Tony Oursler

by Raymond Bellour, Tony Conrad, Gloria Moure

The intelligent irony that resonates through the video and projection installations of American artist Tony Oursler results from a subtle combination of sound, language and pop culture images. These elements are thoroughly explored in this monograph, the most extensive publication on Oursler and his work. His videos often employ a projected human face to create bizarre contemporary icons and fragmented narratives that 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.

208 pages, Hardcover

First published August 15, 2001

About the author

Raymond Bellour (born 1939 in Lyon) is a French scholar, and writer. Best known to Anglophone readers for his publications on film analysis, his work is dispersed across a wide range of articles and books, few of which are available in English, in which he addresses a broad spectrum of topics in the areas of cinema, literature and moving-image art. He is currently Director of Research, Emeritus, at the CNRS, the Centre national de la recherche scientifique, which he entered in 1964 In the course of his career he has taught at the Université de Paris I, at IDHEC (now "la Fémis"), the Université de Paris III, the Centre américain d'études cinématographiques, later renamed the Centre parisien d'études critiques, and in a range of international institutions as a guest lecturer