Victor Burgin
"Victor Burgin" by Adele Weder, Summer 2007, pp. 92-94
Victor Burgin’s ambition for his work has always been to “explode the art object.” When the British conceptual artist turned his attention to a carefully selected archival photograph at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, he remained true to this approach.
“Voyage to Italy” is part of the CCA’s Tangent exhibition series, wherein a contemporary artist is invited to choose a single work from the institution’s vast photographic collection and launch a dialogue with it. Burgin’s choice was Basilica, an 1864 albumen silver print by Carlo Fratacci. The photograph displays the ruins of a Pompeian basilica, populated by a lone woman in crinolines. Burgin transformed this solitary figure into his theoretical vantage point: he travelled to the same ruins and created two sequences of photographs at the site where she would have stood almost 150 years earlier. Adjacent wall texts describe in matter-of-fact detail the position and appearance of each architectural feature contained in the photographs. The third element of the installation is a video loop that runs voice-overs from Roberto Rossellini’s Viaggio in Italia over black-and-white footage of the surrounding region shot from the perspective of a swiftly moving car. Time, space, material degradation—it’s all here, creeping around the installation.
In an accompanying monograph, Burgin calls Fratacci’s anonymous female subject a “midday ghost,” the perfect term for this unsettling apparition. Burgin’s photographic sequence fills in her vista for us, implicitly resurrecting the woman herself. This is a powerful homage to and rereading of a subject who was presumably just a photographer’s prop, present to show the scale of the massive column fragments beside her. You can classify Fratacci’s original image as an example of architectural photography, a realm in which—then as now—humans are subsidiary to the more important subject: the built environment they inhabit. Burgin’s response to this imagery, although devoid of human subjects, actually celebrates humanity much more directly by making it—her—the fixed centre.
Burgin’s response upends not only the 19th-century picturesque ideal of ancient ruins but also the idea of the architectural photograph. When viewed individually, any one of these images seems uncanny and strange. Columns appear to abut pediments or sprout unceremoniously from one another. The viewer is compelled to reassemble them somehow, a challenging exercise. But then a memorable, plaintive voice, heard over the running video, brings us back to the human spirit embedded in the ruins.
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