Chris Burden Art Doesnt Have a Purpose New York Times

THE Prototype Well-nigh EMBLEMATIC of '70s body art has the rough panicky blur of a news photo. Faces are unrecognizable. So is the rifle. And the artist'due south description of the action is a unproblematic dispassionate ascertainment: "At seven:45 P.M., I was shot in the left arm by a friend. . . . " Chris Brunt took his risks in the style of a scientist—one who decides that he must test a new serum on himself alone, who later declares that he always knew it would work. When he stopped performing, Burden began to exhibit machines and war toys and installations. The project, however, had remained the aforementioned: to demythologize certain choices, to deromanticize certain symbols, to get real.

He says he had himself shot so he'd know what it felt like, though he didn't mean the physical pain so much as "getting ready to stand there." In that location could be nothing theoretical or metaphoric in knowing that the gun was loaded, that the trigger would be pulled. Burden'southward performances created a context in which it was possible, though not probable, that he would die. That context itself was the art. In Prelude to 220, or 110, 1971, for example, he had his wrists, neck, and legs bolted to a concrete gallery flooring with copper bands. Nearby sat ii buckets of water with live 110-volt lines submerged in them. Had whatever visitor chosen to spill the water, Burden would take been electrocuted. Typically, he was forcing himself, the audience, and the sponsoring establishment to confront an elemental and harrowing reality. Then too, in the photodocumentation of Shoot, 1971, nosotros can read the trace of a shudder.

Indeed, the culture seems to have shuddered through some crisis of the body then, showtime in the late '60s. Or was information technology some crisis in authenticity? Or some trauma surrounding the object'due south "dematerialization?" Analyzing the emergence and disappearance of body art is beyond the scope of this article. But the fact remains that during the '70s in detail, some artists risked injury and death in a manner unprecedented in the history of art. For case, there was Gina Pane climbing a ladder with cutting edges—barefoot (Escalade sanglante [Bloody climb], 1971); Dennis Oppenheim standing in a circumvolve five feet in diameter while someone threw rocks at him from to a higher place (Rocked Circle-Fear, 1971); Marina Abramović and Ulay running naked and repeatedly colliding at tiptop speed (1975); Linda Montano inserting acupuncture needles around her eyes (Mitchell's Death, 1978). And Burden was no doubt the most notorious of them all, at to the lowest degree in America. His risks were more dramatic than the others, but as well more calculated.

Often, his disturbing deportment were misread as exercises in masochism or as fashion stations along somespiritual path. Hadn't he crawled almost naked through broken glass (Through the Night Softly, 1973), pushed two live wires into his chest (Doorway to Sky, 1973), had himself crucified on top of a Volkswagen (Trans-Stock-still, 1974)? But he denies whatever involvement in either pain or transcendence. Equally he explained it in 1975, "When I employ pain or fear in a piece of work, information technology seems to energize the situation."¹ That "situation" was the relationship between him and the audience. It was their fright and distress every bit much as his that "energized the situation." Brunt'south work examines physical phenomena in their natural context, the land of homo error. And Prelude wasn't nigh electricity's potential to kill, simply the audience's. Information technology wasn't a symbol, only a real catastrophe waiting to happen. Through his body, Burden (who studied a good deal of physics in college) could investigate an energy that scientific discipline can't measure.

When he did White Low-cal/White Heat, 1975, remaining out of sight on a platform at the Ronald Feldman gallery for 22 days, his "fantasy" (equally he put information technology) was that the gallery would not reveal his presence, but that people would somehow sense it when they entered the room. White Lite was Brunt'due south refinement of an earlier experiment in inertia, Bed Piece, 1972, in which he'd remained in bed in a gallery for 22 days, visible to all, just communicating with no one. Equally he recalled information technology in 1975: "In Bed Piece it was like I was this repulsive magnet. People would come up to nigh 15 feet from the bed and you could really feel it. There was an energy, a real electricity going on."ⁱⁱ He'd become a generator, and normal man interaction had ceased.

Earlier he began performing, and still an M.F.A. educatee at the University of California, Irvine, Burden fabricated interactive sculpture. Even then, he wanted audiences to do something. But it frustrated him when people failed to understand that his objects were not the art; the interaction was. For his M.F.A. thesis in 1971, he decided to circumvent the problem by using a 2-by-2-by-3-foot locker already present in the exhibition space—and his own body. For that outset operation, 5 Day Locker Piece, he just expected to scroll upwardly and suffer for five sequent days. But to his surprise, people he didn't even know came unbidden to sit in front end of the locker, to tell him their problems and the stories of their lives. Was the appeal but his condition as captive audience? Or is it that artists who break taboos and take on such ordeals are perceived as having special powers? Certainly, those who came were projecting something onto him. And Brunt'south been extremely conscious of audience behavior always since.

Burden'south work exposes real power struggles—with real consequences—between performer and audience, or artist and art earth, or denizen and authorities. Traditionally, an audience wants to sit down passively and expects the performer to "take command"; they will attack if the performer doesn't. Burden began to play with this dynamic—traditional theater's unarticulated mise-enscène. In Shout Piece, 1971, washed soon after Five Day Locker Piece, he saturday on a brightly lit platform, face up painted red, voice amplified, ordering the people who entered the gallery to "get the fuck out"—which about did, immediately. His third functioning was Prelude, in which he became the passive ane, his life depending quite literally on the behavior of each gallery visitor. While masochism was non the indicate in Brunt's work, at that place was ofttimes a dynamic of authority and submission. And probably because dominating (as in Shout Piece) simply drives an audience away, Brunt unremarkably chose to submit, making their decisions much tougher. In La Chiaraficazione, 1975, he sealed off a small room with particle board at the Alessandra Castelli gallery in Milan and persuaded the xi people inside to interact with him on staying in the room till someone bankrupt the door down from outside. The majority of the audience (nearly 150 people) remained outside, and no one knew what he was doing. They finally broke the door down afterwards an hour and a one-half.

Brunt's deportment earned him a sensational media reputation. The New York Times, for example, ran an article in 1973 called "He Got Shot for His Fine art," illustrated with a photo of Burden in a ski mask. The creative person had worn this mask for a piece called You'll Never Come across My Face in Kansas City, 1971, but in the context of a mainstream newspaper such a photograph suggested that this man was a threat to society, a criminal. Burden went on to work with this public prototype as with a found object, sometimes undermining it, sometimes exploiting it. (But eventually, it helped convince him to quit performing.) In Shadow, 1976, for instance, he spent a solar day at Ohio State University trying "to fit people'due south preconceptions of an advanced artist" by remaining aloof and wearing opaque sunglasses, black cap, and a fatigue jacket stuffed with notebooks, flick, and a tape recorder. In The Confession, 1974, on the other hand, he revealed intimate details most his personal life to a specially selected audience of people he'd just met, "imposing on them disturbing noesis which had to be reconciled with my public prototype." In Garcon!, 1976, he served cappuccino and espresso to visitors at a San Francisco gallery and "my attire and demeanor were such that only a handful of people out of the hundreds who attended the prove recognized me every bit Chris Burden." He could create tension merely past sitting in a room. In Jaizu, 1972, Brunt sat facing a gallery door, wearing sunglasses painted black on the inside, and then he couldn't meet. Spectators were unaware of this. They causeless, then, that he was watching, as they entered i at a time and faced him lone. Just within the door were two cushions and some marijuana cigarettes. As Brunt described information technology, "Many people tried to talk to me, i assaulted me, and one left sobbing hysterically." The artist remained passive, immobile, and speechless—the blank slate to whom each visitor gave an identity: gauge? shaman? entertainer?

Burden invited simply a small group of friends and other artists to witness actions with the virtually shock potential, like Shoot. But whether performing in public or private, he never made things easy for those who came to watch. These pieces were too real: either as well horrifying or too everyday. Spectators at Shoot might ask themselves the same question every bit the spectators at Working Creative person, 1975, a piece in which Burden lived and worked in a gallery for three days—and that is: "what fabricated me want to sentinel this?" Audiences found themselves implicated intheir voyeurism. "Art doesn't have a purpose," Brunt once said. "It's a free spot in gild, where you tin practice annihilation."³ Burden established his art as that territory outside the social contract where either the creative person or the spectators might do what they would otherwise think inappropriate.

His unpredictability brought a tension adjoining on hostility to his pieces addressing the art world. For Doomed, 1975, at the Museum of Contemporary Fine art in Chicago, Brunt reset a wall clock to 12 and lay down below a sheet of glass tipped at a 45-degree angle, then did nothing. The audience began to throw things at him, and nonetheless he did nothing. Somewhen they calmed down and some kept acuity with him—for 45 hours and ten minutes, every bit it turned out. Similar his other performances, Doomed was sculptural, in that it was "built" for a particular space and circumstance—in this instance, the asking of the curator that he not do something "brusk" because the museum expected a large crowd. "I thought—OK, I'll start it, you end information technology. And that's what the piece was virtually," Burden said.^four He decided that when museum officials interfered with the piece in any mode, information technology would stop. He never told them this, of class, and never expected them to permit it continue for days. When someone finally set a drinking glass of water next to him afterwards 45 hours, he got up, smashed the clock with a hammer, and walked out. Doomed was a archetype gesture of passive aggression. By conceding that institutions and business organisation people, not artists, accept the power, Brunt forced the museum officials to act as the potency figures they actually were.

In smoking out who really has control, Burden has driven some of the art world'due south most charged taboos out of their hiding places. In the process, he made nerve-wracking demands. For Tower of Power, 1985, for example, he asked the Wadsworth Atheneum museum to borrow a million dollars worth of gold bricks. From this he built a pyramid for exhibit —to make this fantasy number literal. (It was quite discreet, equally it turned out.) But the museum, of course, had to hire extra security. And Tower made its point: if fine art is well-nigh money, why non just show the money? In 1981, with his materials budgets from the Centre Pompidou and the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham, England, Burden bought a piddling over an ounce of gold and a small diamond. In Paris, his operation consisted of melting and molding the gold into a small Napoleon figure that could take passed for a inexpensive souvenir (Napoleon d'Or, 1981). In England, while keeping the real diamond in his pocket, Burden suspended a worthless replica, spotlit, in a large light-tight room (Diamonds are Forever, 1981). Viewers, who had to enter one at a fourth dimension, did not know information technology was fake. This was an exhibition well-nigh exhibitions, in which the "duped" spectators collaborated to ask some blunt questions. Is the artist supposed to play alchemist? Tin a imitation diamond, past virtue of its presentation, become more than valuable than the real jewel subconscious abroad? (And in Napoleon d'Or, was the "cheap" figurine, past virtue of the creative person's touch, now worth more its weight in gilt?) Does something become valuable if you lot're told that information technology's valuable? And is it even more than valuable if yous're told that information technology'south art? Contributing their ain unwitting coda to the diamond projection, the angryboard of directors at the Ikon Gallery who financed information technology met to determine whether the artist had defrauded them. According to Howard Singerman'south business relationship, "The board information technology seems, expected Burden to buy materials that would be worthless until he had transformed them." Brunt, for his part, lays the board'south ire at the fact that he didn't display the existent diamond. In whatever case, as Singerman continues, "The curator finally received special permission to effect a check to a local jeweler; no such permission would have been necessary for the local lumberyard."⁵ Naturally, Burden kept the real diamond.

As the creative person increasingly removed his body and presence from the performance, he continued, at times, to wage psychological warfare with the institutions that sought his work. In 1985, with Samson, he created a sculpture with the potential literally to destroy a museum. Samson connected a turnstile, through intermediate gears, to two massive timbers pushing against the bearing walls of Seattle's Henry Art Gallery. (Burden had outset proposed the piece to the Oakland Museum, which turned it down.) Every visitor had to pass through the turnstile, whose movement increased the pressure on the 100-ton jack betwixt the timbers. If enough visitors passed through, the accumulated pressure level would really bring down the edifice. Crude and clunky, its gears exposed, Samson looked less like art than the insidious machinery it actually was. Burden had nicknamed it "The Museum Buster." In Exposing the Foundation of the Museum, 1986, Burden did exactly that—to the architectural foundation of the Temporary Gimmicky building of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. He took abroad a 52-past-sixteen-foot section of the concrete floor and dug down, installing iii stairways then visitors could descend to the spot where the physical footings met globe. A visitor might be reminded that the remainder of the floor could go just as easily: dust-to-grit, what-goes-upwardly-comes-down. Or the visitor might detect comfort in the evidence of how deep the artist had to dig to find the "raw" elements that supported the establishment. In either instance, Exposing the Foundation disrupted the conventional museum feel, and made the viewer complicit with this project.

That's what Burden did in projects outside the art-earth: brought a footling jolt to an unsuspecting audition. In Dos Equis, 1972, he blocked a route in Laguna Embankment, California, with 2 giant Xs he'd made from xvi-foot timbers soaked in gasoline. He set them on fire and left, creating a powerful image for one driver to run across. In Coals to Newcastle, 1978, he flew a model plane—its cargo tiny marijuana bombs and some messages (e.k., Fúmenlos Muchachos, or "smoke it, kids")—over the contend separating the Us from United mexican states. And he bought television ad fourth dimension to run, over the grade of a month, a ten-second clip of Through the Night Softly, 1973, the performance in which he had crawled through cleaved glass. In each of these pieces Burden looked for the "logic" ordering the arrangement (highway, border, television), then disrupted it in society to brand information technology visible. With the beginning ii, that was piece of cake. Only telly can absorb anything it's fed. At the same time, television receiver has codes, even in terms of how scenes are lit. Through the Night Softly must have looked similar an aberration. A human is injuring himself, but there'southward no narrative, no editing, no packaging, no moral—and nothing for sale. Nosotros, similar Burden, can only daydream about the reactions of the "audition" for such interventions. Just if anyone looked up and said, "What was that?" the fine art succeeded. Burden hoped to crevice the veneer of official reality, if but for a single individual in a single moment.

Brunt has consistently examined the power of the individual to control his own destiny—or to accept any impact at all—in a corporate high-tech world. At maybe the height of his performance-art notoriety in the mid '70s, he built himself a working one-person machine (B-Motorcar, 1975), and literally re-invented the first rough tv (C.B.T.5., 1977). Burden sought to demystify these objects that well-nigh people couldn't make merely can't live without. So he'd "solved" the auto and the idiot box, one-on-i. But so what? What meaning does individuality accept anymore? A one-man factory has no impact on the corporations that manufacture cars and televisions. Of the tiny matchstick men surrounding his Belfry of Power, Burden says they illustrate that "our lives are transient and consumable in human relationship to the ascribed lasting ability of gold." In 747, 1973, he fired several shots with a pistol at a passing airplane, the Lilliputian gesture of one man against the world. The shots were more ridiculous than menacing, and this fantasy skyjacker-without-a-cause didn't even have a demand—his act was pure frustration.

Since 1981, Brunt has been creating his own huge strike force of model planes, ships, and submarines. In All the Submarines of the United states of America, 1987, he's back to concretizing a quantity, this fourth dimension thetotal number of subs always launched by the government, all 625 of them. His 625 paper-thin miniatures suspended from the ceiling look, from distant, similar a big school of tiny fish. Upward close, they resemble a flotilla of floating toys. Does this brand the U.Due south. submarine fleet more real to us, or less? Paradoxically, works such as this, including A Tale of Two Cities, 1981—a massive installation of warring city states—cannot create an temper of risk commensurate with the risks they address. One needs time, for example, to study A Tale, a slice so large in area information technology can be viewed in detail merely through binoculars. Here, Burden has elaborated a whole history of military technology, from primitive canoes to sophisticated robots. Just ultimately, this brandish of the obsession, organization, money, time, and imagination devoted to war, since the cave, doesn't arouse fright. The corporate and war machine powers still seem faceless and remote, and we run across them indirectly, not through the gut. For most Americans, tanks and robots are most existent as babyhood toys. Information technology'southward difficult, then, when confronting these pieces, to overcome the sensation of nostalgic pleasance, and the fascination that attends looking at almost annihilation in miniature.

Certain fictions however rule u.s.a.. When Brunt built his installation called The Reason for the Neutron Flop, 1979, he showed u.s. exactly what the Pentagon'south reasons for that weapon looked similar. He laid out fifty,000 nickels, each with a matchstick "cannon," each representing a Russian tank. Along with the numbers, he was exposing a whole ideology of power, a belief in deterrence and ultimate weapons. When he had himself crucifiedacross the superlative of a Volkswagen, he took the West's most hallowed industrial and religious icons and conflated them, producing an epitome both terrifying and absurd. The creative person became one—non with the universe—just with the machinery, which ran its motor at full-throttle "screaming for me." Information technology was heresy.

And Brunt'due south work is terrorism. One can read the whole resume that way, with its brinksmanship (Prelude), top secrets (The Confession), surveillance (Jaizu), camouflage (Garcon!), ambush (Dos Equis), hostage-taking (La Chiaraficazione), infiltration (the Television set ads), raids (Coals to Newscastle), and time bombs (Samson). But this is terrorism with an R.Due south.V.P. For as we, his spectators, contemplate the turnstile or the bucket with the live wire, we know our decisions will have existent consequences. While Brunt'due south work exposes power without judging information technology, his projection is not amoral—it forces the moralizing onto us. Sooner or later, we will have to decide. And normally sooner.

It's an emergency.

C. Carr is a staff writer for the Village Vox. She contributes regularly to Artforum.

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NOTES

1. Quoted in Roger Ebert, "Fine art of Fearfulness and Pain," Chicago Sun-Times, April 8, 1975, p. 31.

2. Quoted in Robert Horvitz, "Chris Burden," Artforum XIV No. 9, May 1976, p. 25.

three. Quoted in Donald Carroll, "Chris Burden: Fine art on the Firing Line," Coast, August, 1974.

iv. In a chat with the author, April 28, 1989, New York City.

5. Howard Singerman, "Chris Burden's Pragmatism," in Chris Burden: A 20 Year Survey, pp. 24–25.

"Chris Brunt: A 20-Year Survey" premiered at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, California, final year and can exist seen at the Institute of Gimmicky Art, Boston, through September thirty. All quotations from the artist in this article, other than those cited below, announced in the exhibition catalogue.