Victor Burgin: An Interview

Burgin’s work has established him as both a highly influential artist and a renowned theorist of still and moving images. After 13 years in the United States, Burgin recently returned to live and work in Britain. Burgin returned to London to take up the prestigious post of Millard Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths College. In this 2002 interview, Victor Burgin discusses his continuing labor on the politics of representation, from his polemical photography in the '70s to his current theoretical and video work up to 2002’s Listen to Britain. From his beginnings as a painter, Burgin’s dissatisfaction with the lack of rigor in image-discourse led him to immerse himself in the semiotic work of Roland Barthes, psychoanalysis, and other philosophical and political discourses.

In this far-ranging interview he discusses these and many other topics close to his heart, such as photography, analytical cubism, Minimalism, the impulse of narrative, mass rhetoric, advertising, détournement, the utility and meaning of art, and the psychic/sensory apparatus of experience. Burgin describes how he has continued the work of analytic cubism toward a sort of ‘psychic cubism,’ an approach demanded by the mesh of imagery and ideology that lived experience and memory feed upon in constructing the world. Burgin discusses the theoretical and visual tracks of his work in changing British contexts. He addresses the ‘painterly’ capabilities of contemporary digital media and his current concerns involving memory and representation.

Interview by Catsou Roberts. Produced in collaboration with Cornerhouse, Manchester, England.

A historical interview originally recorded in 2002 and re-edited in 2004.