The work of death in Burgin's Belledonne
The work of death in Burgin's Belledonne
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.
413-424
Edinburgh University Press
Hon, Gordon
ca14398f-3e52-46ba-b0ed-35a52d7b8225
March 2019
Hon, Gordon
ca14398f-3e52-46ba-b0ed-35a52d7b8225
Hon, Gordon
(2019)
The work of death in Burgin's Belledonne.
In,
Bishop, Ryan and Manghani, Sunil
(eds.)
Seeing Degree Zero.
Edinburgh.
Edinburgh University Press, .
Record type:
Book Section
Abstract
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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Published date: March 2019
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 433804
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/433804
PURE UUID: 30b99793-4d01-4a66-813c-1e01cd3428a6
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Date deposited: 04 Sep 2019 16:30
Last modified: 11 Jan 2024 17:49
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Contributors
Editor:
Ryan Bishop
Editor:
Sunil Manghani
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