If you happen to be in London for the menswear shows and you want to get away from the runway and the various presentations for a while, check out the "Victor Burgin: UK76" exhibition (until 5th February) at the Richard Saltoun Gallery (111 Great Titchfield Street).
While the event celerates the 40th anniversary of Victor Burgin's photo-text series "UK76", the images will prove extremely inspirational, for both their contents and the way the works are displayed.
Burgin's photos - eleven large photographic prints (each 1 metre high by 1.5 metres in width) - are indeed pasted directly to the wall like they originally were between the '60s and the '70s and will be scraped off at the end of the exhibition.
Their content is particularly interesting and relevant: the images portray a key moment in the history of the UK that marked political, financial and social changes. In 1976, Prime Minister Harold Wilson resigned; inflation touched 24%; the Chancellor of the Exchequer negotiated a £2.3 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund; and The Sex Pistols released their debut single "Anarchy in the U.K.", unleashing punk on the nation.
The National Community Development Project and Coventry workshop commissioned Burgin the photographs, but the artist then cleverly added short texts and captions over the photographs recreating the look of fashion magazine spreads.
The language he used was borrowed from such publications and from British newspapers and advertisements of the day. Burgin combined therefore his socially engaged images with a sort of marketing language that documentarists and proponents of "art photography" would have never used, creating clever discrepancies and juxtapositions.
Born in Sheffield in 1941, Burgin graduated from the School of Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, in 1965, he then went on to study Philosophy and Fine Art at Yale University School of Art and Architecture. On his return to the UK in 1967 his reading of Roland Barthes' seminal text Elements of Semiology led to his subsequent sustained engagement, in his artworks and writings, with the complex interdepencies of words and images.
This is a very inspiring technique: Burgin radically transformed in this way the language of photography into a new system of signs, breaking the content of ritual and convention and tackling issues that spanned from economy and politics to fashion.
Burgin's images become therefore hybrid mental constructs composed of two fragments - a visual and a textual one. A supermarket, a street or a private house turn therefore into spaces where the theory of culture images and spectacle can develop and be analysed, and, while there's fear and anxiety in his images with social and cultural processes pointing towards exclusion and discrimination, there is also a lot of irony and a passion for turning the everyday into an extraordinarily intense experience.
While the artist perfectly understood the world caught in his snapshots was transitory, he still managed to provide a stronger and more permanent meaning through his verbal and visual associations that allowed him to combine two stories into one.
"Saint Laurent demands a whole new lifestyle" (Hips matter a lot. By day each dirndl skirt is stitched firmly down over the hips or else there is a suede hip yoke. By night black velvet camisole bodices extend down over the hipline then the bright taffeta skirt springs out free. Yves' day-time clothes, like his ready-to-wear three months ago, are a ramble through Eastern Europe) he writes in one the pictures portraying a Third World woman standing at a loom - his words could have easily be the title to a modern feature on the new direction of the French fashion house, while the picture, though rooted in 1976, exposes the cruel reality behind global fashion and may have been taken yesterday in a sweatshop somewhere in the world.
There is therefore still a lot to learn from Burgin's technique, first and foremost how to create timeless images by combining the visual and verbal languages and this is the main reason why a trip to see this exhibition would be terrifically inspiring, especially for those among us who have taken to live in a temporary Instagram dimension, in which the visual message prevails over the verbal text, generating a uselessly temporary and transitory satisfaction of the senses.
Image credits for this post
Victor Burgin 1941 -
UK '76, 1976
Set of 11 archival inkjet / pigment prints
100 x 150 cm
Copyright the Artist. Courtesy Richard Saltoun Gallery.
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