Artist Burden Makes It to ‘Late Night’ Via TV Ads

Audiences watching the commercials during “Late Night with David Letterman” at 12:30 Saturday morning will get an involuntary dose of culture:

SCIENCE HAS FAILED

HEAT IS LIFE

TIME KILLS

The words will appear on the screen in block letters. Then the camera will zoom in on a man’s face as he repeats each statement. Ah, some viewers probably will conclude, some more of that wacky Letterman wit.

But then , a voice-over will tell them they have just seen part of an exhibit by contemporary artist (and UC Irvine graduate) Chris Burden that opens Sunday at the Newport Harbor Art Museum. The piece, called “Poem for LA,” is an example of Burden’s video art from 1975.

It is also, in this case, a very rare example of a museum advertising an art show on TV.

“We’re buying television time because there are a lot of people who just don’t read articles about art,” museum spokeswoman Kathy Bryant explained. “But if you’re sitting there and watching the Letterman show and this ad comes on, well . . . maybe it will work out that a lot more people will come.”

Bryant said the museum, which is shelling out $10,000 to run spots on the Letterman show and other programs, has sent public service announcements to television stations before but has never paid for commercial air time.

The ads are integral enough to the art show to be listed in the exhibition program. They are also the subject of an essay, “Chris Burden’s Television,” in the show catalogue.

Burden paid tens of thousands of dollars of his own to run the ads in the mid-1970s on stations in Los Angeles and New York. They are, he said in an interview this week, about the uses of technology and television itself. “It is different than being a guest on a talk show program or some other kind of publicity because I’m paying the bill. Actually, the museum is this time. But, at first, it was me. Those 30 seconds of television are mine. I own them.

“I remember driving on the Santa Monica Freeway and thinking, ‘look at all those houses with their antennas.’ They can’t control the messages that they get. I decided I could. This was a way of fighting back.”

“Poem for LA” will repeat on the Letterman show on April 22, only in the Los Angeles market. Other Burden videos will air during the Today Show and other local network and cable programs. The exhibition, a 20-year retrospective of Burden’s work, will run through June 12.

In all, Burden made four pieces for television. Only two will be running as part of the show, the second being “Chris Burden Promo,” an ad that shows the names of artists that a national survey revealed as the best known to the American public: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso. Then a sixth name appears: “Chris Burden.”

The idea, Burden says, was that if he repeated the ad enough times he would actually become one of the six best known artists in history. In 1976, he ran the 30-second ad 24 times in New York and 21 times in Los Angeles. He says people still remember him from it. “I’ll give a lecture and somebody will come up and say, ‘My brother was visiting me from Arizona and we were watching TV, and this ad of yours came on.’

“When I showed the ad in New York, people in the art world would be incensed that I was putting my name in there with those other names. They didn’t see the humor in it . . . it was an insidious comment on television, the fact that you could make yourself one of the most famous artists in the world by paying for it. I was going to put Andy Warhol in the list but he was alive then, and I figured why give him the free plug.”

A staffer with KNBC (Channel 4) in Los Angeles said an estimated 200,000 people will see the Letterman ads, although fewer than usual will tune in because the show is in re-run due to the writers’ strike.

Burden, who went through UC Irvine as a graduate student in art, first made a name for himself in Orange County with a series of conceptual and performance pieces including his first television work in 1972, called “TV Hijack.” In that piece Burden 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, a friend of Burden, 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. “I didn’t know what he was going to do before the taping,” Lutjeans said in an interview. The piece was recorded, Burden let Lutjeans go without injury and a bizarre bit of art history was made.

In the catalogue essay about Burden’s television pieces, writer David Ross says, “Burden has always been interested in . . . television as technology, as social force, as drug, as the mirror of an alienated culture. . . . Burden believed that he and his work must finally function within the real world.”

Newport spokeswoman Bryant puts a pragmatic spin on the purpose of running the ads this time. “We think the people who watch David Letterman are going to be kind of hip, the sort of people who attend art shows, and we want to entice them to come see the show.”

Edward H. Able, executive director of the American Assn. of Museums, said examples of nonprofit museums like the Newport advertising on television are rare. “I don’t know offhand of any specific instance,” he said. “But I know it has happened on some occasions.”

“Chris Burden: A Twenty-Year Survey” opens Sunday and continues through June 12 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum, 850 San Clemente Drive, Newport Beach. Museum hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Admission: $1 to $3. Information: (714) 759-1122.