Victor Burgin

Considérer les figures qui peuplent les textes de Victor Burgin permet de supprimer la distinction entre les essais, les articles, les chapitres d’ouvrages collectifs et les textes accompagnant les œuvres elles-mêmes. Théorie, critique, écriture autobiographique : chaque format fait comparaître des personnages.

Victor Burgin's search for meaning within the modern cityscape reflects the attempt to build depth into a genre that, by definition, is superficial in nature. Capturing both the city and its inhabitants in a symbiotic manner, where one's significance reflects the other, Burgin's visual essays represent the successful development of a form of narrative view painting. For generations cityscapes that focused on both the physical areas of the city and those individuals who daily-occupied those areas, fell into the no-man's land between landscape and genre; neither entirely view painting nor that depicting everyday life. While certain works within this genre suggested pure attempts at topographical documentation, recording what is actually seen and focusing on the permanent, others seemed more like discursive social exercises. This latter type, embracing the local populace and expressing something of the experience of the individual within their environment, rested along the periphery of the classical cityscape. By developing both a convincing feel for the surface, as well as the potential for narrative which naturally exists within any outdoor, peopled scene, Burgin's oeuvre presents a convincing representation of the city. Our ability to appreciate Burgin's contribution to this genre, to discern between works of genre and cityscape and furthermore, to assess the fluidity between the documentation of fact and the exploration of experience, is greatly assisted by the enlistment of a theory developed to explore the same phenomenon within the field of literature. This essay will apply a theory on descriptive and narrative approaches in nineteenth century literature developed by literary historian Georg Lukács (1885–1971) to Burgin's oeuvre. Lukács' distinct separation of the role of the observer from that of the participant, with its concomitant effect on the nature of any realistic work, effectively enhances our comprehension of the deep and insightful portraits of the modern city provided within Burgin's narrative cityscapes. Victor Burgin's search for meaning within the modern cityscape reflects more than a century of determining how to build depth into a genre which, by definition, describes the surface. Capturing both the city and its inhabitants in a symbiotic manner where one's significance reflects the other, Burgin's visual essays represent the successful development of this genre. For generations cityscapes that focused on both the physical areas of the city (its streets, buildings and green areas) and those individuals who daily occupied those areas fell into the no-man's-land between landscape and genre;

This essay traces the emergence of the panoramic apparatus in a cross-historical and intercultural context, and demonstrates how the theoretical principles of nineteenth-century panoramic apparatus have continued to inform modern and contemporary visual practices.

This essay, published in a Festschrift for Alex Potts,  investigates the role of documentary photography in the radical aesthetics of the 1970s. I argue that the Brecht-Benjamin line should not be seen simply as a matter of representation, but must include the transformation of production relations. The range of practices current in Britain at the time included both perspectives, but a range of organisations, groups and individuals paid serious attention to creating, what Alan Sears calls an 'infrastructure of dissent'. The essay includes research conducted in the Jo Spence Archive at Birkbeck.
Incidentally the phrase 'dirty realism' as adapted from Enzensberger's 'dirty media'.

Publié originellement en 2004, Le Film qui me reste en mémoire apparaît aujourd'hui à la lectrice et au lecteur francophones qui le découvrent pour la première fois comme une réflexion profondément originale sur les rapports que les sujets-spectateurs que nous sommes entretiennent avec les films de cinéma. Il s'agit dans cet ouvrage, qui constitue alors la somme logique de différentes préoccupations traversant la vaste production théorique de Victor Burgin - le souvenir et la mémoire, l'articulation entre psychanalyse et idéologie, le questionne-ment de l'opposition entre image fixe et image en mouvement, etc.-, d'interroger la façon dont les films investissent sous forme de fragments non seulement notre environnement visuel, mais aussi notre espace psychique.