VICTOR BURGIN
English
Equally known for his theoretical writings and for
his artworks, Victor Burgin has had a profound
impact on photography since the late 1960s. Com-
prising photography, text, video, and critical writ-
ing, his creative practice challenges traditional
dualistic categories, operating in the in-between
spaces between art and theory, image and text,
photography and film, narrative and coincidence,
inner and outer realms, psychic and social realities.
As Maya Deren did for American avant-garde film,
as Joseph Kosuth did for early conceptual art, and
as Allan Kaprow did for happenings—artists who
were impassioned advocates for their particular
media, art histories, and conceptual positions—
Burgin has extensively contextualized the ideas
and concerns fueling his work. In the process he
has staunchly defended the relevance of photo-
graphic images to contemporary society. He has
done this on two fronts: in terms of the hidden
ideologies images represent from the point of view
of social, economic, and gendered institutions, and
in terms of the way the psychological unconscious
fuels our subjective projections onto what we see in
the world around us.
Burgin’s interests have moved from the semiotics
of Roland Barthes to the class consciousness of
Karl Marx and Louis Althusser to the psychoana-
lytic theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan,
along the way including feminism, film theory,
postmodernism, and cultural studies. Often giving
a very close reading of his influences, Burgin finds
in each of these theorists language that articulates
the complexities of interpretation and meaning,
with a methodological focus on demystifying so-
cial phenomena—sign, image, class, and sex respec-
tively—formerly assumed to be fixed and natural.
Burgin’s genius is to apply these theories and meth-
odstothetaskofdenaturalizingphotography,which
also suffers from essentialist assumptions about
its truth-value. Throughout all of his investigations
is a persistent questioning of the way social institu-
tions and personal experiences mediate photo-
graphs, an emphasis on the connotative, rhetorical
meanings of photographic images that belie their
obvious empirical, denotative meanings.
A few key pieces early on lay Burgin’s theoretical,
aesthetic groundwork.Photopath(1967), first pre-
sented in the landmark exhibitionWhen Attitudes
Become Form, presents a row of photographs of a
hardwood floor laid out exactly to match the areas
photographed underneath them; the subtle one-to-
one displacement, however, briefly confuses the real
and the imaged, suggesting the faint ghosting of
memory on the actual event. InPerformative Narra-
tive(1971), nearly identical images of an office desk
are paired with 16 different text narratives. The slight
differences in both are governed by a strict set of
binary possibilities: file folder open or closed, desk
chair pushed in or out, events described closer or
farther in time, closer or farther in space. The syste-
matic exploration of these possibilities contrasts
sharply with the more evocative connotations of the
scenes, as the emotional resonance of the photo-
graphs shifts depending on who we think took the
photo, whose experience we think it captures, and
how all those involved relate to one another. The
street poster Possession (1976), initially posted
throughout the city center of Newcastle upon Tyne,
England, appropriates the visual rhetoric of mass
media but with a linguistic twist; while the image
shows a conventionally beautiful couple embracing,
relying similar to advertising on the appeal of the
image to draw a passerby’s glance, the text questions
the status quo distribution of wealth and property.
Rather than convince us of the accuracy of the cam-
era’s reportage, these early photographic projects ask
viewers to become critically aware of our own con-
tribution to creating meaning for the images at hand.
One consequence of denaturalizing photography
is that all perception can then be understood to arise
outofacomplicatedinterminglingoffactual,cultural,
and psychological associations. In Burgin’s more
recent work, which includes video portraits of New
York, London, Paris, Weimar, and Berlin, and a col-
lection of essays titledIn/Different Spaces: Place and
Memory in Visual Culture(1996), the experience of
place becomes the subject of this critical analysis. For
example,Venise(1993) explores the Mediterranean
port city of Marseilles, but is juxtaposed with foot-
age of San Francisco. A voice-over narration that
tells the story ofVertigoand its dual manifestations
in Alfred Hitchcock’s film set in California and theBURGIN, VICTOR