Victor Burgin

...from the Topographics series published by Reaktion Books; a collection of experimental writing about place, established under a remit to provide ‘criticism with original expressive writing, to explore the creative collision between physical space and the human mind’...

One colour plate prefaces Burgin’s book: a few spectators stand before a x 4 video wall, two are wearing similar yellow raincoats. One stands up close and central, the other a few yards back and to the side. The perspective and regularity is suggestive of time-lapse photography. These individuals are one and the same, indifferent, and in different spaces before a moving image. Finally there is the photographer’s view, watching the scene with critical distance. Altogether this can be taken to illustrate Burgin’s mode of writing. He is nostalgic for his childhood, and knows of the fetish his camera brings, but equally he looks for an alternative reflexive point of view. His thoughts and reminiscence become convoluted, but kept within an ethical momentum maintaining a questioning of the here and now, without abdicating a responsibility for being in the present. For Burgin, the integrating ‘scene’ of the media screen is a site of eternal return; ‘As a child in Sheffield, I imagined that the factories were huge steam ships. The ships have all left Sheffield. But now and then I find them sailing through some cities’ (p. 210). He closes the book with a line dedication ‘for the woman in the corridor’, for Madeleine of Vertigo, and surely the Madeleine in us all – in other words, for the struggle (and pleasure) to ‘truly live in the present’ (p. 203).

FULL REVIEW:
Experimental Text-image Travel Literature in Theory, Culture & Society, 2003, Vol.20, no.3, pp.127-138.
http://tcs.sagepub.com/cgi/reprint/20/3/127?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&a...… (mais)