The Work of Death in Burgin’s Belledonne
Hon, Gordon (2019) The Work of Death in Burgin’s Belledonne. In: Seeing Degree Zero: Barthes/Burgin and Political Aesthetics. University of Edinburgh Press, Edinburgh, pp. 423-436.
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The chapter provides a largely psychoanalytic reading of Victor Burgin's Belledonne that relates the panoramic form of this projection piece to the nearly mechanical operations of Freud's death drive and the unheimlich encounters with non-human agency that pertain in the projection. The gaze in the artwork, the gaze of the zero degree CGI camera, which Burgin calls 'theoretical vision', therefore does not seek satisfaction but instead repetition, excess and destruction. The argument made is that there is a critical structural relationship between the impossible subject position offered by the virtual eye of the virtual camera and the indescribable, psychological object operational in the projection piece. In turn this opens up a deeper rumination on the 'absent' or unseeable aspects of artworks and how such 'viewership' persists over time.
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