CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 11/11/2015

ARTBOOK & Swiss Institute to Launch 'Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler'

Join ARTBOOK and Swiss Institute Friday, November 13 at 7PM for the launch of Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler, the monumental 666-page compendium of the occult published by JRP|Ringier and accompanied at this event only by a limited edition print. Oursler will appear in conversation with contributors Stephanie O’Rourke and Noam M. Elcott, followed by a signing.

To order a copy of the book plus limited edition, email booksmomaps1@artbook.com. We'll email you back after the event - first priority goes to people who attend.

ABOVE: The signed limited edition print, numbered to 66, which will be included with the purchase of each book at the launch and signing.

Since the late 1990s, artist Tony Oursler has amassed a vast personal archive of objects and ephemera relating to magic, the paranormal, film, television, phantasmagoria, pseudoscience and technology. For Oursler, the archive functions as an open visual resource, historical inquiry and–most intriguingly–a family history. This publication features approximately 1,500 objects from Oursler’s collection, including photographs, prints, historic manuscripts, rare books, letters and objects. Additional topics include stage magic, thought photography, demonology, cryptozoology, optics, mesmerism, automatic writing, hypnotism, fairies, cults, the occult, color theory and UFOs.

This catalogue is produced in conjunction with the exhibition “Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Ourslers,” on view at Les Forges, Parc des Ateliers, Arles, France, July 6-September 20, 2015 and LUMA Westbau, Zurich, October 31-February 14, 2016.

Please RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

LOCATION
Swiss Institute
18 Wooster Street
New York NY 10013

Noam M. Elcott is Assistant Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia University and an editor of the journal Grey Room. He specializes in the history and theory of modern art and media, with an emphasis on interwar art, photography, and film. He also teaches and writes on contemporary art. Artificial Darkness: A History of Modern Art and Media, his first book, is forthcoming from University of Chicago Press.

Stephanie O’Rourke is a PhD candidate at Columbia University, where she specializes in late eighteenth- to early twentieth-century visual culture. Her other publications include "Beholder, Beheaded: Theatrics of the Guillotine and the Spectacle of Rupture" in Visual Culture and the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (Ashgate Press, 2015) and “A Surrealist Fact” in Object:Photo. Modern Photographs: The Thomas Walther Collection 1909-1949. An Online Project of The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA, 2014).

Print image caption: "'Snake Cultists Who Regularly Defy Death...One branch of the Church of God has used poisonous snakes...in religious faith demonstrations... [According to Rev. Oscar Hutton] the snakes are symbols by which the faithful are willing to risk their lives 'to prove the power of God.' He believes that once 'power' is felt, the snakes are harmless.' News photograph, Kentucky, 1947."