Photography as Rhythm: On Prairie
This chapter explores Victor Burgin's Prairie through rhythm and the aesthetic conditions for constituting politically viable engagements with the image. The chapter posits rhythm as something simultaneously organising the relationship between the political and the aesthetic and as a principle that can undo that organisation. In this manner, the argument draws on Barthes' concept of 'zero degree' to render the contradictory and ultimately irreconcilable concerns of Burgin's projection pieces evoked and embodied by their rhythms. Drawing on writings by Sergei Eisenstein and many others, the chapter asks the following questions in relation to still and moving images: can we envision a rhythm that, at a juncture between the aesthetic and the political, does not operate as a principle of systematic organisation? What image of the past and of the collective would this other rhythm engender?