 x 15 inches. San José Museum of Art. Gift of the Lipman Family Foundation, in honor of the San José Museum of Art’s 35th anniversary, 2003.32. Photo by Douglas Sandberg.

With blinking eyes and whispering lips, Tony Oursler’s projections of faces onto fiberglass sculptures create lifelike figures that make media imagery tangible. Despite the alien forms of these “electronic effigies”1—as in the green, S-shaped Slip (2003)—their facial expressions and language communicate. Oursler’s scripts sound like stream-of-consciousness ramblings or, as he describes, “a sort of babble, like someone’s in a therapy session,”2 initiating unfinished narratives that the viewer is left to complete. Mirroring human struggle and humor, they play on human empathy; like film and television characters with whom we bond, they invite our affinity.3

  1. Tony Oursler, in “Who’s Making It: Tony Oursler,” Gotham TV segment, New York Metro TV, filmed 2001, video, 5:08 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews. ↩︎

  2. Tony Oursler, “Who’s Making It: Tony Oursler,” Gotham TV segment, New York Metro TV, filmed 2001, video, 5:08 minutes, available at tonyoursler.com/interviews. ↩︎

  3. Deborah Rothschild, “Introjection: In Oursler’s World, No One Escapes Its Unbidden Influences,” in Tony Oursler: Introjection, Mid-Career Survey, 1976–1999 (Williamstown, MA: Williams College Museum of Art, 1999), 14. ↩︎