Returning to Benjamin
Victor Burgin
MACK
English
Softcover
40 Pages
125 x 195 mm
2022
ISBN 978913620912
In the mid-1930s, Walter Benjamin posed the question of the relation of art to the dominant representational technology of his time: photography and film. To return to the artwork essay today in the spirit in which it was written is to ask the same question in respect of the hegemonic representational technology of our own time: the digital. Benjamin found that the medium of photography and film had dissolved the auratic quality of art. Digital technology has dissolved the very category of ‘medium’ itself.’
Walter Benjamin’s essay of cultural criticism ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ has become a ‘classic’ text, one which resonated through the twentieth century and beyond. In this succinct and pointed new essay, the artist and writer Victor Burgin rereads Benjamin’s 1935 text, to elaborate a new argument contending that the camera today is profoundly imbricated in that which is not visible.
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/products/returning-to-benjamin-br-victor-burgin)
About the Author
Victor Burgin (b. 1941) is a British artist and writer. Burgin first came to attention as a conceptual artist in the late 1960s (Harrison & Wood, 1992; Walker, 2001) and at that time was most noted for being a political photographer of the left, who would fuse photographs and words in the same picture. He has worked with photography and film, calling painting “the anachronistic daubing of woven fabrics with coloured mud” (Burgin, 1976). His work is influenced by a variety of theorists and philosophers, most especially thinkers such as Sigmund Freud, Henri Lefebvre, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. (European Graduate School Staff Page)
(source: https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/victor-burgin-834)
About the Publisher
MACK is an independent art and photography publishing house based in London. Mack works with established and emerging artists, writers and curators, and cultural institutions, releasing between 20-25 books per year. The publisher was founded in 2010 in London by Michael Mack.
mackbooks.co.uk
(source: https://mackbooks.co.uk/pages/about-us)
