ABSTRACT
The meaning of Burgin's work is socially constructed, but the role of his images as rhetorical statements about culture necessitates the tacit acknowledgement of their formal hierarchy from their source materials. By 1979, Semio-Art had provided the institutional framework for a plethora of cultural analysts as consistent in their aims and methods as the rationalized society to which they were opposed, steering many potential artists towards a 'post-productivist' position. In 1979, Tagg's 'different spaces' were connecting with those explored by cultural analysts such as Hall and Paddy Whannel at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham during the early 1970s. The radical academic and critical postmodernist artists of the late '70s and early '8os had learned the lessons of the '60s counter-culture perhaps too well, choosing to oppose cultural hegemony from the inside in the belief that the 'outside' never existed in the first place.
