Chris Burden

April 10, 2003 | 2 min read

I saw the artist Chris Burden speak at SCIArc last night. I know of his work from the art history classes I took in college. He is most well known for conceptual/performance pieces that even in our more jaded times are pretty shocking: He locked himself in a 2ft X 2ft X 3ft locker for five days; he sequestered himself for 22 days on a ledge built close to the ceiling in a New York gallery. Though the audience was told he was there, they were not able to see him from their vantage points. At his gallery in Venice Beach he pressed live electrical wires against his chest. He had hiself briefly crucified atop a Volkswagon Beetle. And, in a piece that has proved to be his most notorious, he had a friend shoot him, agressively confronting the artist/audience relationship.

At some point, however, he switched to architectural work, both on the scale of buildings and scale models. During his lecture he didn’t not explain this transformation. I suppose he wasn’t obligated to, but it would have been interesting. His later work is very introverted, and seems very weak compared to the early part of his career.

He did have a few things of interest to say though. most notably that “sculpture is different from two-dimensional work in that it forces the viewer to move,” and the revelation early in his career that if he brought a prexisting object into the gallery and acted upon it during the course of the piece, the audience would see his actions as the art and not the objects. This was his transition from sculpture to performance. L. and I discussed at length whether we should be disappointed in an artist who has turned away from his early, daring work, and who seems unable to talk about why. Though in the end it is hard to make such a judgement based upon a single lecture. Today, my coworker said that the wilder the public persona, the milder the private citizen, and surely there is an element of that at play here. Still, I cannot reconcile the idea that a man who once had himself shot before an audience (1.) can find little compelling to say about it and (2.) now creates work which is as bland as his early mastery was vital.

Here is a link to his interviews as well as some of his work.

created The Millions and is its publisher. He and his family live in New Jersey.