Victor Burgin’s Parzival in Leuven
Victor Burgin’s Parzival in Leuven

Author: Stéphane Symons

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2017-05-22

Total Pages: 161

ISBN-13: 9462700990

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In-depth analysis of Victor Burgin’s video installation Parzival (2013) In commemoration of the destruction of the University Library of Leuven (Belgium) in August 1914, the projection work Parzival, created by Victor Burgin (°UK, 1941) in 2013, was installed within the rebuilt Library. The installation uniquely marked the 100th anniversary of the beginning of World War I, which left its profound traces on both the consciousness and physiognomy of the city of Leuven. Burgin’s reflection on Richard Wagner’s opera Parsifal (premiere 1882) combines the artist’s computer modelled images (a bombed out street, a sunset meadow, a Venetian palazzo, …) with citations from Roberto Rossellini’s Germany Year Zero (1948) and references to works by Milan Kundera, W.G. Sebald and Philip K. Dick. This publication provides an in-depth analysis of Parzival, a work that is inspired by the period of seven months that Wagner spent in Venice (1858-1859). Burgin’s Parzival raises questions about some of the most fundamental elements in Wagner’s operatic work: the longing for a savior, the complex connection between violence and catharsis, and the presentiment that destruction awaits humanity in the future (Götterdämmerung). In an associative manner, Parzival brings together various artistic and political features to confront the romantic ideal of the ruin with the horrors that might result from such a myth. In addition, this book contains a reprint of Michel Foucault’s essay “The Imagination of the Nineteenth Century” (1980). GPRC label:

Psychical Realism
Psychical Realism

Author: Alexander Streitberger

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2020-10-20

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 9462702462

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Comprehensive overview of a highly influential contemporary artist’s work Victor Burgin counts among the most versatile figures within art and visual culture since the late 1960s. His artwork both connects with and reacts to minimalism, conceptual art, staged photography, appropriation art, video art and, more recently, computer-based imaging. As a scholar his thinking is informed by phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis. This monograph provides a comprehensive and unique overview of Victor Burgin’s body of work over the past five decades. Identifying the concept of ‘psychical realism’ as an overarching umbrella term, Alexander Streitberger traces back the artist’s parallel unfolding of practice and theory, while situating this process within various historical contexts and critical debates. Five chapters link insightful case studies to key issues such as conceptual art and situational aesthetics, the relationship between representation and politics, postmodernist concepts of space, and the digital environment of media images. The book is richly illustrated and includes a sequence from the major work Dear Urania (2016) especially designed by the artist for this book.

The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory
The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory

Author: Mark Durden

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-11-07

Total Pages: 500

ISBN-13: 1317541588

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With newly commissioned essays by some of the leading writers on photography today, this companion tackles some of the most pressing questions about photography theory’s direction, relevance, and purpose. This book shows how digital technologies and global dissemination have radically advanced the pluralism of photographic meaning and fundamentally transformed photography theory. Having assimilated the histories of semiotic analysis and post-structural theory, critiques of representation continue to move away from the notion of original and copy and towards materiality, process, and the interdisciplinary. The implications of what it means to ‘see’ an image is now understood to encompass, not only the optical, but the conceptual, ethical, and haptic experience of encountering an image. The 'fractal' is now used to theorize the new condition of photography as an algorithmic medium and leads us to reposition our relationship to photographs and lend nuances to what essentially underlies any photography theory — that is, the relationship of the image to the real world and how we conceive what that means. Diverse in its scope and themes, The Routledge Companion to Photography Theory is an indispensable collection of essays and interviews for students, researchers, and teachers. The volume also features extensive images, including beautiful colour plates of key photographs.

Seeing Degree Zero
Seeing Degree Zero

Author: Bishop Ryan Bishop

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-10-14

Total Pages: 456

ISBN-13: 1474431437

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In the fields of literature and the visual arts, 'zero degree' represents a neutral aesthetic situated in response to, and outside of, the dominant cultural order. Taking Roland Barthes' 1953 book Writing Degree Zero as just one starting point, this volume examines the historical, theoretical and visual impact of the term and draws directly upon the editors' ongoing collaboration with artist and writer Victor Burgin. The book is composed of key chapters by the editors and Burgin, a series of collaborative texts with Burgin and four commissioned essays concerned with the relationship between Barthes and Burgin in the context of the spectatorship of art. It includes an in-depth dialogue regarding Burgin's long-term reading of Barthes and a lengthy image-text, offering critical exploration of the Image (in echo of earlier theories of the Text). Also included are translations of two projections works by Burgin, 'Belledonne' and 'Prairie', which work alongside and inform the collected essays. Overall, the book provides a combined reading of both Barthes and Burgin, which in turn leads to new considerations of visual culture, the spectatorship of art and the political aesthetic.

The Rhythm of Images
The Rhythm of Images

Author: Domietta Torlasco

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

Published: 2021-06-08

Total Pages: 174

ISBN-13: 1452964637

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A rigorous and imaginative inquiry into rhythm’s vital importance for film and the moving image Focusing attention on a concept much neglected in the study of film, The Rhythm of Images opens new possibilities for thinking about expanded perception and idiosyncratic modes of being. Author Domietta Torlasco engages with both philosophy and cinema to elaborate a notion of rhythm in its pre-Socratic sense as a “manner of flowing”—a fugitive mode that privileges contingency and calls up the forgotten fluidity of forms. In asking what it would mean to take this rhythm as an ontological force in its own right, she creatively draws on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray. Rhythm emerges here as a form that eludes measure, a key to redefining the relation between the aesthetic and the political, and thus a pivotal means of resistance to power. Working with constellations of films and videos by international artists—from Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and David Lynch to Harun Farocki and Victor Burgin, among others—Torlasco brings to bear on them her distinctive concept of rhythm with respect to four interrelated domains: life, labor, memory, and medium. With innovative readings of artworks and critical texts alike, The Rhythm of Images fashions a vibrant, provocative theory of rhythm as the excess or potential of perception. Ultimately, the book reconceives the relation between rhythm and the world-making power of images. The result is a vision of cinema as a hybrid medium endowed with the capacity not only to reinvent corporeal boundaries but also to find new ways of living together.

Ubiquity
Ubiquity

Author: Jacob W. Lewis

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2021-12-15

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9462702896

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From its invention to the internet age, photography has been considered universal, pervasive, and omnipresent. This anthology of essays posits how the question of when photography came to be everywhere shapes our understanding of all manner of photographic media. Whether looking at a portrait image on the polished silver surface of the daguerreotype, or a viral image on the reflective glass of the smartphone, the experience of looking at photographs and thinking with photography is inseparable from the idea of ubiquity—that is, the apparent ability to be everywhere at once. While photography’s distribution across cultures today is undeniable, the insidious logics and pervasive myths that have governed its spread demand our critical attention, now more than ever.

Contemporary Photography in France
Contemporary Photography in France

Author: Olga Smith

Publisher: Leuven University Press

Published: 2022-10-19

Total Pages: 233

ISBN-13: 9462703442

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This compelling publication traces the broad arc of photography’s development in France from the 1970s to the present day. A decade-by-decade account reveals unexpected points of convergence between practices that are not usually considered in a comparative perspective. These include photographic practices in contemporary art, documentary, photojournalism, and fashion. Author Olga Smith sets these practices in dialogue with French philosophy – the writings of Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Jacques Rancière – to produce an innovative study of the intersections between the photographic image, text, practice, and theory. This analysis is guided by an understanding of photography as deeply engaged with historical, cultural, and intellectual events that defined French national experience in the contemporary period. Landscape provides a particular focus to study issues of key significance, including national identification, colonial past, legacies of modernization and environmental breakdown.

The Camera
The Camera

Author: Victor Burgin

Publisher:

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 9781912339068

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"Victor Burgin is one of the most influential artists and writers working today. He came to prominence as a key figure in the Conceptual Art of the late 1960s. After turning to photography in his artistic practice he produced a series of groundbreaking theoretical essays that drew on semiotics, psychoanalysis and feminism in order to think through the ideological role of photographs in the production of beliefs and values, and in the understanding of memory, history, subjectivity and space. In the last decade or so, Burgin has worked with computer-generated imagery and the virtual camera. But rather than accepting a radical divide between so-called 'analogue' and 'digital' realms, Burgin has emphasised the continuity of the virtual camera, the various physical cameras in use today, and the painted images of Quattrocento painting - all of which have their essence in the perspectival system of representation. Further to this, Burgin argues that no image is merely an optical experience - all images are essentially psychological events and thus virtual also. Inseparable from language, they form the psychical spaces of fantasy and projection, recognition and misrecognition. Whether on pages, walls or screens, in galleries or online, single views, or swarms of picture fragments, images are the making and unmaking of our sense of self, and the world around us. This collection brings together for the first time Victor Burgin's writings related specifcally to the camera, following the shifts and nuances in his thinking over nearly five decades. Moreover, it allows us to chart the evolution of what the camera was and is, and how its affects are to be understood."--Publisher's website

Victor Burgin. Afterlife
Victor Burgin. Afterlife

Author: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther Konig

Publisher:

Published: 2019-11-15

Total Pages: 138

ISBN-13: 9783960986584

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Afterlife" is a narrative text/image work on the model of the classic 'photobook' Victor Burgin conceives of the afterlife as a parallel virtual world engineered along the lines of a 'first person exploration' videogame. In keeping with his premise he makes his photographs with virtual cameras in computer environments built with 'game engine' software. "Afterlife" is an experiment with both a classic book form and a classical myth - a sciencefiction variation on the story of Orpheus and Eurydice, constructed with lapidary texts and laconic pictures worked together to invoke 'images' understood not as optical phenomena but as events in the reader's mind.

In/Different Spaces
In/Different Spaces

Author: Victor Burgin

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1996-12-10

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 9780520202993

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Book on art and philosophy