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.

This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).

About the Author
Alexander Streitberger is professor of modern and contemporary art history at the UCLouvain and director of the Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography, Art, and Visual Culture.

Reviews

Au cours de cette traversee erudite de l'oeuvre de Burgin, ce sont trois domaines historiographiques qui sans cesse entrecroisent leurs problematiques : une histoire des images qui fait de ce livre une contribution importante aux etudes visuelles ; une histoire des idees qui permet de parcourir un enchainement de courants intellectuels marquants ; une histoire des technologies, enfin, indissociable de l'avenement du capitalisme mondialise. Ce qui ressort d'une telle densite reflexive et experimentale, c'est l'indefectible intelligence critique qui meut l'oeuvre de l'artiste. - Valerie Mavridorakis, Focales, 8 | 2024, 1 June 2024, DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/11r5o

Book Information
ISBN 9789462702462
Author Alexander Streitberger
Format Paperback
Page Count 320
Imprint Leuven University Press
Publisher Leuven University Press
Weight(grams) 865g
Dimensions(mm) 230mm * 170mm * 19mm