Eye to eye with Oursler

The poster for the exhibition devoted to him by the Nantes Museum of Art might lead us to believe that Tony Oursler has become a late adopter of vintage Vasarely-style 2D Op Art. Not so.

Rest assured: the creator of the mythical rag "Dummies" that made him famous in the early 90s still mixes media like no one else. He mixes media and mediums in this case. His new immersive installation in Nantes is placed under the seal of hypnosis which gives it its title.

In its presentation of the exhibition catalogue, the museum reminds us that many great artists of the past have been fascinated by Mesmer's magic. From Courbet and Rodin to Dali and Warhol. The fifteen or so pieces and projections that make up the Hypnosis exhibition do indeed write little stories about hypnosis, but they are by no means a history of hypnosis with a capital H. The smartphone and facial recognition become neighbours here, contemporaries of Méliès.

There is nothing documentary about Oursler's work. It is about the power of fascination. Of the power of attraction, or more precisely the immersive power of attraction that sought-after beings and mass-market objects have today. The public enemy that invisible cameras track in each of us. And a silly phone that helps us manage our loves, our friendships, our affairs and, consequently, our entire daily life and our vision of the world. A smartphone, like a hypnotist, has the genius of drawing us out of ourselves and into wherever it draws us. All the while, conversely, allowing our carnal envelope to become a statue with empty eyes. And to think that this magic works through our eyes alone,

The look. The fascination exerted by the object being looked at. The immersion in its seemingly unsuspected depths. The loss of self in this labyrinthine spiral trap. Then the slightly haggard and embarrassed return to reality. Embarrassed to have preferred a chimera, a waking dream with superior attractions. Embarrassed also to have offered during this time to the others the static spectacle of his body out of control because emptied of his mind caught elsewhere.

When you take a closer look, a hypnosis session follows exactly the same scenario as falling in love with a work of art. Both are about fascination. Both trap us by our own gaze.

At a time of great mixing of genres between painting, sculpture, theatre, video... the arts that tend to become a unique multimedia art collide head-on with large commercial installations using the same technologies as them. The ends are different. But the boundaries are blurring. The art that is served here is opposed to the culture and plastic aesthetics that are used there.

Tony Ousler's approach is original in that it consists of following this trend but against the grain. Ousler dares to go alone under the belly of these dragons that have become the large immersive "experiential" installations. But his works differ from them in two essential ways: they do not seek to impose a one-way reading and they do not confuse the aesthetics of marketing with the beauty of art. They don't care if they seem ugly to the majority of people. That's what saves them! They shake up our consensual cardboard certainties on both levels. Ousler's art is indeed hypnosis. It is a spectacular enterprise of destabilisation.

Illustration: Tony-Oursler_Hypnosis - 2021