Tony Oursler: UFOs and Effigies

The exhibition presents two sets of images drawn from artist Tony Oursler’s extensive photographic archives. The two collections serve not only to open new perspectives onto the more well-known aspects of Oursler’s artistic production, but also to raise a larger set of questions about the “rhetoric” of the photographic image. Among other important distinctions, the two sets of photographs exhibit different mediatic temperatures. The heightened realism of the “hot” effigy photos and the “cool” objectivity of the UFO photography occupy competing and symmetrically opposite evidentiary positions. Each set strains against the outer edges of the truth claims that were culturally invested in photography, particularly as it functioned prior to the widespread adoption of digital photography and the electronic distribution of imagery via the Internet.

Together the image sets establish an economy of facticity and duplicity. The journalistic legibility of the effigy photographs reveals the evident fabrication of the simulacral bodies. The objectivity of the UFO photographs assert a similar form of documentary “proof,” even as a primary quality is their blurry, grainy abstraction. An effect of manipulation through enlargement and rephotography, this indistinctness is also positioned as the registration of the extreme speeds and the unusual optical qualities of the flying objects. If such traces of truth and deception are literally inscribed within the photographic print, it is also the product of atomic age, aerial anxieties, and suspicion of cover ups and withheld information. The photographs penetrate the skies to expose alien craft, as well as a regime of cold war secrecy. The effigy photos express their historical condition more directlty, they are redolent with traces of national and historical traumas, from hangings to lynchings, to military reprisals to burnings at the stake.