Prairie (Argo)

This chapter offers a reimagining of Victor Burgin's projection piece Prairie and its political aesthetic. Using the specificity of Chicago as site and staging ground, the chapter deploys Roland Barthes' conceit of the ship Argo, 'each piece of which the Argonauts gradually replaced, so that they ended with an entirely new ship, without having to alter either its name or its form.' Using this critical tool in which 'the system prevails over the very being of objects' to build its own version of the projection, the chapter explores explicitly many of the themes and issues in Burgin's piece: issues of urban destruction, race relations, spatial justice and deep time. The chapter begins with Prairie and, 'by dint of combinations made within one and the same name' comes to find that, like the argo, 'nothing is left of the origin', but instead is understood as a site of both disappearance and of writing.

Pre-occupations: Calling Up Ghosts in A Place to Read and Belledonne

This chapter considers pieces by Victor Burgin that stage and foreground the acts of reading and writing to explore the recursive and self-reflexive elements of making found in Burgin's projection pieces. Starting with the metaphor of the palimpsest, this paper traces the way the pieces explore specific forms of language and of telling aimed at 'spatializing the temporal flow'. The chapter explores how the image of the palimpsest or "overlay" allows the viewer to see in the projection pieces a gesture that complements the coalescence of different times. Seeing the palimpsest as haunted space, the paper uncovers melancholy stories of loss and exile echoing from A Place to Read to Belledonne. The critical power of the projection pieces lies in the way they disrupt traditional categories of chronology and spatial compartmentalisation, allowing story and history, present and past, collective and individual experiences to reflect one another.

Prairie

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Belledonne

Victor Burgin's projection work, Belledonne (2016), which poignantly evokes the sanatorium in which Barthes lived for a number of years in his youth due to tuberculosis, is rendered in print in this chapter. The impossible panoramic views of this work along with the numerous inter-titles often using Barthes' beloved haiku form evoke a poetic imagining of life in the asylum where Barthes spent World War II. Scattered throughout the projection piece are allusions to Barthes' entire body of work while evoking the work being done to his body. The rendering of Belledonne offers a vivid visual preface to the 'zero degree' that pervades the book, and which beckons the exploration of a political aesthetic of 'zero degree seeing'

Response/Abilities of Seeing

By considering John Cage's re-phrasing of 'responsibility' as 'response-ability', and thus foregrounding political engagement as requiring aesthetic capabilities and sensibilities, alongside Victor Burgin's extended explorations of the specificities of both making and viewing an artwork, the introduction undertakes two key functions. Firstly, it sets out the context for the book, which concerns Burgin's sustained reading of Barthes, begun in the 1960s, and how we understand images/imaging/Image. Secondly, in dialogue with this context, the chapter establishes the key operative themes and terms operative in the book as a whole. In attempting to set out its theoretical underpinning, the chapter ranges over issues of the political aesthetic, spatial/temporal ethics, the generative capacities of visualisation technologies, and contemporary spectatorship, particularly in relation to contemporary art.

Camera as Object and Process

The chapter provides a conversation between the three authors in which a number of Burgin's site-specific installations frame a consideration of the status and future of the camera from photography to moving image to computer-generated virtual works. In the process Burgin modifies Bazin's question 'What is cinema?' to ask 'What is a camera?'. The CGI projection works extend and develop Burgin's long-standing interest in the relationship of aesthetics and politics as rendered through visualisation technologies, especially as it pertains to space. Burgin's account constructs a genealogy of seeing, visualising and image-making as technologically determined and crafted. In brief, he explains that 'the history of the camera is inseparable from the history of perspective'.

The End of the Frame

The chapter continues a decades long engagement by Victor Burgin with the theoretical work of Laura Mulvey as in pertains to cinema theory, panoramic perception, narration, memory and time. The chapter links these issues to how they are addressed and used in Burgin's practice and theoretical writing. The chapter includes Barthes in the discussions of cinematic theory in discussion with photographic theory through artistic practice that foregrounds modes of moving image narrative capacities for theatre and gallery-based spectators. Two kinds of narrative practices emerge, each relevant to spectatorship and viewing situation, as well as art work. The opposition between movement and still, the chapter argues, is not to be reduced to the distinction in narrative theory between 'narrative' and 'image', but is rather a matter of two kinds of narrative structure historically located in two kinds of architectural setting, each presupposing its own specific form of audience behavior.

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?

Painting, Photography, Projection

This image-text offers a series of propositions that theorise perspective and Image through the technologies that create different visual mediums. The chapter takes its lead from the propositional nature of the essay 'From Work to Text'. In this case, the focus is upon the 'image', upon the technics of the image, rather than the Text. We might suggest a practice of imaging, except that in everyday language such a term for the making of the image seems to falter somewhat, to evoke techniques and technologies of the image, rather than a more general conceptual space, as we understand with the Text. Here, as we look through painting, photography and projections, we come to consider perspective as the underlying construct, and one which leads us to work against the image, or at least the fixed, empirical image.

The Situation of Practice

The Situation of Practice In Writing Degree Zero Roland Barthes addresses the dilemma of the writer who wishes to be free from the grip of bourgeois history as enshrined in language: the doxa of style. Thus at the end of that book, he invokes the image of the writer facing the blank page. The confrontation with the blank page is the degree zero of any art practice, the schematic centre of the situation of the practice. In everyday speech the word 'situation' is used in disparate senses: from the gallery space in which it is encountered to the geopolitical context of its production and reception. The issues explored apply to the material means specific to Burgin's own art practice - writing and camera images - and at other times concern 'art' in general.