Victor Burgin - Seminars / Lectures / Workshops
CINEMATIC HETEROTOPIA / UNCINEMATIC PRACTICES: The Language of Films (3 Credits)
Victor Burgin, MFA
Description: The French critic and film theorist André Bazin famously asked What is cinema? We might also ask: ‘Where is cinema?’ In addition to being seen in a movie theatre, or at home on DVD, a film may be encountered through posters, ‘blurbs’, and other advertisements, such as trailers and clips seen on television or the Internet; it may be encountered through newspaper reviews, reference work synopses and theoretical articles; through production photographs, frame enlargements, memorabilia, and so on. In Burgin’s book of 2004, The Remembered Film he calls this expanded space beyond the confines of the movie theatre the cinematic heterotopia. This expanded space has become the site of a variety of practices – from video mashups on YouTube to audiovisual works in art galleries – that cannot be considered ‘cinematic’ in the traditional sense, and yet maintain a variety of different relationships to classic cinema. We refer to these practices in settings other than that of cinema as uncinematic. In this seminar I shall survey a range of uncinematic practices and settings, and give an account of what I consider to be the specificity of audiovisual works in the uncinematic setting of the museum and art gallery.
Objectives: Consideration of the particular cultural situation outlined above in an empirical and anecdotal way will lead to an examination of some theoretical questions of more general applicability. Prominent amongst these is the idea of the ‘figural’ as it deconstructs the traditional divide between word and image, and Victor Burgin’s own concept (in The Remembered Film ) of the ‘sequence image’ as it suspends the distinction between the still and moving image. The overall framing question is that of the implications of digital communications technologies for extant theories of representations.
Learning Outcomes: The aim of the seminar is to encourage a theoretically informed awareness of, and a common reflection upon, the aesthetic, ideological and technological dimensions of the everyday environment of digital imagery. A basic ‘tool box’ of relevant theoretical concepts will be assembled en route.
Course Schedule:
Module 1:
The noise of the marketplace
Heterotopias, everyday life, cinema. A Remembered Film: Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger’s A Canterbury Tale (1944).
Module 2:
The eclipse of time
Questions of time and stillness prompted by the seven minute coda in Michaelangelo Antonioni’s film The Eclipse (1962).
Module 3:
Interactivity
A short history of interactive cinema. Interactive artworks and the ‘society of control’.
Module 4:
The uncinematic
Apparatus and ‘specificity’
Required Readings:
Barthes, Roland. "On Leaving the Movie Theatre.” in: T.H.Kyung (Editor). Apparatus. Tanam. 1980. Paperback, 437 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0934378460. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. Reaktion Books. October 15, 2004. Paperback, 176 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1861892152. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Burgin, Victor. "Medium and Specificity.” in James Elkins (Editor). Photography Theory. New York, Routledge, 2006. Paperback, 480 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415977835. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Foucault, Michel. "Of Other Spaces." in: Diacritics. Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 1986.
Rodowick, David. "Reading the Figural.” in: Camera Obscura. No. 24, September 1990. (English).
Recommended Readings:
Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture. University of California Press. October 1996. 333 pages, Hardcover, ISBN: 0520202988. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.de or Amazon.fr. Paperback, ISBN: 0520202996. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Burgin, Victor. "Seeing Sense." in: Artforum. XVIII. February 1980, pp. 62-65. (English).
Burgin, Victor. "Seeing Sense" in: H. Davis, P. Walton (eds). Language, Image, Media. Palgrave Macmillan. August 1983. Hardcover, Language English, ISBN: 0312467478. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Enzensberger, Hans Magnus. "The Industrialization of the Mind (1962).” in: The Consciousness Industry. Seabury. 1974. Hardcover, 194 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0816491852. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. The MIT Press. March 15, 2001. Hardcover, 354 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262133741. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr. Paperback, ISBN: 0262632551. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Mulvey, Laura.”The pensive spectator revisited: time and its passing in the still and moving image.” in: David Green (Editor). Where is the Photograph? Photoworks/Photoforum. 2003. Paperback, 136 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1903796083. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Narrative as Virtual Reality. Johns Hopkins. 2001. Paperback, 416 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0801877539. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Vygotsky, Lev. Thought and Language. MIT. 1977. Paperback, 344 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0262720108. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Hollis Frampton, ‘For a Metahistory of Film: Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses’ (1971), in Circles of Confusion: Film, Photography, Video; Texts 1968 - 1980, Rochester, N.Y., Visual Studies Workshop, 1983. Paperback, 199 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0898220203. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
DW Winnicott, ‘Transitional objects and transitional phenomena’ (1951), in Playing and Reality, London, Penguin, 1971. Paperback, 240 pages, Language English, ISBN: 0415345464. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Wollen, Peter. "Fire and Ice.” in: Photographies. No. 4, April 1984.
Wong, Jenny. "What’s the future of interactive cinema?” in: Seven Magazine. August 7, 2008.
ART AND PSYCHOANALYSIS: The Object in Question (3 Credits)
Victor Burgin, MFA
Description: This class is a survey of the idea of the 'object' in psychoanalytic theory provides a framework for considering the subjective dimension of encounters with 'objective' reality. We will attempt to understand the idea of object as it applies to photography, film and other media art projects.
Objectives: Students shall leave this course with a larger grasp on key psychoanalytic theory. This theory becomes the backdrop to developing connections between subjectivity and objectivity as they are experienced through the idea of the ‘object’. Taking a psychoanalytic perspective will enable us as a class to create new ideas and theories. As we move towards a new understanding of the Object, Subjectivity is necessarily examined and discussed in new ways.
Learning Outcomes: This course aims to provide a firm framework by which students can discuss psychoanalytic theory in their own personal research projects. Through taking an artistic approach to objectivity both research methods and practical research are informed. Students are expected to come to the course not only having read the required readings but to bring their own research as it applies to questions of objectivity within psychoanalysis.
Required Readings:
Flusser, Vilem. Towards a Philosophy of Photography. Reaktion Books. October 2000. Paperback, 176 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1861890761. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Burgin, Victor. In/Different Spaces: place and memory in visual culture. University of California Press. October 1996. Hardcover, 333 pages, ISBN: 0520202988. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.de or Amazon.fr. Paperback, ISBN: 0520202996. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.
Burgin, Victor. The Remembered Film. Reaktion Books. October 15, 2004. Paperback, 176 pages, Language English, ISBN: 1861892152. Buy it at Amazon.com, Amazon.ca, Amazon.de, Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.fr.