Tony Oursler

During the course of the past fourty years, video art has blossomed well beyond the expectations of its early practitioners and theorists. Born as a critique of television and a medium at odds with traditional pictorial forms, at its inception video was filled with an utopian promise that lead artists to belive in a true democratisation of art. Today it has reached a pinnacle of technical sophistication and aesthetic importance that was only dreamed of in the 1960s, when the accessibility of the Portapak camera seemed to allow limitless creative possibilities.Tony Oursler stands as a major figure within the evolution of the medium, poised at the crucial turning point when the television monitor could no longer contain video''s still developing potential. With a keen understanding of its technical intricacies, as well as its limitations as a time-based form, Oursler began to paint in moving images a broad picture of how visual technologies influence - even modify - our social and psychological selves.

The intelligent irony that resonates through the best-known body of work of the American artist Tony Oursler, namely, his video and projection installations, results from the subtle combination of sound, language, and pop culture images that suffuse it. These elements are thoroughly explored in this monograph, the most extensive publication ever about Oursler and his work. His videos often employ the strangely projected human face to created bizarre contemporary icons and fragmented narratives that, while containing a humorous element, also speak to the dislocation caused by contemporary issues of sex, violence, and power. "Tony Oursler" includes 180 illustrations from his video, sculpture, and mixed-media works on paper, as well as an extensive selection of the artist's own writings. There are also two long conversations between Oursler and the artists Mike Kelley and Dan Graham, which testify to the long-lasting mutual appreciation and collaboration between them. This is a major new publication on the career of one of the most important American artists of the last two decades. 280 illustrations