A reflection on Victor Burgin’s art theory, semiotics, and the enduring value of rereading images in a capitalist art world.
Revisiting Victor Burgin and the Art of Rereading Images
Recently, I found myself reflecting on how formative Victor Burgin‘s lectures were during my Art History studies at UC Santa Cruz in the 1990s. Burgin—a conceptual artist and theorist trained in psychoanalytic thought—introduced our class to the world of semiotics, Lacanian psychoanalysis, linguistics, memory studies, and the intriguing concept of “teletopology.” He spoke in a calm, intellectual London accent—reminiscent of David Bowie’s—not just soothing, but layered with meaning.
For his course, I wrote a paper analyzing the work of Japanese fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto as portrayed through Wim Wenders‘ film Notebook on Cities and Clothes.. It was a creatively rich time in my early 20s: sitting in a dark, Italian-style café, drinking pint glasses of coffee, reading Baudrillard and Virilio. contemplating the layers of meaning in visual and cultural texts.
In the piece TateShots – Burgin states:
“I felt that there were already enough photographs in the world. There’s no point in making any more images – What we need to do is re-read the images we already have.”
This idea resonated deeply, especially in light of the Tacoma Art Museum’s curatorial practice—juxtaposing its Haub Family Collection of Western American Art with contemporary works and critiques. Their exhibitions exemplify Burgin’s call to reinterpret and recontextualize the visual archive.
On the Dematerialization of the Art Object
Burgin also addresses the conceptual, creative act as well as something that has for him evolved from photography, to the moving image, to 3D computer modeling – as each relates to an understanding of a psychological object or space.
In TANK Book Talks with Leslie Dick he brought up a particular provocative view about the parameters of the art object, particularly when we are wanting to challenge the confines and limitations of capitalism. He describes the ambition of 60’s conceptual art and Lucy Lippard and others’ goals to “dematerialize the art object” out of “flight from the commodity form.” Burgin critiques how contemporary art has increasingly become “a parking lot for money” for the elite—arguing that the market’s grip has “entirely wiped out contemporary art.” He raises questions about capitalism’s impact on meaning-making, and what remains of artistic autonomy under such conditions.
Conceptual Objects and Psychological Realities
He then goes on to describe the relative immaterialality of digital art objects, when considered through through an understanding of the ‘psychical object’ having as real a reality as any other form of reality. From psychological theory he describes how a fantasy can have as real of an impact on the body as a real event. He describes how there can be (art) objects without physical materiality. He then goes on to describe in scientific terms then how the associated network around a conceptual work becomes a characteristic of that work. “So you define an object in terms of all its dimensions, all its aspects.”
Burgin goes further in discussing epistomological studies about objects being the spatial intersection of multiple disciplines or perspectives. There’s object, complex object, and integrative object. This ‘contemporary’ object is temporal because the perspectives, contexts, projects brought to it in one period of time will all change during another period of time. Burgin feels this understanding is incredibly important to the process of art criticism.
On this Father’s Day, the first since my father has passed, I think about these things in lieu of our experiences discussing art, the art making process, and the art analysis process.
Art is never just about an isolated final result – the process of ideation, of researching and reacting to others approaches and takes, of note-taking and discussing, of experiencing a work within a particular dynamic moment in time….the process of building up of ideas and working off of earlier ideas….all these are just as important to understanding the ‘complex art object’ as the material final result. An absence of any particular materialized final result does not negate the network of creativity involved in building the conceptualization or approach. The lines between philosophic or psychoanalytic theory and artistic theory are thin….yet of only one the market requires a physical manifestation.