Artist and critic Victor Burgin’s visual and written works span four decades, and Parallel Texts presents a compilation of essays, interviews, and extracts that evidence the interconnectedness throughout his career of his vast artistic oeuvre exhibited around the world and his influential critical and theoretical writings on art.
Organized chronologically, Parallel Texts includes Burgin’s take on the emergence of conceptual art in the early 1970s, his explorations on the theoretical foundations for a post-conceptualist socialist art practice in such non-Western precedents as Maoism and Russian Formalism, and essays on the issues of gender politics and sexuality as they came to the fore in psychoanalytic criticism. In addition, excerpts from The End of Art Theory record his observations on an art world turning toward fashion and gaining unusual wealth. His later works, influenced by his experiences teaching cultural theory at the University of California, look at art theory from within an environment almost unrecognizably transformed by cultural, political, and economic globalization, as well as unprecedented forms of technology and violence.
An extensive selection of works from a long and influential artistic career, Parallel Texts will be invaluable to admirers of Burgin’s art and writing as well as those readers with an interest in contemporary art and art theory.
Table of Contents
00. Preface
01. From ‘Situational Aesthetics’, Studio International
02. From ‘Conceptual Art: Interview with Victor Burgin’, Varsity
03. From ‘Rules of Thumb’, Studio International
04. ‘In Reply’, Art-Language
05. From ‘Introduction’, in Two Essays on Art, Photography and Semiotics
06. ‘Socialist Formalism’, Studio International
07. ‘Images of People’, contribution to The State of British Art debate, Institute of Contemporary Arts; Studio International
08. From Tony Godfrey, ‘Sex, Text, Politics: An Interview with Victor Burgin’, recorded in 1979, published in Block
09. From Rosetta Brooks, ‘Victor Burgin: Interview’, Z.G.
10. Excerpts from The End of Art Theory: Criticism and Postmodernity
11. From Mark Lewis, ‘Victor Burgin: Interviewed by Mark Lewis’, C magazine
12. From Geoffrey Batchen, ‘For an Impossible Realism: An Interview with Victor Burgin’, Afterimage
13. Homi Bhabha, ‘Visualizing Theory’, from a public conversation at the Institute of Contemporary Arts; Visual Anthropology Review
14. From Tony Godfrey, ‘The Space Man’, Tate Magazine
15. From Amanda Nowinski, ‘Victor Burgin: The Art of Being Understood’, Speak
16. From Peter Suchin, ‘Seeing Between Signs: Peter Suchin interviews Victor Burgin’, dpict
17. From Sarah Thornton, ‘Zeitgeitst and Transmission: interview with Victor Burgin’
18. “Medium” and “Specificity”, in Photography Theory
19. ‘Populism, Genre and the Blank Canvas’, paper given at the conference Populism and Genre, Tate Britain
20. From a ‘Q & A’ with graduate students at the University of Rennes, Haute Bretagne and the Université catholique de Louvain; in Components of a Practice
21. From Alexander Streitberger, ed. Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings by Victor Burgin
22. David Campany, question put in an e-mail
23. ‘Face à l’histoire: Document and Interpretation’, paper given at the conference L’image document, entre réalité et fiction, la Fémis
24. From ‘Interactivity and Cinema’, talk given at the Jeu de Paume
25. From ‘Uncinematic and Virtual Signifier’, talk given at the Jeu de Paume
26. Hilde Van Gelder, ‘Artistic Representation and Politics: an Exchange between Victor Burgin and Hilde Van Gelder’, A Prior
27. From ‘Interview with Victor Burgin’, 1453: Journal of Istanbul’s Culture and Art
references
acknowledgements