Victor Burgin. The field of Representation. Malta March 28 2016

source: European Graduate School Video Lectures   2016年10月28日
http://www.egs.edu Victor Burgin, Professor at The European Graduate School / EGS. Valetta/Malta. March 28 2016.
Victor Burgin is a British artist, cultural theorist and photographer. He studied Painting and Philosophy at The Royal College of Art, London (1962-1965) and Painting, Sculpture and Philosophy at Yale University, New Haven (1965-1967). He taught photography at Nottingham Trent University (1967-1973) and then at the Polytechnic of Central London (1973-1988). Burgin was a Professor of Art History and Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz (1988-2000) and currently holds the Emeritus Millard Chair of Fine Art at Goldsmith’s College, University of London.
Victor Burgin’s artistic work and his theoretical writings are often concerned with spatial and temporal relationships and with a tension between real (exterior) space and psychological (interior) space. Burgin claims: “To have an interest in the relation between real exterior space and psychological space is quite simply to be interested in the image. The ‘image’ is neither a material entity nor simply an optical event, an imprint of light on the retina, it is also a complex psychological process. It is in this sense that the image is defined as essentially ‘virtual’ in the phenomenological perspective that Deleuze derived from Henri Bergson. The ‘image-for-commerce’ is something that can be propped on an easel beside an auctioneer, something that can sit easily on the cover of a magazine, something that lends itself to becoming logo or brand. But the image is a different thing outside the circulation of commodities, outside the order of the spectacle – which is to say, outside of modern Western history. For example, in the Western tradition there are things – objects, ‘images’, whatever – and then there is the space between them, which is empty. In a certain Japanese tradition the space between – ma – is as tangible as any material thing and is as charged with sense. This is the place and the substance of the ‘image’ as I understand the term.”
In his works, Burgin also attempts to provide an answer to the question: how do memory and fantasy shape and distort real objects and actual space? This is why he also explores the relationship between words and images; a relationship that, according to Burgin, produces a “virtual” or “psychological” image. His work is influenced by many different theorists and philosophers, but the most important ones are Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault, Henri Lefebvre, Andrè Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Roland Barthes.