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

Introducing Mark Bradford.

The devil is beating his wife, 2003.

Across 110th street, 2008

The work of this artist inspired me to start making large scale collages mixing printed advertisements with paint. He therefore deserves an introduction.
Mark is based in the United States (where else?).  In particular, in Los Angeles.
His monumental compositions mix billboard advertisements with paint, resembling giant maps. His materials are found on the street, making his work a kind of street art made by a studio based artist. His relationship to the french 'Decollage' group (Francois Dufrene, Raymond Hains, Mimmo Rotella, Jacques de la Villegle) is apparent, although in Mark's case the work is composed so that it becomes something other than merely a record of the process of the accumulation and destruction of urban posters. Not reality, but a transformation of reality is what he is interested in.
In the resulting compositions, what I find particularly fascinating is the look of a city struck by natural disaster.

Much has been written about his work. For example, the racial issues raised or the mixing of popular culture with high art. What is interesting for me however, is considering his work in the light of what  Frederic Jameson defines as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping in his  "Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism".
In this text, Jameson argues for a kind of art that will raise spatial issues as its fundamental organizing concern. This is in response to the increasing alienation felt in the postmodern city, where people are unable to map in their heads the space in which they live in , or  the sociopolitical totality that organizes and shapes this urban space as an experience.
Moreover, this results in a difficulty to connect private experience to the experience of the city and the difficulty to internalize or make one's own, the problems of our cities or the information about our world provided by intermediary authorities, such as the politicians and the media.
We are not actors in the space we live in, and therefore we are alienated from this space. Disalienation, for Jameson, means "the practical reconquest of a sense of place, plus the construction or reconstruction of place. An articulated ensemble which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories".
Works like Bradfrord's, work towards disalienation, if only in play.  This happens because by collecting, reassembling and restructuring mass media images which make up the public communication of the city, this information is personalized. By appropriation and creation, the role of the passive city-dweller who cannot act to change his/her circumstances is overturned in the artist's case and questioned for everyone.


Mark Bradford's site is really interesting. I have particularly enjoyed the option of zooming in to his works.
http://www.pinocchioisonfire.org/

Jameson, F. Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991. Available in

http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm

 Finally, some more images

Noah's Third Day, 2007.

Orbit, 2007.

May Heaven preserve you from Dangers and Assassins,

"We just want to lose control of our thoughts."

KURT KOCHERSCHEIDT (1943-1992)

 "If I should try to give a definition of the artist at all, then it would most likely be a person whose profession, as it were, involves the constant reconsidering of one's own situation, continuously analyzing, continuously 'reworking' it. In the face of the threat all around, one is continually tempted to give in, to think it's all senseless. But you have to keep going, keep doing your thing consistently - as a counterforce - even if it all were over tomorrow.

Openings - Wounds.
Injured tree. Resin springs from the wound.

An artist I discovered whose work bears an interesting affinity to my photocollages (Algedon series).

Tsunehisa Kimura (1928–2008) was a Japanese artist working in photomontage.  His montages depict an urban world brought to chaos by the invasion of nature. 

For him photomontage is 'Like meeting a whole lot of different people on a railway station'.

Interestingly, he also uses his own photos...

There is another world but it is in this one... (Keats or Eluard?)