Board_Advisors_etc 3..5

original novel set in Paris and Marseilles. Other ele-
ments add to this layered doubling to emphasize
the theme of migration: colonial imagery from a 1936
French film, North African music on the soundtrack.
As the multi-threaded videos suggest, even while
walking the streets the real and the imagined are hope-
lessly confounded by past experiences of other cities,
memories of other times, snippets of literary, histor-
ical, and filmic representations, and our own idiosyn-
cratic needs and wants. For Burgin, the object of our
gaze, much as the object of our love, is never what
we think it is; we never see something purely but al-
ways filtered through a network of prior recollect-
ions and desires. This explains in part the complexity
of Burgin’s video work: the open-ended narratives,
the repetitions and patterns that provide structural
support in lieu of a singular storyline, the tendency to
appropriate other films and other artworks into his
imagery, the shifting authorial voice of its speakers.
As in his writings, Burgin quotes many other artists
and authors in his artwork: Edward Hopper’sOffice
at Night, Edouard Manet’sOlympia, Johann Wolf-
gang von Goethe’sElective Affinities, Freud’s case
histories, E.T.A. Hoffman’s Gradiva, Hitchcock’s
films, the personal letters of Friedrich Nietzsche and
Lou Salome, the correspondences between Freud
and his collaborator Sandor Ferenzi. By putting his
images in a complex stream of other images, culled
together through the peculiarities of his own imagina-
tion, Burgin defeats the single point of view of the
isolated photograph. He allows photography to
work around its own limits, or rather, its material,
analogue basis, to begin to represent the harder-to-
show subjective side of meaning.
In artists’ books and exhibition catalogues such
asBetween(1986),Some Cities(1996), andVictor
Burgin(2001) from his retrospective in Barcelona,
Burgin has generously shared a detailed view of his
motivating preoccupations. While such articulation
should not be taken as narrowly definitive of the
work—the work itself being more robust than what
the artist has to say about it—it gives a rare chance
to understand in depth one artist’s relationship to
his chosen profession. Those who love photography
are fortunate to have such a record at our disposal.

JANEstep

Seealso:Artists Books; Barthes, Roland; Concep-
tual Photography; Interpretation; Photographic
‘‘Truth’’; Postmodernism; Representation; Semiotics

Biography

Born in Sheffield, England, 1941. Attended Royal College of
Art, London, A.R.C.A (1st Class), 1965; Yale Univer-

sity, New Haven, M.F.A., 1967; Professor Emeritus of

History of Consciousness, University of California,

Santa Cruz; Millard Professor of Fine Art, Goldsmiths

College, University of London. US/UK Bicentennial

Arts Exchange Fellowship, Berlin, 1976–1977; Deutscher

Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) Fellowship,

Berlin, 1978–1979. Allocation de recherche ́et de se ́jour,

Ministe`re de la Culture et de la Communication, De ́le ́ga-

tion aux Arts Plastiques (vide ́o et nouvelles technologies

de l’image), Paris, 1991. Living in London and Paris.

Individual Exhibitions

1977 Victor Burgin; Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindho-

ven, Netherlands

1979 Zoo; DAAD Gallery, Berlin, Germany

1986 Office at Night; Renaissance Society at the University

of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois

1986 Danaı ̈des/Dames; Massachusetts Institute of Technol-

ogy, Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, Cam-

bridge, Massachusetts

1986 Between; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London,

England

1991 Passages; Muse ́e d’art moderne Villeneuve d’Ascq,

Villeneuve d’Ascq, France

1993 Family Romance; Center for Research in Contempor-

ary Art, University of Texas at Arlington, Texas

1997 Szerelmes Levelek/Love Letters;Mu ̈csarnok Museum,

Budapest, Hungary

1998 Case History; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San

Francisco, California

1999 Lichtung; Weimar 99 Cultural Festival, Weimar, Ger-

many

2000 Nietzsche’s Paris; Architectural Association Gallery,

London, England

2001 Victor Burgin; Fundacio ́ Antoni Ta`pies, Barcelona,

Spain

2002 Listen to Britain; Arnolfini, Bristol, England

2003 Victor Burgin; LisboaPhoto 2003 Festival, Cordoaria

Nacional, Torrea ̃o Nascente, Lisbon, Portugal

Group Exhibitions

1969 When Attitudes Become Form; Institute of Contempor-

ary Art, London, England

1970 Information; Museum of Modern Art, New York,

New York

1971 Guggenheim International Exhibition; Solomon R.

Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York

1972 Documenta 5; Museum Fredericianum and Neue Gal-

erie, Kassel, Germany

1972 36 Biennale de Venezia; Venice, Italy

1980 The Third Biennale of Sydney; The Art Gallery of New

South Wales, Sydney, Australia

1987 Difference: On Sexuality and Representation; The New

Museum of Contemporary Art, New York, New York;

The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago,

Chicago, Illinois; Institute of Contemporary Arts, Lon-

don, England

1987 The Turner Prize; Tate Gallery, London, England

1989 On the Art of Fixing a Shadow: One Hundred and Fifty

Years of Photography; Art Institute of Chicago, Chi-

cago, Illinois; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.

C.; and traveling to Los Angeles County Art Museum,

Los Angeles, California

BURGIN, VICTOR