Internationally Renowned Video Artist...TONY OURSLER.

The pioneering video artist talks about the pernicious influence of TV, society's "emblems of need", and the fragment of madness in all of us.



Ouuurrrrrsler Studio" - as Tony Oursler's answering machine intones with gravelly drama - is a frenetic place. As I arrive, its abiding presence is padding about in shorts and T-shirt, trying to make travel plans whilst also readying a metre-high white model light bulb to be sent off in the mail. He seems harried. That may be because it's nearing 100 degrees outside, but it may also be because he'd rather be doing things at a slower pace. He sometimes likes to spend a part of the day drawing. Sometimes, he likes to write. And sometimes, he tells me, he just needs to get out and gather his thoughts, "to read and snoop around". It makes you wonder if he'd rather do without a traditional studio. After all, so much of what lends his work its vitality is almost phantasmal, ghostly, televisual.


But Oursler likes a perch, and since he arrived in New York back in 1983 his have been at various places in downtown Manhattan. For a time he lived on Fulton Street, close to the World Trade Center. (He made a memorable free-form documentary about the morning the twin towers collapsed, when he ran around the area frantically with a camera, recording his own confusion as much as the city's.) But a few years ago he and his wife, the abstract painter Jacqueline Humphries, moved to a 19th-century brownstone on Henry Street in the Lower East Side, once home to a synagogue.


He works from two of its downstairs floors. The upper one holds relatively peaceful offices and places to lounge about, the lower is the grimy pithead, where assistants carve the white, sculptural components of his installations, and where Oursler tinkers with arrangements of objects and backdrops and projections to create his finished work. The latter is a process almost like the composition of a sentence: recently, he even started to assemble a library of motifs to give him more range, but he has been finding the process difficult. "For a while I was trying to shoot another element every day," he says. "A burning dollar bill, or a spinning penny, maybe someone dialling a cell-phone. But then I realised that all these small tasks are actually big tasks. How do you shoot these things?"


It's enough to make one a little neurotic, although Oursler firmly believes we all have a little fragment of madness lodged within us. It's simply the modern condition, he says. Yet as he hopes to demonstrate in a new series of work on show at London's Lisson Gallery in September, the triggers of neurosis are spreading and multiplying. He explains the new work. "It's a suite on the subject of filling a void in someone's personality, or vice-versa, like a personality extending out as an appendage. So there are images of chronic gambling, compulsive cleanliness, over-eating. They're all linked by this idea of a need, a desire to complete a missing part of the person."


Thus, Oursler has given each "need" its own inflated emblem. There are giant scratchcards, a mobile-phone whose screen pulsates with dancing girls, a cluster of towering cigarettes which burn down - and miraculously reform - to the sound of sucking breath, and a £20 note with a talking Queen (Oursler was still working on her lines when we met).

It is, if you like, a tour of the seven vices. "Thing is," he says, "I don't know if we're going to have enough room to have all the vices in one gallery show!"