The Loner is the story of a polymorphous humanoid adolescent. The protagonist is racked by his multiple complexes, obsessed by his auto-erotic fixations and devoured by acute paranoia. The character is faced with self-hatred. His emblem is the runt. The Loner is maladjusted. His maladjustment to the world takes shape as soon as he is born. He is the result of a mistake, the accidental mating of a couple represented in the tape by a pair of hands. When he is born, it is in the form of an eggshell, immediately broken by his parents. The scene of his arrival in the world is repeated, showing him as a sort of shapeless larva made up of colored chewing gum. Because he is unfinished, his appearance constantly changes, switching from a condom filled with water, through an albino cockroach to a malformed spider.
All the decoration in the tape is close to French "Nouvelle Figuration" and German neo-expressionism, which used form and color as genuine expressive elements, while introducing the figure as a structural basis and reference to the forms which have come out of contemporary subculture. In Tony Oursler's video, the decor, a sort of miniature theater, is covered in garish colors. The characters are represented by different parts of the body. We see an arm which moves the accessories about. The artist makes reference to the 1980s. In particular, the scene in the bar where a hand and a foot serve as actors. A singer, in a sort of television screen frame, appears in the form of a video clip. There are no sophisticated special effects in this work. Everything is shown, remaining voluntarily gaudy. The insertion of a face in the decor is done using an opening to let an actor's head poke through, like photos taken at an old-time funfair. To a certain extent, the expressiveness of the mise en scène is reminiscent of the cinematographic style of the Cabinet du docteur Caligari (1920) by Robert Wiene, both in formal terms and in terms of the themes dealt with: fate, madness and death. But Tony Oursler's stories are not didactic and always remain funny and troubling because of the ironic treatment. As in his very first works, Tony Oursler is trying to create a mental space using stories and images. In an interview with Elisabeth Janus, he said: "My primary sources of inspiration for my writing came from what I call personal "pop" experience: a sort of amalgam of images from the popular press and my own experiences, often snatches overheard by chance when listening to other people. When I was working on those first tapes, I acted like an aerial picking up other people's narration; I collected and dissected urban legends, fables and folklore." 1

Dominique Garrigues

1 Elisabeth Janus, "Vers une grammaire psycho-dramatique de l'image en mouvement : un entretien avec Tony Oursler", Tony Oursler catalog, capcMusée d'art contemporain, Bordeaux, 1997.