In Victor Burgin's video installation Nietzsche's Paris, the melancholy of the excluded party in a love triangle pervades a garden of learning, writes Jeremy Melvin. Burgin weaves together two paradigmatic concepts through the specific instance of an episode in Nietzsche's life.
During much of 1882 Nietzsche was in love with Lou Salome, a relationship forged through philosophical discussions in the forest of Tannenbaum, but complicated by Salome's attachment to Paul Ree.
For a short time it seemed that a menage a trois in Paris would satisfy all parties. Suggestively Salome wrote: "I saw a pleasant study filled with books and flowers, between two bedrooms, and, coming and going amongst us, comrades in thought forming an intellectual circle at once serious and gay."
