Tony Oursler b. 1957
Grand Mal (1981)
1981, 22:36 min, color, sound
Grand Mal is a hallucinatory, discordant drama, an extravagant and sinister fable of postmodern cultural malaise. Oursler's obsessional themes and morbid visions of religion, sex and death unravel in a fragmented narrative of fear, horror, delirium — and humor. His fantastic theater of the absurd is propelled by a series of thematic dialectics — heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death — that are rendered with remarkable inventiveness and originality. The narrative's expressionistic visual dreamspace is permeated with an eerie sense of displacement and disorientation, which is echoed in Oursler's layered sound collage and somnambulant narration.-- EAI
This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.
Grand Mal is a hallucinatory, discordant drama, an extravagant and sinister fable of postmodern cultural malaise. Oursler's obsessional themes and morbid visions of religion, sex and death unravel in a fragmented narrative of fear, horror, delirium — and humor. His fantastic theater of the absurd is propelled by a series of thematic dialectics — heaven and hell, good and evil, life and death — that are rendered with remarkable inventiveness and originality. The narrative's expressionistic visual dreamspace is permeated with an eerie sense of displacement and disorientation, which is echoed in Oursler's layered sound collage and somnambulant narration.-- EAI
This title is available for exhibitions, screenings, and institutional use through Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), NY. Please visit the EAI Online Catalogue for further information about this artist and work. The EAI site offers extensive resources for curators, students, artists and educators, including: an in-depth guide to exhibiting, collecting, and preserving media art; A Kinetic History: The EAI Archives Online, a collection of essays, primary documents, and media charting EAI's 40-year history and the early years of the emergent video art scene; and expanded contextual and educational materials.