Inside a former synagogue on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, 67-year-old Tony Oursler has built an extensive personal collection of historical materials related to magic, spirituality, and the occult. Known for his installations that combine video, sculpture, and projection, the artist has both an artistic investment and a familial connection to illusionism. His grandfather, Fulton Oursler, was a mystery writer and magician who took pleasure in exposing the fraudsters he believed were armed with this skill.
What started 50 years ago as a few folders of slides and flyers has grown into an apartment-filling archive that includes color theory, UFOs, automatic writing, and more. “The material I have is a barometer of people’s belief systems,” Oursler said. On a recent afternoon, several boxes of spirit photographs, séance drawings, and manuscripts were scheduled to be shipped to the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, where they will be part of the upcoming exhibition “Evoking the Spirit World: Art, Magic.” It will be exhibited at. And medium. The archive also inspired Oursler’s series of installations related to fairies, crystals, and historical mischief in the recent exhibition “Smoke & Mirrors: Magical Thinking in Contemporary Art” at the Boca Raton Museum of Art in Florida. I gave it.
collection: Occult, spiritual, pseudoscience, and technological ephemera.
Number of works in the collection: Between 3,000 and 5,000.
First purchase: “In the 1970s, I was taking art classes at Rockland Community College. [in New York State]. Someone came in with a Kirlian camera and took some kind of aura photo. I kept the photo and, ever since, other curiosities, such as cult-related leaflets that were often handed out to young people on the streets at the time. ”
Most expensive: “An album of rare psychic photographs taken during a séance by William Walker of the Krewe Circle, a famous spiritualist group from the early 1900s. It cost about $14,000.”
Cheapest: “Polaroid of the Virgin Mary appearing in a glass structure in Clearwater, Florida. I got it on eBay for $7.”
Most valuable: “There are a few things that have to do with my grandfather. Arthur Conan Doyle sent him an ectoplasmic image along with a handwritten note. My brother has a wand that he received as a present from Harry Houdini. My grandfather and Houdini were friends and both debunked psychics.
Strangest: “I bought a painting of Satan from this guy who worked at a funeral home. He sent it to me in cloth to line a coffin. I don’t collect that much anymore.”
Most famous: “A photo of Mary Todd Lincoln being visited by the spirit of Abraham Lincoln, taken by William Mumler, the first spirit photographer. Copies of that photo are all over the place, but I happen to have the original photo.”
Longest wanted: “I came into possession of a book from the 1830s that I had been looking for since the late 1990s. It was the memoirs of Etienne-Gaspard Robertson, a practitioner of phantasmagoria, which combined theater with a ghost show using magic lanterns. The image of the spirit on the surface. He was one of the original installation artists. ”
This interview has been edited and condensed.
