Oursler’s Imponderable

BY: PROVOKR Staff

Multimedia artist Tony Oursler’s latest work—on view through January 8 at New York’s Museum of Modern Art—is a feature-length film titled Imponderable, which explores the blurring of lines between fantasy and reality within the wide-ranging worlds of magic, mass media, spirituality and photography. Through a series of acted-out vignettes, Oursler recounts the biographical history of his grandfather, Fulton Oursler, an amateur magician who made it his mission to debunk the séance fad and other mystic con games like psychics and mediums, which came to prominence in the 1920s and ’30s. With his grandfather’s tale as inspiration, Oursler attempts to trace the dots leading from the illusionists of the past to their modern day peers. Here’s a segment of Oursler’s provocative film.