Imponderable: The Archives of Tony Oursler - Softcover

Oursler's archive is the mother lode of all things occult: it has everything...--Yau John "Hyperallergic "

Devoted to so much funny, engaging, and ultimately moving evidence of our search for instructive or simply comforting messages from the beyond... [Imponderable] reveal[s] the intriguing connections between the work of video artist Tony Oursler and his encyclopedic and obsessive collection of over 2,500 images and objects.--Francine Prose "The New York Review of Books "

Since the late 1990s, artist Tony Oursler (born 1957) 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. One of the collection's many digressions records the friendship between the artist's grandfather Charles Fulton Oursler--a famous early 20th-century author and publisher--and magician and escapologist Harry Houdini, and a historic interaction with Arthur Conan Doyle, who, beyond his Sherlock Holmes series, was an important advocate for spiritualism and the paranormal.
This publication features up to 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.