Tony Oursler’s Synesthesia: Alan Vega and Genesis P-Orridge
Two portraits by Tony Oursler of two fascinating cultural figures. I can’t stress how riveting and hypnotic these pieces are: by doing so little, Tony is doing so much. The camera simply is focused on the interviewee’s head and they talk for an hour and a half, candidly and openly about how they got to be who they are. Occasionally off screen Oursler and friends are heard asking just the right questions at the right time. Full of digression, humour and passion, these portraits get to the heart of the creative process, deeply exploring what it means to be an artist today. And it just shows what a brilliant and sensitive auteur Oursler is: whatever he touches bears the mark of his vision.
Genesis P-Orridge, performance artist and vocalist for the iconoclastic English industrial band Throbbing Gristle in the late 1970s, pioneered industrial music. P-Orridge, who went on to form the experimental band Psychic TV, continues to work in music, art, and performance in New York, and is undertaking a long-term “Pandrogeny” project involving a radical identity transformation.
Alan Vega, one half of the influential pre-punk synthesizer/drum machine duo Suicide (with Martin Rev), helped pioneer electronic music in the early 1970s. Vega, who began his career in New York as an artist known for light sculptures, also ran an art space that was a meeting ground for some of the most important artists in the underground New York art and music scenes.Ourlser will be presenting Synesthesia in person at Issue in Brooklyn on June 1:
http://issueprojectroom.org/2009/05/08/tony-ourslers-synesthesia/
Tony Oursler on UbuWeb:
http://ubu.com/film/oursler.html
EVOL (1984)
