Components of a Practice

Over the past thirty years, Victor Burgin has become both an influential artist and a renowned theorist of the still and moving image. His writings are noted for their lucidity, while his photographs and videos are paradoxical and question meaning in contemporary society. In this book, Victor Burgin retraces the history of his artistic and critical pursuits, from his conceptual photographic works of the sixties to his recent video work. He reviews the evolution of his visual work with a particular focus on its relationship to the institution and practices of painting, photography and cinema. This book is different from Burgin’s previous publications, which are either monographs of his visual work—with essays by other writers—or collections of his essays. This is the first book in which Burgin turns his attention to his own artistic production.

Victor Burgin came to prominence in the late 1960s as one of the originators of conceptual art. His works are in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York and the Tate Modern, London.