Fool, 2006

For his contribution to the Door Cycle edition project, Tony Oursler designed a metal door featuring a circular, porthole-style window, behind which his video piece Fool plays –offering a glimpse into a surreal, self-contained world.
“Video is like water,” Tony Oursler once remarked, “an entirely ethereal form that was trapped inside the television for 50 years.” In Fool, this fluidity is given physical form: a functional door becomes the unlikely host for a pulsating video installation embedded in a porthole-like window. Typical of Oursler’s practice, Fool combines image, sound, and language into an uncanny visual experience that is both humorous and unsettling. Drawing from the visual codes of popular and punk culture, Oursler taps into the unconscious with grotesque, fragmented icons that reflect the psychological turbulence of contemporary life. His use of the human face – often stretched, distorted, or disembodied – becomes a vessel for fractured narratives touching on issues of identity, violence, sex, control, and power. The resulting imagery is as if plucked from the fevered hallucinations of a delinquent adolescent on a bad trip – distorted, disjointed, and eerily resonant.