Search results for ""Author Victor Burgin""

A compendium of the history of contemporary American art and a living testimony of a sincere and active protagonist. Victor Burgin, an artist and sophisticated theoretician of the image, both still and in movement, was born in Sheffield, England, in 1941. He established himself on the international art scene in the late sixties, as one of the fathers of Conceptual Art, working both with the photographic medium and with moving images in his films. His work draws its inspiration from and is influenced by great thinkers and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Over the past 30 years, Victor Burgin has become both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image. His writings on general issues such as photographic, psychoanalytic and cultural theory are noted for their lucidity, compactness and reason. In contrast, the photographs and videos that Burgin creates as an image-maker are richly paradoxical and constitute an inquiry into the structure of meaning in contemporary society. This book is different from Victor Burgin's previous publications, which are either monographs of his visual work - with essays by other writers - or collections of his theoretical essays. Although Burgin is known equally as an artist and as a theorist there has so far been no book in which Burgin turns his critical attention to his own artistic production. The proposed monograph will fill this absence and will appeal to a wide audience interested in photography, film and media.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Recent discussions about the culture of images have focused on issues of identity - sexual, racial, national - and the boundaries that define subjectivity. In this context Victor Burgin adopts an original critical strategy. He understands images less in traditional terms of the specific institutions that produce them, such as cinema, photography, advertising, and television, and more as hybrid mental constructs composed of fragments derived from the heterogeneous sources that together constitute the 'media'. Through deft analyses of a photograph by Helmut Newton, Parisian cityscapes, the space of the department store, a film by Ousmane Sembene, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre, Andre Breton, and Roland Barthes, Burgin develops an incisive theory of our culture of images and spectacle. "In/Different Spaces" explores the construction of identities in the psychical space between perception and consciousness, drawing upon psychoanalytic theories to describe the constitution and maintenance of 'self' and 'us' - in imaginary spatial and temporal relations to 'other' and 'them' - through the all-important relay of images. For Burgin, the image is never a transparent representation of the world but rather a principal player on the stage of history.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

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.

Read more less