Working since the late 1970s among the downtown New York music and art overlaps, video artist Tony Oursler (born 1957) is famed internationally for his immersive installations. In the summer of 2001, Oursler staged a spectacular installation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz. Titled Flucht , it involved projections onto the building's glass façade and an audio component with actors speaking in a range of dialects.
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.