Diamond: The Eight Lights (1986) by Tony Oursler
Sunday, November 9, 1986, 8:00 pm
Tony Oursler
Tonight’s program features the West Coast premiere of Diamond: The Eight Lights (1986, from Spheres of Influence), with text by Tony Oursler and music by Edward Primrose; EVOL and a selection of other tapes. Oursler’s work is visionary, sinister and strangely playful in its expressionistically obsessive approach to anxiety and sexuality. Whether he’s working with puppets, live actors or bizarre objects that stand in emblematically for characters, Oursler’s psychodramas have an unsettling charge that “suggests The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari staged by the early Ernie Kovaks… a taste for splatter that’s half Jackson Pollack, half David Cronenberg.” — J. Hoberman, The Village Voice. Oursler’s newest tapes have a different surface, more reminiscent of Méliès than Wiene, but more than equal in their evocative powers.