Specialties
Abstract, Conceptual, Contemporary

Tony Oursler

Wall space has always been a hierarchical space. It’s a sacred territory. It seems to belong to the seamless painting. If you’re a painter, you paint from one side of the canvas to the other, and right now ’70s magazine illustration is the vogue.

There’s a history of experimental collage and stuff that’s been glossed over and lost because of people’s notions of craft. If you’re a photographer, it’s like Rauschenberg never happened. You just do huge, gorgeous, seamless photographs, and that’s your craft. It’s a very strange moment. Of course I like to muck it up. It’s just so antithetical to the recent history that I’ve experienced.

I’m really interested in what I call a “shadow history of art.” I’ve written a timeline that’s on my Web site that’s an alternative moving-image history. It begins with the first camera obscura and it ends with somebody injecting glowing jellyfish genes into monkeys. It came out of a feeling that there was no art history written for a video artist or a performance artist or an installation artist. It’s just not there.

Past Exhibitions Visit Gallery