Tony Oursler dishes on art changes old and new

Toronto’s Luminato festival, launched in 2007, has often been met with skepticism in the contemporary art community. But this year the fest has tried to up its aesthetic credibility with the participation of prominent New York artist Tony Oursler. While the artist was setting up his public installations near Grange Park this week, I got to chat with him about last-minute and long-term changes in his projects. Here's an excerpt from the full chat published today at Canadianart.ca:

LS: A lot of your past work can be read as making private traumas semi-public in a gallery setting. Is moving into full-fledged public art an expansion of that practice?

TO: Well this is a voyeuristic situation so in a way it’s highlighted. It will become obvious at a certain point that this is an installation, but it’s also a private space that has a memory, and goes out into the public space. I like the idea that people have a kind of membrane that they have to choose to pierce in one way or another. That voyeuristic dynamic is important; to look in the window is to join into the piece. We’ll see how it works. It’s a new thing for me.

LS: What part is new to you?

TO: Well, there’s a lot. First of all, this house has a mosaic of flatscreens inside. So it’s not projected. It’s also completely three-dimensional too, where a lot of my previous stuff is more frontal or 180-degrees or whatever.

When I had a flatscreen TV around the studio I was thinking of how amazing they are, because they become almost architectural. Whereas TVs are more like furniture, flatscreens to me are almost like tile or bricks or something. They’re also about redesigning and redefining interior space.

So I kind of wanted to play with that. You look into the space and it becomes like a memory palace of things that have happened or that are happening in the space. We edit the characters from screen to screen so they can move around from side to side, and occasionally the whole house becomes one character. Then it breaks back up into other characters.

Image of Tony Oursler with his in-progress installation near Toronto's Grange Park from canadianart.ca