ANTI-WAR SCULPTURE : NEWPORT MUSEUM BUYS BURDEN WORK

The Newport Harbor Art Museum has bought a large anti-war sculpture by Chris Burden, a UC Irvine graduate who worked at the museum before gaining international attention for having a friend shoot him in the arm in 1971 and calling it a work of art.

The recent acquisition is the museum’s first so-called environmental piece, a work that stresses its own interplay with the space in which it is located, said Paul Schimmel, the museum’s chief curator.

Newport Harbor purchased the sprawling 800- to 1,000-square-foot work titled “A Tale of Two Cities” from the 41-year-old artist on March 31, but it won’t be displayed until next January.

The 1981 work, an elaborate depiction of two cities at war, consists of 3,000 tanks, airplanes, cardboard buildings, rocks and plants--and includes a stand with binoculars that a viewer can use to survey the scene like a general.

“It is unusual for museums to buy large installation pieces, which are considered by many to be uncollectible,” Schimmel said in a recent interview. “When you’re buying a painting, you’re committing five feet of the wall. Here, you’re committing a whole room. It is one in a series of installation pieces that we hope to buy over the next few years.”

Schimmel declined to reveal the exact purchase price of the work except to say that it was “in the five figures.” The piece was acquired with the hope of putting it on permanent display in the new, expanded facility that museum officials want to build, he said. The work by Burden joins the museum’s permanent collection of 1,800 works by post-World War II California artists.

Now packed in crates, “A Tale of Two Cities” will be assembled for a Newport Harbor retrospective of Burden’s work, “Chris Burden: 1968-1988,” scheduled from Jan. 22 through March 20, 1988.

When the work was displayed at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1982, a reviewer for Artforum wrote that “in its obsessiveness and its use of toys,” the piece “suggests boyhood or male adolescence.”

The piece joins another anti-war work by Burden at the Newport Beach museum called “The Large Glass Ship,” an assemblage of several model submarines hanging from wires, Schimmel said.

Burden, who was born in Boston and now lives in Topanga, first made his reputation in the contemporary art world as a performance artist. In “Five Day Locker Piece,” a 1971 performance piece Burden used to complete his graduate studies, he remained in a school locker for five consecutive days without eating.

In the early 1970s, Burden experimented with performance art throughout Orange County. In a 1972 performance titled “TV Hijack,” he threatened to cut the throat of cable television interviewer Phyllis Lutjeans during her program “All About Art” on Community Cablevision’s Channel 3 in Irvine.

Lutjeans, who also was working with him at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, had invited him to perform a piece on her show. Before the taping, he held a small knife to her throat and ordered station technicians to start live transmission. “He came around behind me and told the people taping the show that he was going to slit my throat,” recalled Lutjeans, who now works as a curator at the UC Irvine Fine Arts Gallery. “It was turned on live for a while. I didn’t know what he was going to do before the taping. I wasn’t sure how serious he was. I didn’t know whether he was going overboard.”

A video crew brought along by Burden recorded the episode, which ended without injury, said Lutjeans, and without any public response from viewers who may have been watching.

Laguna Beach residents may remember him for “Dos Equis,” in which he blocked both lanes of Laguna Canyon Road with two huge wooden ‘X’s, soaked them with gasoline and lighted them.

“He was a very quiet, serious person,” recalled Sue Henger, now an editor for museum publications who was a volunteer office worker when Burden was there. “Everybody in Orange County art circles was talking about how special he was because the things he was doing shocked people, and they were called art.”

Added Schimmel: “He’s somebody who people around here know. He has had a relationship with the museum and he will be very involved (in) setting up our show.”