Victor Burgin

At the Venice Biennale 2001

Victor Burgin spoke in his studio at Goldsmiths College at the time of his shows at Matt's Gallery, London and the Arnolfini, Bristol.

from Audio Arts Magazine Volume 21 Number 2, 2003

Transcript

Victor Burgin spoke in his studio at Goldsmiths College at the time of his shows at Matt’s Gallery, London and the Arnolfini, Bristol in 2003.

Jean Wainwright: I’m here with Victor Burgin in his studio at Goldsmiths. Victor, I’d like to talk to you about your two exhibitions: one at Matt’s Gallery and also one at the Arnolfini, which is a retrospective. I’d like to begin by talking about the Arnolfini exhibition, which spans, in effect, quite a lot of your career. Could we begin by talking about the installation which gave the exhibition it’s title Listen to Britain, about the marriage of the text, music, sound and image.

Victor Burgin: Well the work’s put together on the computer and what attracted me to the computer, back in 1986 when I had arts residency at the Leicester Centre at MIT, was that it had the capacity to put images, sounds, words on the same level. It gave me the fantasy almost of emptying the contents of one’s head which is full of images and sounds and words, into the computer. The Light Plus had just been launched. I mean this was the cutting edge computer and I brought one back to London, plugged it in and it blew up instantly, because I’d been given the wrong transformer. So this sort of mushroom cloud was hanging over my Light Plus. I was devastated. This little black and white screen had very limited capacities. The work in the Arnolfini has that technological and phenomenological base which is, in this particular case, my being on a hill, near Canterbury knowing that this was the hill where the film ‘The Canterbury Tales’ by Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger was made, back in 1944 and thinking of a short scene from the film on that hill with that lapse of fifty years, shot at a time when the Second World War was still running and Britain was at war, and thinking there on that hill in Canterbury in the summer, on the same kind of a day as when the film was shot over fifty years ago. Again, there is all this rhetoric about the war on terrorism and whether Britain should go to war against Iraq? Thinking back on the whole history of wars and the representations of wars. My video is not about that. You know, my videos are about the mix of the present moment in history and of the trace of history in that present moment, through very indirect means. There’s the fragment of sound track where class is very clearly inscribed. There’s a whole history of ownership of the land and the struggle over that ownership. It’s a British landscape and if we listen to the texture of the voice we listen to the texture of the landscape. And at the entrance to the installation I’ve inscribed two lines from Shakespeare, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. It’s Bottom who is speaking and saying something like, ‘the eyes of man have not heard, the ears of the man have not seen’. I was interested in the act of listening, which is also an act of looking.

JW: You’ve written extensively, books where you’ve either commented or revisited people like Roland Barthes. Your work is very much informed in terms of texts that we might know, whether it be Jean Paul Sartre or Freud. But you want people to go to them intuitively, even if they didn’t know the story of an ode.

VB: That’s right.

JW: Can we just talk a little bit about your engagement with the written word and also with politics, because that’s very much part of who you are and how you’ve come to your work.

VB: Yes. I suppose it really began at Yale when I was in the art department in the sixties. I found myself in an environment which was very unlike the one I was in at the Royal College of Art. The students were expected to defend their work verbally. I was quite shocked when I went to Yale when I was actually expected to know, to say something about the work that could be defended. Not in the terms that one, I think rather unfortunately, tends to get in many British art schools now, where somehow your theory, God knows I don’t know how, has entered the art school. Wall to wall you hear justifications couched in technical terms with a lot of names of grand thinkers bandied around. It wasn’t that kind of self-justification with reference to an authority, it was something that engaged with the work itself. You know, what was the motivation for this shape or for this colour? How did it relate to the other elements in the picture? How did the making of this picture relate to the context of contemporary art or the history of painting? So, there was the whole historical context brought to bear. That, I think is where it began. Strictly speaking, it began before that with my getting Iris Murdoch as a tutor whilst I was at the Royal College of Art. I was doing courses in philosophy and having tutorials with Iris Murdoch, which was a sort of an intimidating experience for a young painter to do his best on a text that she had set him, by David Hume.. And then having to defend it in front of this ferociously intelligent woman with these gimlet blue eyes that drilled right through you. Nobody really expected you to relate this to your painting. I got interested in philosophy and continued to do it at Yale. Then through the engagement with Minimalism, with Robert Morris and Alec Michaelson, who were writing texts in Art Forum at that time. Using philosophical ideas to work through a program for visual art, film and sculpture I think was the time when my interest in written texts, philosophy and phenomenology came together, with a program for making art works. That’s where it began and it came to a head, I think, when I got my first teaching job. I was originally hired to teach life painting but the work I was doing would subsequently be called conceptual art. And after a couple of years I started teaching in Nottingham in ’67 and then ’69. It was then that everybody was aware of so-called conceptual art and it got into the art schools. I tried to help the students do what they were interested in doing. But this stuff was in the art magazines and shows then and that’s the sort of stuff they were doing. I was very much aware that this approach to art making, called Conceptualism at that time, had come out of a long involvement with history, with certain philosophical and political ideas because, of course, the sixties was a very political period. So the first generation of people producing conceptual art produced it out of those debates and those engagements with ideas. The second generation very quickly were producing it out of the engagement with art magazines and with the look of the thing. At that time I felt that if I was going to teach them anything it would be that, and to show them the framework that they’d inherited. I was very much aware of the fact that the whole ethos of the art schools seemed to be that when you leave, you’re going to become a successful artist. But what if you don’t. And most of them didn’t. What have you learnt in three years? And I got deeply troubled by this, you know, at a sort of ethical level, about what was I being paid for? So I tried to set up courses where at least they would learn some history, and some philosophy, related to aesthetic issues. That’s how I started teaching, quote-unquote, ‘Theory’ except you didn’t use words like that then. You actually had to specify what it was that you were talking about. So that’s where it began. Then you had politics of the image and the whole impact of feminism, which was enormous in that period. Also having to think about what you meant by politics, which suddenly became quite different, influenced by Althusser and the idea of the specificity of political action. So there is, as a feminist pointed out, a politics of the kitchen, a politics of the bedroom. Althusser was pointing out that there’s politics in absolutely every area of life. I became convinced that the political specificity of my own work was primarily as a teacher and less as an artist. I found the idea that you could make works of art, that would make considerable and significant contributions to the broader political process, for the most part implausible. Which is not to say that art cannot have that function. I mean, one can site instances of works, such as Solzhenitsyn’s ‘Archipelago’. The work of the Gulag had a very strong impact on history. You can occasionally locate the works, mainly of writers, that have had a significant political impact. But, from where I was standing at this particular moment, in this particular culture, it didn’t seem to me that visual art had a chance in hell of making any particular kind of significant change in the political process. The educational system has very important function within the broader political process and, therefore, I had to struggle with what I was able to talk about in a seminar. What is permissible? I felt it was, my responsibility as a citizen, sounds a bit heavy but I’m simply saying that’s how I felt about it. Perhaps it was because I came out of the working class and I could remember, from my childhood, people who were very poor and working under very difficult conditions. I did feel some sense of responsibility and teaching and writing became the means through which that responsibility was discharged, as it were.