Search results for ""Author Victor Burgin""
MACK Returning to Benjamin
Victor Burgin revisits Walter Benjamin's essay 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' to argue that the camera today is profoundly imbricated in that which is not visible.
£10.65
Reaktion Books The Remembered Film
Most books about cinema, whether popular or academic, concentrate on what we might call the inside' of the film: from star performances to narrative structures. The relatively few books about the outside' of films speak mainly of such aspects of production and reception as the organization of the film industry and the sociology of audiences: the Hollywood studio system, for example, or fan clubs. "The Remembered Film" is unique in addressing a previously overlooked aspect of cinema: the isolated fragments of films, iconic images or scenes, that fleetingly cross our perceptions and thoughts in the course of everyday life. Victor Burgin examines a kaleidescope of film fragments drawn from a variety of media, the internet, memory and fantasy. Among these are sequences of such brevity they might almost be stills. Such sequence-images', as Burgin calls them, are neither strictly image' nor image sequence' and have not been considered before by either film or photography theory. He also considers some typical individual experiences sampled' from mainstream cinema. He reflects on such disparate occurrences as the association in memory of fragments from otherwise unrelated films, of the relation of a recollected film image to an architectural setting, or of a feeling marked' by an image remembered from a film. "The Remembered Film" provides a radical new way of thinking about film outside conventional cinema, and in relation to our everyday lives. It will appeal to a wide audience interested in film and media.
£20.88
MACK Between
First published in 1986 and long out of print, Between charts Burgin’s passage from early conceptual art, via appropriationist works and critiques of mass media imagery to a series of photo-texts informed by psychoanalysis, semiotics, cinema studies and feminism. Photographer, critic and curator David Campany writes: “Between was first published into a time when the art markets came to dominate and dictate as never before. Art was no longer that stubborn space of resistance and reflection; it was to be part of the spectacle of neoliberal capitalism in which image is all. Self-congratulatory art fairs, artists as media celebrities, bloated auction prices, and the reduction of criticality to recognizable and increasingly empty gestures. … Burgin makes photographic work like no other artist, but his themes and motifs are drawn from experiences common to us all – the modern city, the structures of family, language as something that forms and reforms us, the power of images, principles of government, memory and history. And yet, encouraged by the media to look to art for quick messages, some audiences and critics have found his work ‘inaccessible’. Actually Burgin’s work is among the most accessible I know, if by that we mean ‘easy to get into’. It’s the getting out that’s tricky.” Interweaving Burgin’s visual work with fragments from interviews, talks and letters, Between offers insights into the relation of ‘theory’ to ‘practice’ in a form of art which has undermined the basis of this distinction. This MACK facsimile makes Burgin’s historic and groundbreaking book available for the first time in over three decades.
£30.59
MACK The Camera: Essence and Apparatus
Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space. In the last decade or so, Burgin has worked with computer-generated imagery and the virtual camera. But rather than accepting a radical divide between so-called ‘analogue’ and ‘digital’ realms, Burgin has emphasised the continuity of the virtual camera, the various physical cameras in use today, and the painted images of Quattrocento painting – all of which have their essence in the perspectival system of representation. Further to this, Burgin argues that no image is merely an optical experience – all images are essentially psychological events and thus virtual also. Inseparable from language, they form the psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition. Whether on pages, walls or screens, in galleries or online, single views, or swarms of picture fragments, images are the making and unmaking of our sense of self, and the world around us. This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin’s writings related specifically to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood.
£18.81