"'Literature,' Susan Sontag once said, 'is writing one wishes to reread’. Artworks, one might extend, are images or objects or performances one wishes to re-view. Early in his long career, 1973 to be exact, the artist-writer Victor Burgin offered a slightly different definition:
"A job the artist does which no-one else does is to dismantle existing communication codes and to recombine some of their elements into structures which can be used to generate new pictures of the world."
Here an artist isn’t simply someone who works within the institutions of art; it is someone who works in relation to, and at odds with, the structures of culture at large. An artist may well exhibit in galleries but may also be a writer, architect, filmmaker, designer, musician or speaker. Burgin himself has made visual work and written essays for over forty years. His photography and video pieces are visual and textual, and so are his writings.
