Little House on the Charles: Burgin Shacks Up at Carpenter

“We are swamped with spectacular images,” says Victor Burgin. “I’m trying to do a different kind of image.”

Burgin is this year’s Sert Practitioner in the Arts at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. Last week, Burgin installed his “different kind of image,” a single-channel video entitled “The Little House,” on view in the Carpenter Center’s Sert Gallery until April 13.

Along with the installation, Burgin has brought a rarefied conceptual approach to the artistic questions of text and authorship.

PART OF A PLAN

Traditionally, the Sert Practioner comes to Harvard with a work in progress, and students participate in its completion. Burgin opted instead to bring a finished work and to involve students through lectures, critiques, and an interactive seminar.

Professor of Film Studies David Rodowick notes that Burgin’s selection is “part of a plan we’ve had in VES...bridging the studio art and the film and video sides of installation art.” According to Rodowick, this plan has recently been supplemented by the department’s hire of Amie Siegel, whose work combines film, video, sound, and installations.

A CHINESE BOX

In Burgin’s video installation, a female narrator recites his translation of an 18th century novella, “La Petite Maison,” while the screen alternates between scenes of a Chinese woman turning the pages of Mao Tse-Tung’s “Little Red Book” and slowly rotating 360-degree panoramic views of Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House in West Hollywood.

In “La Petite Maison,” the original inspiration for Burgin’s project, the Marquis de Trémicour performs a feat of architectural seduction by transforming a prudish Mélite into his lover simply by touring her through his well-decorated mansion.

Burgin translated and rewrote the book to fit his project.

“I made Mélite’s repartee much more incisive, and shifted the narrative towards feminism,” he says.

In “The Little House,” Burgin explores the eighteenth-century European fascination with the “Oriental.” This fascination is apparent in the exotic descriptions of the rooms in “Le Petite Maison,” which Burgin sets off against the modernist Schindler House.

“The Schindler House gives a very clear rhetorical structure to the entire work. The austere interiors are the antithesis of the ones being described in the text,” says Burgin. “Yet at the same time, inevitably, I think we start to see the Schindler house through the lens of the description.”

Burgin likens his project to a “Chinese box or Russian dolls,” referring to the installation’s multiple layers of “housing.”

AN ‘INSCRIBED AUDIENCE’?

The book is a “written house,” narrated over visuals of the Schindler House, the whole of which is viewed in the “little house” of the projection room, contained within the Sert Gallery, inside the Carpenter Center.

Burgin has written extensively on semiotics and art theory, and the richness of his thought is reflected in “The Little House.” He describes his audience as two-fold: those who visit the installation, and “the audience inscribed in the work, with an interest in and knowledge of the Baroque, modern architecture, and textuality.”

“I don’t expect anyone to have the background of the inscribed audience,” he adds.

Although few may come to the installation with the precise knowledge or interests of the “inscribed audience,” Burgin insists that his work is accessible. “I am not creating a mystery to be solved, and [am] not being deliberately evasive,” he says.

“The video gives you a space to invest with meaning, which has boundaries of possibility but allows for a freedom of association.”

CONFIDENT IN UNCONFIDENCE

Early last week, Burgin held a seminar for students of the Visual and Environmental Studies (VES), History of Art and Architecture, and Anthropology departments.

On Monday, Burgin and five students discussed previously assigned readings by Roland Barthes as well as the introduction to Burgin’s new book, “The Remembered Film,” and explored the idea of a work in progress. On Tuesday and Wednesday, three of the students participated in discussion-based critiques of their work with Burgin.

Karen J. Adelman ’07, a VES concentrator, brought the group to her Linden St. studio.

“I’m in this hectic freak-out stage, and Victor represented to me somewhere I would like to be, making work in a more careful and slow way,” says Adelman. “He has established his own confidence in this unconfident place.”

“It was different from criticism and feedback that I’ve received from most professors,” says Amy J. Lien ’09, also a VES concentrator, who showed Burgin and the other seminar members a sample of her installation paintings. “There wasn’t much talk about the content and forms of the work, and more about its connotative and denotative values.”

Burgin’s critique focused on the critical concept of the death of the artist. “It was totally disorienting,” says Lien, since her paintings are still in progress.

However, Lien says that the critique was productive. “I got a lot from his about how to think about titles, how they would relay the viewer to somewhere they wouldn’t necessarily immediately go.”

MEDIA AND MEDIATION

Burgin capped off his week as Sert Practitioner with a public lecture, “The Responsibility of the Artist,” on Thursday March 8 at the Carpenter Center. In the lecture, first given at the National Institute for the History of Art in December 2005, he presented his art practice and writings in the context of the intellectual history of conceptual art.

Addressing the elusive question, “What does it mean to speak of engagement in terms of the work of art itself?” Burgin interwove strands of political and cultural criticism, drawing largely on conceptualism’s anti-capitalist perspective.

“Aesthetics has its own meta-politics,” Burgin said.

He concluded that engaged art must work outside the framework of the concepts and categories of what he called “the global audio-visual entertainment industry.”

During the post-lecture discussion, Rothenberg Professor of English and American Literature Homi K. Bhabha praised Burgin’s “resistance of the absurd drive to novelty and acceleration,” and the way his work “continually reflects on both media and mediation.”

To this, Burgin replied, “A gentleman from the Harvard Crimson asked me earlier who I thought my audience was. Now I can answer, Homi Bhabha.”

—Staff writer Jeremy S. Singer-Vine can be reached at jsvine@fas.harvard.edu.