DOUBLE SPACE: On Victor Burgin

Paul Smith


 In 1987 I had my first opportunity to see Victor Burgin's photo-and-text
sequence, The Bridge (1984), while I was reviewing an exhibition of contemporary
British art at the ICA in Boston. I thought of The Bridge in the same way as I
had often thought of Burgin's work--as primarily and most interestingly a
meditation, as a certain kind of abstract revery. Burgin's meditation wanders
around his own act, or his own habit, of looking as a heterosexual man. 

 Such a man's gaze selects, alights upon, and tries out some of the mutifarious
images, structures, spaces, and metaphors, which construct his imaginary and
which enable (or even enforce, perhaps) his position as a sexed subject. The
meditation ranges across a flood of culturally specific metaphors and allusions
(not to mention illusions and ideologies) which Burgin appropriates into his
works in order to show the complex networks of image, word, and thought that we
(we men, whatever our sexual preference) deploy when we enjoy looking. 

 In The Bridge he arranges bridges and bodies of water as eroticised (or at
least, sexualised) symbols of male and female bodies, associating them with
other cultural topoi of sexual construction: the watery birth of Venus, the
watery death of Ophelia, the rescue from water of Madeleine in Alfred
Hitchcock's fantasy, Vertigo , and so on. These and other elements are
structured into a sequence of photos and texts that call up what Laura Mulvey
has called "collective fantasy." This is "generated by a collective unconscious,
not the Jungian collective unconscious, but a pool of raw material common to all
who share an induction into sexual difference, experiences of castration
anxiety, the Oedipus complex and, indeed, the psychic drives."1 

 And the psychic drive that Burgin's work of this time has specifically invoked
is the scopic drive. In this respect, the psychoanalytical theory of Jacques
Lacan is hard at work in Burgin's project. Lacan speaks of how the "privileged
object" in the scopic relation is the gaze itself, vacillating between subject
and object. But the oscillatory operations of the gaze are normally elided in
order that the subject might maintain the wholesome fiction of "seeing oneself
seeing oneself."2 In a work like The Bridge Burgin can be thought of as
attempting to dispense with that fiction, aiming instead for an art that will
mimic the processes of the gaze itself as it crosses objects and grabs them for
deployment in a particular imaginary. 

 Seeing The Bridge I understood it--as I am sure I had been cued to do by
Burgin's "woman" trilogy, Gradiva, Olympia, and Portia (1982-4)--as this kind of
allegory of the gaze's meditation producing a meditation on the gaze. But this
time I was struck by the high degrees of both abstraction and difficulty which I
found in the work, and which I felt to be less than compelling. My lack of
enthusiasm was perhaps in part a function of the context--a show in which work
by an array of British artists (including Hannah Collins, Tim Head, David Mach,
and the NAT¯ group) addressed the postmodern landscape of Margaret Thatcher's
Britain in ways that I thought were usefully and powerfully politicized. In that
setting, Burgin's piece seemed heavy, and my review suggested as much, claiming
that "now is not the time, and Britain is not the place, for the luxury of such
abstraction as Burgin's, with its academic edge."3

 I have felt quite uneasy with that summary judgement ever since I wrote it.
Most of all it is a judgement that pretends to ignore the political urgency and
specificity of the project that Burgin had been undertaking--his interrogation
and even deconstruction of the monolithic notions of masculine sexuality that
had, for the most part, been left to one side when feminisms and feminist theory
in the 1970s undertook to reformulate notions of feminine sexuality. Burgin's
political project, then, was a sexual politics, and one whose indisputable
efficacity was downplayed in my commentary. For me, as a male viewer of Burgin's
work, it had been precisely his art's ability to unfold some of the complexities
of male sexed subjectivity and to stir them into the mix of sexual political
debates that had been its power. 

 And yet still....The experience of viewing Burgin's mid-1980s work demanded
that one draw on a certain faith in the possibility of what we might call "a
revolution at the level of the signifier." That is, it was necessary to imagine
that the evolving of new forms of representation, and the deconstruction and
destruction of the old, was necessarily a politically progressive strategy.That
act of faith involved--for me, at least--putting aside one's nagging sensation
that there was too large a disjuncture between the works on the wall and the
urgent political thinking that impelled their production. This is not a call for
the artwork to be propagandistic, but rather to suggest that possible modes of
exchange between work, reader, and political discourses might be more evidently
and helpfully structured than in Burgin's work of this time. 

 There is perhaps some reason to imagine that Burgin, an artist who has shown
himself willing to keep moving and allow his work to develop in new directions,
might have had similar thoughts. Since 1986 Burgin's work has taken off in
significantly different directions--and this may have something to do with the
fact that he has been working and teaching more and more frequently in the
United States. Those new directions have led to the shaping of a new
concentration on the idea of space, and have been accompanied by a sense that
"surely the legitimate expectations [of viewers] include a certain amount of
visual pleasure--or, at the very least, visual interest."4 One consequence of
these moves is Burgin's decision to abandon photography. Much of his work since
1986 has opted for computer over camera, and has also involved him in the use of
new materials such as formica. 

 I want to say that the new preoccupation with space begins with his first use
of computer generated images which, so far as I know, was in Park Edge (1987), a
site-specific work made in (?). But even as I say that, I think again of The
Bridge and of the way the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge works there. It is
offered both as a geographic or topographic signifier and as an imaginary one.
That is, it acts as a kind of two-way object, a projection of the imaginary into
worldly space and an introjection of the material world to become a marker of
psychical space. In that sense this bridge actually forms a bridge to some of
Burgin's more recent work. 

 Park Edge and Minnesota Abstract (1989) both, I think, constitute continuations
of what is begun there. That is, Burgin's abiding concern with the shape and
content of the imaginary, and with the process of its formation, is carried on
in these works. But the novelty here is that the aspect that concerns him is no
longer specifically the work of sexual positioning that the imaginary does.
Rather, he seems to be concerned more generally--and indeed, more
literally--with positioning, with the way in which a landscape, and the objects
of that landscape, come to belong to a dialectic of inside and outside. 

 Of course, I suspect that to put it that way is already something of betrayal
of Burgin's project--it is exactly the dialectic confusion and co-operation of
internal and external space that appears to be what Burgin is pointing to here.
Indeed, it is probably the case that Burgin would want to dispense with that
linguistic doublet altogether; our language keeps us tied up in these binaries,
and that fact constitutes as good a reason as any to make the artwork instead,
which might "say" it differently. 

 This concern with what I can only call, then, "double space" is a persistent
one with Burgin. But what to make of its articulation in non-photographic form?
Or to put the question another way, is there any necessary link between Burgin's
moving to a more generalised concern with positioning and space, and his
abandoning of photography? I can perhaps best approach the question by quoting
Burgin's own explanation, noting that his words demarcate another kind of double
space. That is, he has suggested that his recent work is "a return to the
prehistory of photography....but also in a sense a turn towards the future of
photography."5 

 Another double space: a before and an after of photography. It is tempting to
try to draw a double analogy: first, between the prehistoric space before
photography and the unconscious; and then, a matching analogy between the
computer-treated future of photography and the space of postmodern culture. I am
not certain that the analogies quite work--nor that they are what Burgin might
approve--but perhaps they are not outrageous. I am assuming that the process by
which Burgin makes his new work is to pass images of the "external" space
through the computer, sifting and shifting them--a process that works in much
the same way as that of the unconscious sifting and shifting (condensing and
displacing) our perceptions of the world. 

 The silhouettes and abstract shapes of Park Edge lead me to believe that this
is what Burgin is doing, what he is getting at. In fact, I have not seen that
work on site, but I imagine that the resonances amongst those reduced shapes,
the shapes of the environment, and the shapes in the memories of the viewers are
powerful. Correcting the disjuncture in Burgin's earlier pahse between the work
on the wall and the politcial discourses impelling it, this work seems to become
a more successful point of commutation, as it were, for "double space" and for
its structuring exchange of self and other, of subject and object, of internal
and external.

 This is certainly what happens for me in Minnesota Abstract. There the shapes
of the familiar cityscape of Minnesota-St Paul resonate within the gallery and
set up a kind of vertiginous relay between "inside" and "outside" that is all
the more effective (and affective) for the quite overt political commentary that
it offers. Minnesota Abstract directly refers to the remnants or traces of
Minnesota history that remain in the commercial signs, in the buildings and
billboards, in the whole postmodern urban "outside." That history includes, for
example, the (continuing) expropriation of lands from Native Americans by white
America: thus the bitter irony of the "Mutual Trust" bank logo blinding the
stereotypical image of the Native American.

 Because it has found new ways to relay double space, and because it is able now
to make direct reference to the way that politics is implicated in that double
space, I think of Minnesota Abstract as probably Burgin's most achieved and most
political work since his street postering in the early 1970s. (Perhaps if this
kind of work is to be the future of Burgin's art it should properly be referred
back to that prehistory?) At the same time it constitutes a development of one
of his most abiding concerns--the positioning of the imaginary in relation to
the world. In his attempt to explain and discover double space in this new way
Burgin might be said to be moving towards a strange kind of complexity that
could feasibly be called referential. I imagine that such a move towards a
complex referentiality is a prerequisite for the kind of political art of which
our times and our places are sorely in need.


 Paul Smith, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA

__________

1 Laura Mulvey, Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana U.Press, 1989),
     128.
2 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (New York:
     Norton, 1981),83
3 Paul Smith, "Terminal Culture?", Art in America (Sept. 1987), 37-41
4 Victor Burgin and Geoffrey Batchen, "For an Impossible Realism: An Interview,"
     Afterimage (Feb. 1989),8.
5 RŽgis Durand, "Victor Burgin, l'adieu ˆ la photographie," Art Press 130
     (nov.1988),23.