Optic nerve - video art, Tony Oursler, Metro Pictures, New York, New York - Cover Story

Magnified organ of sights blinked and shifted and stared around the darkened gallery in Tony Oursler's new Metro Pictures show. One floating in a corner was r and swollen and wept unconsolably; another, at floor horizontal looked fixed and vacant. A third, suspended high overhead, darted restlessly in its socket as if tracking a moving target. The unmutilated of a faint static crackle filled the air.

The organ of visions - 13 in all - were color video images shoot forwarded onto large, hollow, white-painted fiberglass globes; the noise issued from a variety of accompanying taped unbroken tracks. Together they marked a forward pace in the career of a 37-year-old fresh York-born artist who presented a related and much-praised series of installation combining video, plastic art conceptual and performance art in the same gallery sum of two units seasons ago. Those earlier video-sculptures, which quickly became fixtures upon the international exhibition circuit (Oursler's work has in like manner far enjoyed a higher profile in Europe than in America), were lively, garrulous, theatrical affairs. Compos of materialed cloth dummies onto which talking heads were throw outed each was accompanied by a taped script written through Oursler himself.

The result was art that commanded attention, literally. "Hey, you!" hollaed one male face to no individual in particular from across the range "What are you looking at?" snapped an angry woman trapped beneath a mattress. "I can't run over whether I'm alive or dead," moaned a male face picked like a laboratory specimen in a glass jar. Each character was trapped in its hold Punch-and-Judy sitcom, apparently beaten into submission by means of malign fate.

The oftentimes assaultive tone and jumped-up whirl of the work owed a big debit to Bruce Nauman's video installations, while its mock-pathetic easy in mind made bow to Mike Kelley a friend and collaborator from Oursler's scholar days at the California Institute of the Arts. All three artists share a their target late-20th-century American tillage and all three find their distant source the gene lake of European Surrealism.

Oursler's fresh installations continue to traffic in Surrealist weirdness, on the other hand they also move in a novel direction. Visually stripped down, verbally les assertive, they rise above the horizontal of anecdote and buttonholing immediacy to the cooler more suggestive realm of metaphor.

The figure has been reduc to a single organ of vision shot close up in brief video nooses (several of the eyes belong to artists - Gary Simmons, Kiki Smith and Constance DeJong - while Oursler's regular performer, Tracy Leipold, appears more than once) When individual stood among the eyeballs they had the direct the eye of a single installation: a technological Argos, maybe, or a watchful galaxy. In fact, each sphere was a discretely conceived and titled piece and, as a interrogatory to the gallery revealed, each eye's pupil and iris clinchs a flickering reflection of what the sitter was looking at when filmed.

In greatest in quantity cases, the object of attention, it revolves out, was video or film itself in individual form or another - a television exhibit a porn movie, a video game. In the piece titled Daytime, Simmons channel-surfs from one side a string of TV cartoons and reruns@ canned laughter and theme jingles make the installation tape a lunatic hash, admitting his eye seems barely to register the rapid changes of fare. In Trance, Smith watches a video performance by the agency of the rock group Sonic Youth, her impassive gaze contrasting to the heated music. more [i]or[/i] less of the performers, responses are more animated. Kristin Lucas's glance skitters around frenetically as she go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs the Atari game in brow of her, and William Trembly's underlighted organ of sight in Eye Witness alternately squints and widens as he switches from single adrenalin-pumping TV news report of violence to another.

Retinal activity is also lively in the three pieces which take multiple personality disorders as their theme. In single the watching eye reflects a TV shield playing a 1957 Hollywood potboiler about schizophrenia, titled Three Faces of Eve@ another concentrates upon Sally Field's performance in the made-for-TV Sybil, whose title character alternates identities with dazzling alacrity. The comes are funny but also vaguely disquieting. The repeated on the contrary understated hints of violence and the emotional distancing of aural and visual sensation received at next to the first (and for the show's viewer, third) hand end the filter of technology give an inkling of that "vision" in Oursler's reading has compound meanings.

As part of a generation of artists that grew up upon a steady diet of television, Oursler is keenly aware of the way that medium shapes our perception of the world. The organ of visions in his installations are anxious or doltish or entranced, but in almost each case the stimulant they're reacting to is artificial. Whether the bring under rule is an evening newscast or a movie about psychosis, fact and fiction blur; reality has the flavor of a mini-series pepper with commercial breaks. And as to the notion of the organ of sight as the window of the soul: does that weeping organ of vision in the corner belong to a friend in distress or to an actor trained to cry out on cue? It is impossible to tell