Tony Oursler

NEW YORK—Since he first began to receive large-scale public attention in the early 1980s, New York-based artist Tony Oursler has established a reputation as a conjurer of often-unsettling video installations. His most memorable work projects moving images onto arrangements of sculptural objects, making them appear to come alive and engage in anthropomorphic interactions with both the viewer and one another.

Oursler studied at CalArts during the 1970s, where contact with Southern California’s conceptual and performance artists, such as John Baldessari, encouraged his independent, iconoclastic spirit and his appetite for experimentation. Working throughout the 1980s, he had his first New York solo show at Metro Pictures in 1994 and his first London solo show at the Lisson Gallery in the same year.

In 2004, Oursler was invited to initiate a series of Musée d’Orsay commissions, in which contemporary artists respond to works in the institution’s permanent collection. Oursler’s reply to Gustave Courbet’s The Artist’s Studio (1855) was Studio: Seven Months of My Aesthetic Education (Plus Some), which included artworks and appearances by dozens of his friends and acquaintances. It later toured to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

A retrospective of his work, titled “Dispositifs,” recently traveled to several museums in Western Europe, and his latest exhibition, “Ooze,” opens at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery on Feb. 17.

In his Lower East Side studio, where he was putting finishing touches on a few pieces for the exhibition, Oursler spoke with ArtInfo about his roots in conceptual art, the history of video and the tricks behind his most recent painting-inspired work.

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Tony, the pieces in this latest show are hanging on the wall, which is a major departure for you. Is this some sort of long-term hangover from your Courbet project?

I started out as a painter, but I’ve avoided it. I have immense respect for painting and I’ve shunned it out of that respect. I always have to trick myself to address it.

My wife [painter Jacqueline Humphries] calls me a closet painter. I spent years and years learning to paint photographically as a kid. It’s a wonderful basis for any perceptual activity. I never really regarded painting as lost, like some artists did: my friend John Baldessari burned all his paintings!

And now you’re making things that look like splatters of paint on the wall?

They’re paint, but the black one has got a sort of Rorschach feel to it. It could be mold or it could be—well, the word is “ooze.”

I agree. They’re pretty revolting.

Yeah, it’s somewhere between Salvador Dalí, and “Through the Looking Glass Darkly.” The eye is somewhere between a reflection and a peephole, coming out of the ooze.

There are eight of them in total. Each one has either a different text or a different thing happening. For example, one of them has got a lot of relationships to the history of performance art. Rather than being just an iconic eye or mouth, it starts to turn into a map of the head, and another one maps the whole body. Then, some have texts that whisper to you.

How does that relate to the historic practice of painting?

In the history of painting, you have a relationship between the painting and the viewer—you have no history of a dialog beyond a silent, psychological dialog. But we live in an age where everything is verbal. My son’s toys all talk, for example.

The art world is always a little bit behind pop culture. People were used to television in their homes for years before they could get used to it in an art context because there are barriers and hierarchies that get set up. It took 30 years before video art was accepted by the art world, thanks to Nam June Paik.

And it’s much more recently that video has been allowed to hang on a gallery wall.

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.