Components of a Practice

A compendium of the history of contemporary American art and a living testimony of a sincere and active protagonist. Victor Burgin, an artist and sophisticated theoretician of the image, both still and in movement, was born in Sheffield, England, in 1941. He established himself on the international art scene in the late sixties, as one of the fathers of Conceptual Art, working both with the photographic medium and with moving images in his films. His work draws its inspiration from and is influenced by great thinkers and philosophers such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. Over the past 30 years, Victor Burgin has become both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image. His writings on general issues such as photographic, psychoanalytic and cultural theory are noted for their lucidity, compactness and reason. In contrast, the photographs and videos that Burgin creates as an image-maker are richly paradoxical and constitute an inquiry into the structure of meaning in contemporary society. This book is different from Victor Burgin's previous publications, which are either monographs of his visual work - with essays by other writers - or collections of his theoretical essays. Although Burgin is known equally as an artist and as a theorist there has so far been no book in which Burgin turns his critical attention to his own artistic production. The proposed monograph will fill this absence and will appeal to a wide audience interested in photography, film and media.