Performers bleed for art
Burden delivers performance art innovative shot in the arm
By Nisha Gopalan
On Nov. 19, 1971 at 7:45 p.m., performance artist Chris Burden stood in anticipation while his friend, 15 feet away, shot him in his left arm with a .22-caliber rifle.
Journalists would later refer to this performance entitled "Shoot" as "the shot heard around the world."
Though more concerned with his art itself rather than its implications in the art world, Burden, as a part of the new movement of performance art, became one of the first to use self-mutilation. Therefore one may consider Burden to be, arguably, a father of provocative performance art.
"(Once) I was giving some lectures and someone said, 'Well, aren't you a masochist?' I said, 'No, I'm an artist,'" says Burden.
"I'm not saying that things couldn't go wrong, but the object of the performance wasn't to inflict pain or suffering on myself," contends Burden, a UCLA professor of new genres.
"To the contrary, I was trying to deal with the psychology of knowing beforehand. If you set up some sort of intense situation, then the two months beforehand and how you feel afterwards are most important."
"The actual event is not that significant in a certain sense," adds Burden. "People get outraged because they have this bucolic fantasy about what art is a pretty girl in a pretty field full of flowers."
Burden attended UC Irvine for his graduate work, receiving his masters in fine arts. He focused upon minimalist sculpture, in which the artist strives to reduce things to their primary elements.
At the time, performance art represented to Burden the logical extension of minimal sculpture. Having created progressively larger sculptures, Burden realized that one had to walk around the sculpture to view it.
"What is the quintessential element of sculpture?" asked Burden. "Sculpture forces the human body to move."
Still concerned with the phenomenon of space, for his master's thesis show, Burden performed the landmark "Five Day Locker Piece" (1971) during which he stayed in a 2-by-2-by-3-foot locker for five days.
"I kept thinking about making a box and being in a box. And then I saw this row of lockers and I thought, 'Ah, better to do this performance in the lockers.' And I didn't even think of it as a performance so much. But better to do this work of art rather than make a box ... making objects and then having them interact with my body. It's better to use something that already exists because then I've eliminated the object," explains Burden of his investigation into minimalism.
"Sculpture's really about human physicality and human emotion," Burden says.
In "Trans-Fixed" (1974) Burden delved into Christian imagery when he crucified himself, nails through hands, onto a Volkswagen with its engine running. Here, he sought to investigate human emotion through one of the most moving depictions of human suffering in western society, a crucified Christ. The use of a Volkswagen, a car of the people, seemed to somewhat demystify the Christ-like suffering.
Burden considered his audience an integral part of the work. "The audience was always structured into the work," Burden says.
Clearly he makes that his goal was always to use "these charged moments to build an aesthetic structure." To simply deem his work ugly or masochistic, in Burden's case, undermines his intentions.
By the mid-1970s, Burden became fed up with shortsighted, sensational press, such as a Newsweek critic who labeled Burden as the "Evil Knievel of art." Individuals growingly associated his performances with entertainment value rather than artistic endeavors. So Burden increasingly created, once again, sculpture that did not utilize his body. Now, he no longer participates in performance art.
"Most people are peripheral to what they don't understand," says Burden. "I realized that I am a traditional artist. I am just like the impressionists and Van Gogh. If they were alive today, they would be doing the kind of work I do.