BURDEN DROPS A ‘BOMB’ ON LA JOLLA

The La Jolla Museum of Contemporary Art has bought 50,000 nickels from artist Chris Burden. Also 50,000 matches and a paragraph of text explaining “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb.” They are all part of a new acquisition, proudly installed in the museum’s Meyer Gallery where it will remain through May.

The nickels are precisely positioned at regular intervals in a gridded carpet covering the gallery floor. Each coin is topped with a match, trimmed to fit and positioned so that the red tip faces front like the barrel of a gun. With “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb” spelled out across the back wall and explanatory text posted by the entrance, it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out that the nickel-match units symbolize tanks.

The text reads: “Behind the iron curtain, along the border between Western and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union maintains an army of 50,000 highly sophisticated tanks. The United States possesses only 10,000 tanks, and the combined tank strength of all Western European nations, including the NATO forces, is estimated to be no more than 20,000. The Western European forces are outnumbered by more than two to one. This imbalance is the reason given by our military for the existence of the Neutron Bomb. Each nickel-and-matchstick combination here represents one Russian tank.”

Much stranger things have come to roost in art galleries (Wolf Vostell’s 1980 installation of live turkeys and TV sets at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art comes to mind), but the purchase of Burden’s work represents the sort of institutional courage that warms the hearts of contemporary art aficionados.

For one thing, the piece is unwieldy and extremely tedious to install, requiring untold hours of back-straining, knee-scuffing labor from staff and volunteers. For another, the anti-war subject matter isn’t necessarily popular with people who provide the means for buying such art.

Purchase and installation accomplished, visitors are free to simply contemplate the spectacle at hand. Though the work was shown in a New York gallery in 1979 and at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1984, it is still something to behold. The spit-and-polish order, the assimilation of overwhelming numbers into a streamlined whole and Burden’s neat substitution of money and fire for expensive tanks make the point of military fanaticism very plain indeed.

This example of formal purity and sobering commentary isn’t altogether characteristic of an artist largely remembered for having himself shot and more recently creating such improbable machines as a “Flying Kayak,” a “Frictionless Sled” and a “Ship O’ Corks.” But we’ve seen many sides of Burden through his unpredictable work: humor, braggadocio and scientific curiosity, to name a few.

While this side won’t please the folks at the Pentagon, it appears admirably understated and wise.