Movies: Tony Oursler

A ramshackle underground SF satire set and shot in the self-absorbed art world of lower Manhattan, written, produced, and directed by Joe Gibbons, who also plays one of the lead parts. Gibbons plays a mad scientist who's developed a technique for tra...

Long before Kim Gordon was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Body/Head, she was a cooler-than-thou multimedia artist in Sonic Youth. In the ’80s, Gordon and her bandmates were fixtures of New York’s downtown art and music scene; one regular hau...

Featuring performances by artists Tony Oursler and Mike Kelley, Garage Sale II moves between a couple’s sexually dysfunctional relationship and a series of vignettes in which characters attempt to fulfil their desires through prosthetics, masturbatio...

A short film showcasing the song The Teacher from the Foo Fighters' album 'But Here We Are'...

Presented in a “5-D” cinematic environment utilizing a contemporary form of Pepper’s ghost—a 19th-century phantasmagoric device—and a range of sensory effects (scents, vibrations, etc.), Imponderable is an immersive feature-length film inspired by Ou...

Feature documentary on the pioneering life and work of iconoclastic filmmaker/musician/composer/artist Tony Conrad....

"Oursler’s thematic concerns betray classic Freudian anxieties about sex and death. In Grand Mal, the hero takes a convoluted odyssey through a landscape of disturbing experiences. The video’s free association includes, "digressions about the differe...

Told with raw eccentricity and grotesque humor, The Weak Bullet is an ironic tale in which the trajectory of the eponymous bullet propels a bizarre narrative of social rupture and sexual paranoia....

In EVOL (love spelled backwards), the audience is voyeur, peering into the delirious and erotic dreams of a young man (Oursler). We drift with him through anecdotes that poke fun at the disparity between the culturally accepted stereotypes of sex and...

A series of reflections on New York City by key figures of its prominent art scene. The City is considered in light of the history, influence and audience of its art scene and the relationship the artists have with the city. With the participation of...

Blood and transcendence are themes that permeate Sucker, with its incarnations of religious iconography and sexuality. Life and death, good and evil are evoked as the incantatory voiceovers and sordid images make reference to communion, transfusions,...

The Surrealist, "Exquisite Corpse" was a French Café parlor game. "Exquisite Moving Corpse" is more of an artist chain letter. 60 artists participated over a two-year period, beginning in March 2020. Each invited artist made a one minute video in res...

As recent state cut-backs force many mental patients out into the real world, Tony Oursler and Joe Gibbons team up to address psychiatric deinstitutionalization from a comic angle. After years of being cared for, Tony, Joe and their dog Woody leave t...

The Loner is a psychosexual journey through the dark landscapes of Oursler's insular narrative universe. The tape's paranoid, tormented protagonist — who is represented by such objects as a spoon and a water-filled sack — wanders through a hostile dr...

Spinout is an apocalyptic tale of a world spinning out of control to nowhere. Space travel, astrology, spirals, the universe, catastrophe and madness are recurring visual and narrative themes in this expressionistic theater. "Of course we're all a li...

AWGTHTGTWTA (Are We Going to Have to Go Through with This Again?) is one of a recent series of single-channel video works in which Oursler explores the idea of the "chorus." Here Oursler asked high school and middle school students in Manhattan's Che...

Son of Oil is a cautionary tale about the decline of Western civilization, as only Oursler could envision it. Oil is the central metaphor around which he constructs a burlesque critique of the cults of money and power that fuel economic and sexual sy...

Life of Phillis is one of Oursler's earliest video narratives. In this psychosexual, low-tech epic, Oursler creates an outrageous theatrical world, fashioning characters from unlikely found objects. Willfully primitive, often grotesque, and crafted w...

9/11 is a first-hand, harrowing document of the events of September 11th and their immediate aftermath, as observed by the artist. As the tragedy unfolds, Tony Oursler records from his apartment, just blocks from the former World Trade Center, and on...