Over the past thirty years, Victor Burgin has become both an influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image. His writings are noted for their lucidity, while his photographs and videos are paradoxical and question meaning in contemporary society. In this book, Victor Burgin retraces the history of his artistic and critical pursuits, from his conceptual photographic works of the sixties to his recent video work. He reviews the evolution of his visual work with a particular focus on its relationship to the institution and practices of painting, photography and cinema. This book is different from Burgin’s previous publications, which are either monographs of his visual work—with essays by other writers—or collections of his essays. This is the first book in which Burgin turns his attention to his own artistic production.
Victor Burgin came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the originators of conceptual art. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London.
Published by Hatje Cantz. Epilogue by Hubertus von Amelunxen. Edited by Hubertus von Amelunxen, Thomas Zander.
Over the past 30 years, Victor Burgin (born in 1941) has become both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image, with work in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern in London. Burgin rose to prominence in the late 1960s as an originator of Conceptual art. In the 1970s he worked in large framed photographic sequences, in which printed texts were either juxtaposed with or superimposed on the images. In the 1990s he turned towards digital video. The historian and critic Stephen Bann has written that Burgin's "exploitation of new technologies is itself fairly uninteresting compared with the remarkable consistency of the underlying themes and propositions of his work," among them narrative, memory and fantasy. These duotones refute all that uninteresting technology to offer Burgin's reflections on Pompeii, gleaned through his research of nineteenth-century photographs.
Victor Burgin: Voyage to Italy