Roland
Barthes, Dessin n°393, daté du 21 mai 1972.
The final
exhibition at the John Hansard Gallery, before moving from
Southampton University’s Highfield Campus to its new central
location, brings together two distinctly separate yet intimately
entwined critical thinkers. Shown for the first time in the UK are a
selection of Roland Barthes’ little known drawings brought together
with three pieces by Burgin. The influence of Barthes on Burgin’s
work both as a writer and artist is well known. Not only are several
of Burgin’s essays in direct dialogue with Barthes’ writings but
there is also a distinct theoretical influence on Burgin’s practice
as an artist. It seems like over-simplification to suggest that
Burgin, like Barthes, is first and foremost a writer, as the two
aspects of his practice are in obvious dialogue, yet there is also a
degree of separation between the two; a kind of translation which
takes place in order to allow the work to live beyond theory. Burgin
himself acknowledges a certain distance between himself and the
algorithmically driven cultural developments of alter-modernity.
Whilst he acknowledges his fascination with computer games, for
example, he prefers to observe them and to “read
about them”, which for him is “the way intellectuals experience
life”. This is not a scathing criticism of Burgin, however, for he
seems to retain a certain idealism about the generative potential of
games engines beyond the “pre-packaged”; beyond fixed rules and
terms of engagement. Indeed he is particularly interested in the
first-person video game Dear
Esther,
because there are “no rules”.
Barthes’
works on paper are somewhere between script and painting, which is
most obviously influenced by Cy Twombly, whom Barthes wrote about,
most notably, in Cy
Twombly: Works on Paper
and The
Wisdom of Art.
Barthes’ drawings are rhythmic and ideosynchratic; resembling
Japanese calligraphy, hand drawn maps and the repetitive ‘carefree’
motifs of phonebook doodles. They are worlds away from the
patriarchal violence and big-business spectacle of abstract
expressionism. They also have a joyous exuberance of one delighting
in the properties of drawing materials. His marks seem as considered
yet unselfconcious as those to be found on pen testing pads in
stationary shops. His images, if one can call them that, are anything
but representational. His placement of marks suggest a flow of energy
and dialogue between them that draws our attention to the paper and
undermines traditional figure-ground relations. Yet as his works on
headed hotel paper suggest, his fetishism in the action of applying
ink to paper and mark marking, in these terms, becomes merely a way
of guiding the speed and flow of ink and the pressure of the hand.
Therefore if these works are representations, they are traces of body
space, movement, muscle memory. Yet perhaps it is better to think of
them in the terms of the Situationists, as a détournement
of the image-making process. Barthes perverts the desire for
representation into a pleasurable act of what de Certeau terms
‘making do’ – a means of losing oneself in a meditative state;
a similataneous awakening of material consciouness and a putting
subjectivity to sleep.
Burgin’s
digital projections combine image and text or ‘intertitles’,
inserted between images. These include quotations from Barthes, Milan
Kundera and Philip
K. Dick. The
three of Burgin’s works included in the exhibition – one of which
was commissioned especially – use games engines to produce what he
term’s ‘moving stills’, which, whilst animated, explore images
through subtle shifts that elaborate Renaissance perspectival
techniques via impossible viewing points. Burgin suggest that in
terms of image-making and in the context of the gallery space, these
works are a development of the representational tradition of painting
rather than photography or film. Yet there is also a great emphasis
on breaking down the constraints of Renaissance illusionism. In
presenting the viewer with impossible viewpoints, Burgin provides a
post-corporeal vision that mirrors the transcendence of internet
technologies. Likewise
this disorientating reverie in the unpredictability of the text
disunifies and fragments subjectivity and dislocates Text
from
Work.
In other words it liberates the utterence from the speaker, the
signifier from the signified, the script from it’s institutionally
supported or authorial reading / writing. And what is left, Barthes
would describe as signifiance:
an
open and generative process of textual and inter-textual
potentiality. Burgin
brings texts together in open and contingent ways, yet prevents their
internal or cross pollination. He is the horticulturist that keeps
the bees from the flowers or removes their stamen or pistils;
neutering meaning and thus the fruition of Work. The Textual
pleasure, as Barthes calls it, comes from the oscillation between
familiarity and the shock of disorientation at the breakdown in
language; the lack of definable fruit. The opening up of desire
presents the vertiginous void beneath it. In this direction, Burgin
is more of a reader than a maker; a flirter with texts. His practice
becomes a pleasurable dance across a multiplicity of texts. He
touches the petals of a multitude of flowers, yet collects pollen
from none. In a sense, Burgin does not commit to knowing or being.
His work is a flirtation with heterotopia:
other spaces, other ideas, other possibilities, other beings. It
becomes a way of foregrounding his enunciations so that his
contingent utterances are not bound to a singular narrator / author.
He takes pleasure in actively demonstrating the lack of distinction
between reader and writer. He
is
not making anything;
he
is lost in textual production; he
is lost in Text.
This is not simply to say that in his cerebral transcendence he
becomes incorporeal, but that in the hybrid composition of
authorship, the subjective whole is lost. To quote Barthes’ most
famous essay The
Death of the Author:
‘Literature
is that neuter, that composite, that oblique into which every subject
escapes, the trap where all identity is lost, beginning with the very
identity of the body that writes’. Yet, paradoxically, Burgin’s
position on the loss, erasure and atrophy has a distinctly critical
ambivalence. Like the public coffee house overlooking the Bosphorous
visualised in his work A
Place To Read,
the clearing of social spaces in common and subsequent replacement
with anonymous bastions of globalisation, demonstrates the deeper
problems of valourising the neutrality of a post-ideological atopias.
That globalisation remains a historical process in which one form of
power is atrophied by another; and we are all authors of that
process.
