Just came across a very interesting and inspiring exhibition!

It is called 'Photography into Sculpture' and is an exploration of the sculptural and three dimensional uses of photographs by artists and photographers. Interesting to see some of my experiments were taken up in the 70s, especially by Robert Heineken, whose work I will soon have to review here!
Check it out.!

http://www.cherryandmartin.com/exhibitions/96

On Double space part A.

Victor Burgin

Victor Burgin, The Bridge. 1984.

Victor Burgin is an english conceptual artist, writer and photographer. He studied painting at the Royal College of Art from 1962 to 1965 and philosophy and fine art at Yale University from 1965 to 1967. His work combines photographs  and printed texts to reveal  what lies behind processes of looking.
In this post, I looked at his work from the 80s. 
His position is that of a male subject. In his body of work 'The Bridge' he juxtaposes images of bridges, man-made constructions and water, as well as images from Art depicting females in the water. The birth of Venus, the death of Ophelia. 
I find this picture very interesting, in its juxtaposition of the man-made and the natural, activity and passivity, movement and stasis. It reveals the contents of our imaginary with respect to the categories male and female. 
In his article on Burgin, theorist Paul Smith writes of the way the bridge, the San Francisco Golden Gate Bridge works. 
"It is offered both as a geographic or topographic signifier and as an imaginary one. That is, it acts as a kind of two-way object, a projection of the imaginary into worldly space and an introjection of the material world to become a marker of psychical space". 
It is this double space that interests me. The merging of the inside and the outside. The contents of the imaginary, and the contents of the external world. Dualistic dichotomies between in and out, existence and non existence, male and female, etc, are man-made constructions. Abstractions that fail to account for what is. I see reality as continuous becoming. The world may consist of opposites but it is finally one. We are trapped into this binary way of conceiving things, what Smith calls a linguistic doublet, unable to see the essence of things, the primordial affinity of everything. 
Art is a way of seeing things differently, bringing together the inside and the outside. 

Victor Burgin 

The above image speaks again of a double spae. There is the space of the viewer (and of the woman performer) but also the space of the viewer's gaze, situated in the mirror at the back. Real space  and imaginary space. The woman looks away from the mirror, which makes us see only her back. She therefore cannot share the image of herself. 

Victor Burgin

In this image, Burgin puts a photograph of a city on a tapestry laden wall, again creating a double space. There seems to be an opening or window on the wall, giving view to a city, reversing the situation where we take the larger context to be the city, and what is contained within it to be the house. Here the house contains the city.  It also makes me aware of the egoistic need to contain, to possess. To feel more powerful than one really is, by acquiring possession of. This feeling is strengthened by the wooden frame, reminiscent of classic paintings, which are again something desirable to possess. 

Sources: 

Wikipedia.Victor Burgin.

Paul Smith "On Victor Burgin"

http://theory.eserver.org/burgin.txt