Other Criteria

Victor Burgin first came to prominence through his inclusion in landmark Conceptual art shows such as the touring exhibition Live in Your Head: When Attitudes Become Form: Works, Concepts, Processes, Situations (1969–70) and Information (Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1970). Informed by semiotics, cinema studies and psychoanalysis he went on to produce a series of influential works using photographs and text reworking the language of mass media into allegories of sexual and political power, memory, history and desire. In a number of projected videos (1999–ongoing) Burgin has turned his attention to architecture and psychical space, to explore how the forces of modernity shape the world in which we live and the unconscious pictures we make of it. Recent works have used computer programmes to bring the image closer to its essentially virtual state. Burgin’s recent books include Parallel Texts. Interviews and Interventions about Art (Reaktion, 2011) and Situational Aesthetics: Selected Writings (Leuven University Press, 2009). He discusses these and other matters with David Campany, who is curating a major show of Burgin’s work for Ambika P3, London, opening in October this year.