“Cultural work as a praxis.” The Artist as Producer in the Work of Victor Burgin, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula
(2019) “Disassembled” Images. Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art — ISBN: [978-94-6270-171-7], 192-211, published
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- Abstract
- The essay explores the work of Marxist-oriented artists Sekula, Martha Rosler, and Victor Burgin who referred to Brecht and Benjamin in order to seek creative freedom in the interval between theory and practice. Based on a thorough comparison of the writings with the artistic practice of these artist-theoreticians, the essay shows that each of them subscribes to the socialist project of “cultural work as a praxis” in a different way. While Burgin’s meta-textual work VI (1973) deconstructs advertising photographs by means of an “aesthetics of fragments and cracks” and Sekula’s Aerospace Folktales of the same year integrates critical and biographical narratives into a “disassembled movie,” Rosler’s “poetry of drunkenness” resists the classical stance of the documentary genre in favor of a critical practice oscillating between the “possibility of negation and metacommentary.”
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Citations
Streitberger, A. (2019). “Cultural work as a praxis.” The Artist as Producer in the Work of Victor Burgin, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula. In Alexander Streitberger, Hilde Van Gelder (ed.), “Disassembled” Images. Allan Sekula and Contemporary Art (pp. 192-211). Leuven University Press. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/227958