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• Description

Description

Diamond (Head) (1978-79) tells the episodic story of the diamond-shaped She, her
courtship with the triangular He, the birth of the fetus-shaped Good Son, and their collective bourgeois passions, desires and fears. A further continuation of the soap opera parodies of Joe… and Phillis, Diamond (Head) eschews specific reference to mass media genres while extending Oursler’s experimentation with archetypal character representation and with more open narrative forms (which prevision, in many respects, the radical picaresque structures employed in The Weak Bullet and The Loner). As an overt critique of consumerism and the superficiality inherent in middle-class capitalist values, Diamond (Head) is matched only by the artist’s more recent tape, Son of Oil.
[Source: "THE VIDEOTAPES OF TONY OURSLER" by John Minkowsky]