Chris Burden and the limits of art.

by Peter Schjeldahl May 14, 2007

An efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded,
or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think hes pretty great. Burden is the
guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California, produced a classic, or an
atrocity (both, to my mind), of conceptual art by getting shot. Shoot survives in
desultory black-and-white photographs with this description: At 7:45 P.M. I was shot
in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was
standing about fifteen feet from me. Why do such things? I wanted to be taken
seriously as an artist, Burden explained, when I visited him recently at his studio in a
brushy glen of Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy
Rubins. The models were Picasso and Duchamp. I was most interested in Duchamp.
Burden is a solidly fleshy, amicable man, given to arduous enthusiasms. Arrayed in
ranks outside the vast, tidy studio building were more than a hundred and forty
handsomely restored antique lampposts, units of an ongoing sculptural project. (Many
are intended for the grounds of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, when its
present expansion is completed, in 2008.) Reinstallations of two major Burdens are now
on view in Southern California: A Tale of Two Cities (1981), a room-filling fantasy
tableau of miniature metropolises at war, incorporating about five thousand toys, at the
Orange County Museum of Art, in Newport Beach; and, at the Museum of
Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles, Hell Gate (1998), a twenty-eight-foot-long scale
model, in Erector and Meccano pieces and wood, of the dramatic steel-and-concrete
railroad bridge that crosses the Hell Gate segment of the East River, between Queens
and Wards Island. Like most things by Burden, they are powerful works that deal
ingeniously with aesthetics and ethics of power. You neednt like them to be impressed.
Shoot was one of a number of perfectly repellent performance pieces of the early
nineteen-seventies in which Burden subjected himself to danger, thereby creating a
double bind, for viewers, between the citizenly injunction to intervene in crises and the
institutional taboo against touching art works. (Such, at any rate, was my analysis of the
distinctive nausea that I felt in thinking of those things, which I avoided witnessing in
person.) He spent five days in a small locker, with a bottle of water above and a bottle
for urine below; slithered, nearly naked and with his hands held behind him, across fifty
feet of broken glass in a parking lot; had his hands nailed to the roof of a Volkswagen;
was kicked down a flight of stairs; and, on different occasions, incurred apparent risks
of burning, drowning, and electrocution.
Usually performed for small audiences, these events became word-of-mouth sensations
on a radically minded grapevine in art schools, new contemporary museums, and grantfunded alternative spacesan emerging academy of the far out. Anti-commercial
sentiments held sway in those circles, although not altogether heroically, given the
concurrent slump in the art market and the flow of patronage from such sources as the
National Endowment for the Arts. (Between 1974 and 1983, Burden received four
N.E.A. grants.) Earthworks, executed in remote locations, were the conceptual art that
came closest to being popular. They had in common with Burdens performances the
fact that almost nobody saw them, except by way of documentation. The avant-gardism
of the time wasnt only reliant on publicity; it was effectively about the mediums of

informationspecialized magazines, insider gossipthrough which it became known.

Burden strummed the network like a lyre.
Burden was born in Boston in 1946, to an engineer father and a mother who had a
masters degree in biology, and he grew up in France and Italy. At the age of twelve, on
the island of Elba, he was badly hurt in a motor-scooter accident, and underwent an
emergency operation on his left foot, without anesthesia. It was a formative experience,
he said, as was a passion for photography, which he acquired during his long
recuperation. He completed high school in Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Pomona
College, in Claremont, California, he declared an architecture major and studied
physics, but gravitated toward art, with a special interest in Dadaism. Burdens masters
thesis, at the University of California, Irvine, in 1971where his teachers included the
doyen of space-and-light installations, Robert Irwinwas the five-day locker stint.
He was immediately taken very seriously, as the most extreme and enigmatic of
provocateurs in a subculture that, in highly educated ways, reflected the political
disarray of the nation during the seemingly eternal Vietnam War, and prefigured the
swing-barrelled rage of punk. By 1977, he had created performance pieces in two dozen
American and European cities. They constituted a theatre of passive-aggressive cruelty.
For one, in 1972, in Newport Beach, he sat immobile in a chair, wearing dark glasses,
facing two cushions and an inviting box of marijuana cigarettes. Visitors naturally
assumed that he was watching them, but the insides of his glasses were painted black,
and he refused to speak. He reported, in his record of the work, Many people tried to
talk to me, one assaulted me and one left sobbing hysterically. Plainly, Burden was not
in sympathy with his supposed community.
Burdens most trenchantly significant work was Doomed, performed in April, 1975,
at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. He set a clock on a wall at midnight,
and lay down on the floor under a leaning sheet of glass. Viewers came and went.
Burden didnt move. Inevitably, he soiled his pants. (It was awful, he recalled.) Fortyfive hours and ten minutes passed. Then a young museum employee named Dennis
OShea took it upon himself to place a container of water within Burdens reach. The
artist got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and left. He never again undertook a
public action that imperilled himself. It wouldnt have made sense. Doomed
unmasked the absurdity of the conventions by which, through assuming the role of
viewers, we are both blocked and immunized from ethical responsibility. In OSheas
case, the situation was complicated by his duty to maintain the inviolability of art
works. There should be a monument to him, somewhere, which would commemorate
the final calling of the bluff of art as a law unto itself. (Would Burden have lain there
until he died? Probably not, he said.) I have in mind Robert Rauschenbergs famous
intention to act in the gap between art and life. There isnt any gap. Art is notional.
There is always only life and death.
In pragmatic terms, art is a privileged zone of gratuitous activity, with boundaries
maintained by the agreement of the vested authorities. Artists of the Duchampian sort
delighted in effacing the boundaries, which, with increasingly avid complicity on the
authorities part, kept being redrawn to corral the effacements. It was a silly game, in the
end. Ultimate limits were discovered, most pointedly by Burden, whose influence on
conceptual and installational artists, to this day, is immeasurable. He defined art, in an
interview in 1975, as a free spot in society, where you can do anythinganything, he

might have added, that society will let you do. (Dennis OShea wouldnt let him die.)
Context is all. The complexity of Burdens attitude became clear in 2004, when he and
Nancy Rubins resigned their longtime teaching positions at U.C.L.A. to protest the
universitys decision not to expel a student who, in a class, had played Russian roulette
with a fake but real-looking gun, then had left the room and set off a firecracker in the
hall. In a university, Burden said, there are rules of speech and decorum. Some
disputants in the controversy, which dragged on for months, accused him of hypocrisy.
He insisted on a cardinal difference between an act performed in an art space for an
audience that had been warned and one sprung on students in a classroom.
Since the late seventies, Burden has specialized in one-off wonders like A Tale of Two
Cities (whose details yield a wealth of technological and social history) and insouciant
engineering feats like Hell Gate, as well as technological stunts involving selfdesigned cars, boats, and laboratory equipment. (He reconstructed a primitive early
television and a nineteenth-century apparatus for measuring the speed of light.) Some
works have had political content, such as a chilling response to Maya Lins Vietnam
Veterans Memorial: three million Vietnamese names, symbolizing the native dead of
that war, engraved on hinged copper panels. (Made in 1991, it belongs to Chicagos
Museum of Contemporary Art.) Others have been hoots: a rubber-band-powered model
plane launched in the aisle of a Concorde in flight, to attain a ground speed of Mach
2.05 plus ten miles per hour. (Burden sells relics of such actions; in this instance, the
little plane mounted in a glass case.) In his studio, he showed me a work in progress:
parts of what will be a huge model city crisscrossed by roller-coasters of hundreds of
track-racing toy cars. The cars will run continuously, until they wear out, at the
equivalent, for their size, of well over a hundred miles an hour. (A smaller version,
shown in 2004 in Kanazawa, Japan, provoked acute anxiety in its viewers, Burden
remarked happily.) There is an inevitable slackness, conceptually, to these works, which
colonize the free spot that Burdens daring carved out. The history of the avant-garde
comes down to this: a boyish gimcracker diverting us by diverting himself. Worse
things have happened.