Christopher Lee Burden was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015.
More ...Christopher Lee Burden (April 11, 1946 – May 10, 2015) was an American artist working in performance, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015.
Burden was born in Boston in 1946 to Robert Burden, an engineer, and Rhoda Burden, a biologist. He grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, France and Italy.
At the age of 12, Burden had emergency surgery, performed without anesthesia, on his left foot after he was severely injured in a motor-scooter crash on the island of Elba. During the long convalescence that followed, he became deeply interested in visual art, particularly photography.
He studied for his B.A. in visual arts, physics and architecture at Pomona College in 1965-1969 and received his MFA at the University of California, Irvine—where his teachers included Robert Irwin—from 1969 to 1971.
Burden began to work in performance art in the early 1970s. He made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His first significant performance work, Five Day Locker Piece (1971), was created for his master's thesis at the University of California, Irvine, and involved his being locked in a locker for five days.
His 1973 work 747 involved the artist firing several pistol shots directly at a Boeing 747 passenger jet plane while it took off from Los Angeles International Airport. The piece had a single witness, photographer Terry McDonnell, who filmed the act.
His best-known work from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about sixteen feet (5 m) with a .22 rifle. Other performances from the 1970s included Deadman (1972), in which Burden lay on the ground covered with a canvas sheet and a set of road flares until bystanders assumed he was dead and called emergency services (leading to his arrest); Match Piece (1972) (also known as Match), in which Burden launched lit matches at a naked woman lying between him and a set of two televisions in a room covered with butcher paper (1972); B.C. Mexico (1973), in which he kayaked to a desolate beach in Baja Mexico where he lived for 11 days with no food and only water; Fire Roll (1973), in which he set a pair of pants on fire and then rolled on them to extinguish them; Honest Labor (1979), in which he dug a large ditch; Velvet Water (1974), in which he spent five minutes attempting to breathe water as a live audience watched; Do You Believe in Television (1976), in which he sent an audience to the third floor of a building — where television monitors showed them the ground floor — and then lit a fire on the ground floor (sources differ as to whether the monitors showed the fire, forcing the audience to realize that the screens represented reality, or showed an intact ground floor, forcing them to realize that the screens did not represent reality); and TV Hijack (1972) wherein, during a live television interview to which he had brought his own camera crew, he held interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans at knifepoint and threatened to kill her if the station stopped live transmission (when asked about the incident in 2015, Lutjeans stated that Burden was a 'gentle soul', that she knew it was an art piece, and that the incident did not damage their pre-existing friendship); to conclude the piece, he demanded to be given the station's recording of the incident, which he then destroyed.
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