Ian Burn has been described as many things: an activist, a trade-unionist, a journalist, an art critic, a curator and an art historian—and, as he once described himself in a moment of self-deprecating alienation, ‘an ex-Conceptual artist’. This volume brings together a diverse collection of Burn’s writings that reveals a probing, analytical artist who turned to language to articulate the need for ‘looking at seeing and reading’, who pursued a Marxist politics in the face of neoliberalism and who sought to occupy and transform the margins of landscape painting. The publication includes previously unpublished material and offers a prescient rethinking of art in a decentered world through what Burn called ‘peripheral vision’.

Ian Burn: COLLECTED WRITINGS 1966–1993 is edited by Ann Stephen and designed by Robert Milne, with contributions by Art & Language, Adrian Piper, Paul Wood, Allan Sekula, and Mel Ramsden.