I honestly cannot enjoy Tony Oursler's work. Even after listening to other students in class and reading more about him, I am still really uninterested. Well, I'm more than uninterested - I'm actually annoyed. I still appreciate being shown his work, because I feel like college is one of the few times in life that I personally will be, not only exposed to but, forced to watch such a different type of art and media.
The Oursler video that we watched in class was the most grating work that I have seen in this class so far. When watching it, I felt stressed and nervous. I was upset that I had to keep watching it, because I just wanted it to be finished. The feeling that it gave me was that of a fly buzzing around your head as you're trying to fall asleep. More than anything else, I was annoyed.
After listening to the other opinions of students in class, I don't understand Oursler any better. Two arguments I heard for him were the following:
1. At least he makes you feel something, which is better than feeling neutral.
Why? Why is it better to feel stressed out that to feel neutral? There is a multi-million dollar pharmaceutical industry dedicated to making people feel more neutral, so how can this be true? If I never had to deal with anxiety in my life again, I would be perfectly okay with that. So why would I purposely try to feel anxious by viewing these exhibits?
2. He is exploring the darker side of the world.
The reason why this doesn't make sense to me is because Oursler never explicitly stated anything like this when talking about his intentions in creating his installations. He spoke a lot about trying to make the viewer see something different and about trying to change the way things are seen, but he never said anything about seeing something disturbing or dark. I don't believe that this was his intention.
Also, I'm not really impressed by seeing "disturbing" images like these. If one really wants to be upset and see the "darker side of life," go view a snuff film. Better yet, there are websites on the internet that post videos of people being murdered, complete with all the gore. If the point is to upset people, then he was being pretty mild.
Also, I don't think it's that hard to be "creepy." A lot of times I doodle during lectures, and the things I draw end up being really weird looking and scary. To test this theory, I spent the entirety of my biology lecture yesterday making weird drawings, and some of them were pretty disturbing. I feel like making art that is ugly and scary is so much easier than to make something beautiful.
I think the biggest problem I had with Oursler is that he gave me a feeling of extreme anxiousness and then didn't tell me what to do with it. For example, my favorite artist we've viewed in class so far is a tie between Glen Ligon and Barbara Kruger. Both of these people show art that is meant to create tension, but they couple this with social commentary, giving the viewer somewhere to put that tension. Barbara Kruger purposely made her images "ugly" by throwing bright red boxes on top of them, but the ugliness, in this case, had a purpose. It was to slap the viewer out of his or her previous state of mind and to get him or her to think about the subjects she presented.
Although I understand Oursler is not the same type of artist as Ligon or Kruger, I still feel like he should have created some sort of outlet for people to express their emotions in his work. If he would have given me something to think about while I experienced his work, then I wouldn't have been so annoyed.
I'm sorry that you found his work so displeasing, but I don't think that his intention was to upset anyone; I think it was really just to make people think about the things that are often ignored, usually on purpose. For example, when movies portray violence and rape in vivid detail it makes us uncomfortable, but for a reason; if bad things are always watered down for us they don't seem as real of a threat and so we don't care about them as much. Ignorance is Bliss, but this is not always a good thing, as much as we would like it to be.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you Eileen. I wrote in my response as well that I found him to be annoying more than anything. In response to the point of "At least he makes you feel something," in all honesty, I left feeling nothing. Other than just being annoyed, I didn't have any other feelings toward the piece. I found it to be obnoxious and was so glad when it ended, and I haven't thought about the work since then. In this respect, how is his work moving if I can leave and never think about it again? Isn't conceptual art supposed to move you and spark a conversation? I think this may be the most annoying part of his work. He even spoke of it as this genius work, but I left feeling underwhelmed and uninterested.
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