Victor Burgin (born 1941) is a British artist and writer.
Burgin was born in Sheffield in England. He studied art at the Royal College of Art, in London, from 1962 to 1965 (A.R.C.A., 1st Class, 1965) before going to the United States to study at Yale University (M.F.A. 1967).
Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting "the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud". His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. (European Graduate School Staff Page)
Articulating the aesthetic with the political, Burgin's work evolves as a series of replies to questions about the nature of the art object and its relation to society. Originally trained as a painter, Burgin has subsequently worked with photography, video and computer animation. The Art Historian Stephen Bann observes: "... this progressive exploitation of new technologies appears in itself fairly uninteresting compared with the remarkable consistency of the underlying themes and propositions of his work."
While a student at Yale, Burgin took part in seminars given by the Minimalist sculptor Robert Morris. In his 1966 essay 'Notes on Sculpture' Morris advocates a work that displaces the viewer's attention from the art object as such to the relations between the object and its surroundings. Continuing Morris's phenomenological approach Burgin subsequently produced 'sculptures' that consist of nothing more than a set of recursive written sentences directing the reader's attention to their immediate perceptions and memories. The 'art object' here has no existence outside of the mental acts proposed in the succession of sentences, nor is an art gallery required to present it. For example, his work from 1970 â Any Moment â is composed so that it may be read in any situation whatsoever, whether in a room or on a bus.
Unhappy with the hermeticism of Conceptualism, Burgin turned to the kinds of combinations of photographs and text routinely encountered in everyday life, bringing his visual art practice into dialogue with a significant aspect of the sociopolitical environment. The philosopher Peter Osborne notes: "most of what passes for conceptual in art [today] has little relation with that more rigorously intellectual body of work from the 1960s and early 1970s that gave conceptual art its name ... Burgin's move to a politicised photographic art practice is best understood not as the rejection of a primarily conceptual art, but as the practical pursuit of its expanded conception."
Burgin's eleven-part work from 1976 â UK76 â combines a number of disparate references to the 1970s environment of print media. The form and contents of the photographs cite the documentary genre, the punning rhetoric of the text-image relations were current in publicity at that time, and the practice of "reversing out" text over a black and white photograph was common in such glossy magazines as Vogue. UK76 cites the poster both in size (photographs in galleries at that time were usually small "fine prints") and, in being pasted to the wall, in the form of its presentation. In content, the work ironizes media representations of class, race and gender. In addition to making poster-like works for the gallery Burgin also made works such as Possession (1976) which were posted in the streets.
Burgin's work towards a 'left' art practice, in both artworks and historical and theoretical research led him to conclude that art with an overtly political content is politically ineffective. Informed by the French marxist philosopher Louis Althusser's notion of the 'specificity' of political practices, notably exemplified by Feminism, Burgin now saw the form of politics particular to art to lie in the sphere of representations, urging we "distinguish between the representation of politics and the politics of representation." The 1980s were a time of intense debate around questions of visual representations and sexuality, to which Burgin contributed both through such essays as 'Diderot, Barthes, Vertigo' [1986, in Alexander Streiberger (ed.), Situation Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin, Leuven, Leuven University, 2009] and such artworks as his 1982 series "Tales from Freud."
Burgin defines the political work of the artist as resistance to "the progressive colonisation of the terrain of languages, beliefs and values by mainstream media contents and forms which impose an industrial uniformity upon what may be imagined and said ..." His recent work enlarges the phenomenological perspective of such early works as Any Moment to include the 'real' of all that is present at a particular time and place, a task strictly impossible as: "The real is by definition that which stands outside representations. ... Representation always comes too late, it can never be equivalent to the real, coextensive or isomorphic with it. Representations, however, may be equivalent to reality, as reality is itself already an assembly of representations."
Burgin taught at Trent Polytechnic from 1967 to 1973 and at the School of Communication, Polytechnic of Central London from 1973 to 1988. From 1988 to 2001 Burgin lived and worked in San Francisco. He taught in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he became Professor Emeritus of History of Consciousness. In 2000 he was Robert Gwathmey Chair in Art and Architecture, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York. From 2001 to 2006 he was Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is currently Professor of Visual Studies, Winchester School of Art, University of Southampton.
In 1986, Burgin was nominated for the Turner Prize for his exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge and for a collection of his theoretical writings (The End of Art Theory) and a monograph of his visual work (Between). In 2005 he received an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Sheffield Hallam University (Hon. DUniv). In 2010 he received a Doctorat Honoris Causa from the Université de Liège.