Multiple Doll Personalities – Tony Oursler’s Projected Traumas

Abstract

In the installation „Judy“ from 1994 Tony Oursler stages the fragmentation into various personalities thus referring to the context of a multiple personality disorder presumedly caused by trauma. In the artistic processing of this argument, he uses the doll in its function as a substitute for human being. Oursler‘s special artistic doll creatures offer a particularly useful medium for the presentation of the trauma of a multiple personality disorder and for the influence of media in general on (collective) psychic phenomena. In the article a search for traces of the creative genetic process and of the developmental path of the work is made in order to get to the bottom of the peculiar character of Tony Oursler‘s dolls.