Publications
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(NL: STAGED BODIES. De enscenering van het lichaam in de postmoderne fotografie)
STAGED BODIES envisage les nombreuses façons dont le corps est mis en scène dans la photographie artistique depuis 1970. L’ouverture de la culture postmoderne aux domaines de la fiction, de l’hybridation et du simulacre a provoqué de nombreux bouleversements dans le traitement du corps.
Le corps n’est plus un fait biologique inchangeable mais une construction sociale, compréhensible uniquement à travers le prisme de ses multiples mises en scène dans des contextes historiques et culturels particuliers.
À ce passage d’un corps naturel et permanent vers un corps idéologiquement déterminé et remodelable correspond, en termes de photographie, l’abandon d’une approche documentaire en faveur d’une staged photography, une photographie qui, au lieu de prétendre à la reproduction du réel, le théâtralise et le fictionnalise.
La publication STAGED BODIES en propose un lecture à travers le travail d'artistes majeurs de la photographie contemporaine tels que Cindy Sherman, Martin Parr, Hiro Sugimoto, Eleanor Antin, Victor Burgin, Balthasar Burkhard, Lili Dujourie, Patrick Faigenbaum, Nan Goldin, Michel Journiac, Jürgen Klauke, Les Krims, Urs Lüthi, Duane Michals, Shirin Neshat, Luigi Ontani, Orlan, VALIE EXPORT ou Jan Vercruysse.
Comprehensive overview of a highly influential contemporary artist’s work
Victor Burgin counts among the most versatile figures within art and visual culture since the late 1960s. His artwork both connects with and reacts to minimalism, conceptual art, staged photography, appropriation art, video art and, more recently, computer-based imaging. As a scholar his thinking is informed by phenomenology, semiotics, poststructuralism, feminist theory, and psychoanalysis.
This monograph provides a comprehensive and unique overview of Victor Burgin’s body of work over the past five decades. Identifying the concept of ‘psychical realism’ as an overarching umbrella term, Alexander Streitberger traces back the artist’s parallel unfolding of practice and theory, while situating this process within various historical contexts and critical debates. Five chapters link insightful case studies to key issues such as conceptual art and situational aesthetics, the relationship between representation and politics, postmodernist concepts of space, and the digital environment of media images. The book is richly illustrated and includes a sequence from the major work Dear Urania (2016) especially designed by the artist for this book.
This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content).
The photo series Gradiva is a key work in Victor Burgin’s oeuvre. With it, the artist (b. 1941 in Sheffield, England) decisively set a tone as a representative of conceptual art and as a photo theoretician. Produced in 1982, Gradiva is part of a well-known group of works, Tales from Freud, and consequently one of the first works in which Burgin falls back on psychoanalytical concepts to investigate questions about the constitution of the subject. Sigmund Freud’s theories on the meanings of dreams, on the mechanisms of the unconscious, on sexuality and on subject formation play an essential role.
An image section, work commentaries, and extensive lists of publications and exhibitions enhance Alexander Streitberger’s knowledgeable analysis of this photo and textual work series.