Chris Burden--A Daredevil’s New Expressions : . . . and Inquiry Is His Guiding Principle

It only took a millisecond for Chris Burden to put his mark on late 20th-Century art. Today, he accepts that nothing he has done since or will do in the future can fully dispel the notoriety of that moment in 1971: A friend stood 15 feet away in a Santa Ana gallery and shot him through the upper arm with a .22-caliber bullet.

Burden called it art. Some agreed, concluding that the gesture daringly reflected a society that had clawed itself raw over Vietnam. But the artist’s self-willed violence convinced others that the avant-garde, after a creative surge in the 1960s, was suffering from a severe lack of talent and direction. Sitting at home in a rugged corner of the Santa Monica Mountains, Burden fingered the famous bullet wound’s brownish, wormlike scar just beneath the edge of his T-shirt sleeve. “People still say, ‘That’s the guy who shot himself. I can accept that. Andy Warhol had blond hair and that was cool. Van Gogh cut his ear off. I think it shows the resonance of that piece. Getting shot is as American as apple pie.”

Burden, a stocky, unexpectedly soft-spoken man with a buried intensity, hopes the retrospective of his work that runs into June at the Newport Harbor Art Museum will prompt an appraisal that searches past the memory of his early pieces (in one, he was crucified on the roof of a Volkswagen, with nails driven through his palms). Whatever the verdict, the fact remains: In an art world not known for its lasting attention span, the 42-year-old artist has sustained a career for the 17 years since “Shoot.”

“He is an important artist who has consistently questioned and overturned conventions,” said Linda Shearer, a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

Ned Rifkin, chief curator for exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, said Burden has “continued to make universal statements about war, the role of technology in society and other serious subjects.”

But Hilton Kramer, former chief art critic for the New York Times, was much less generous. “I think his work is totally worthless,” Kramer said in a lightly dismissive tone. Kramer, who now edits the New Criterion magazine, is a conservative critic who acknowledged that he doesn’t really like any performance or conceptual art--or even consider them art. “What Burden does has acquired the status of art, and to understand why, you would have to understand the whole history of the avant-garde in the 20th Century and the degree to which the whole element of shock and the anti-art impulse came in around the First World War,” Kramer said. “Burden represents the end of that tradition. He represents the dead end of the avant-garde.”

Paul Schimmel, chief curator at the Newport Harbor museum and lead organizer of the Burden show, doesn’t agree. “I think that some of the most interesting sculpture being made in the ‘80s is by artists who were associated with performance and video art in the 1960s and 1970s. A lot of those artists are taking an expression that unfolded in time and transforming it into a three-dimensional sculptural expression. Burden has played a leadership role in reinvigorating what sculpture can be.”

Schimmel said the show, which will travel to Pittsburgh and Boston, will detail the artist’s shift from performance art, starting in 1975 with “B-Car,” a working automobile. In a 1979 piece, “The Reason for the Neutron Bomb,” 50,000 nickels represent Soviet tanks poised to attack Europe. The centerpiece of the show will be a 1981 work called “A Tale of Two Cities,” a huge indoor battle scene built from truckloads of dirt and rock scattered with 3,000 tanks, toy soldiers, airplanes and cardboard buildings. The most recent work, the 1987 piece “Sex Tower,” is a 12-foot, gold-leaf-topped, “phallic-shaped” model of a 125-foot version he may one day build.

“I think this show will do away with the idea of me as a performance artist,” Burden said. “Even before, I was really trying to expand the possibilities of sculpture. I’m still trying to do that, but in a different way. . . . The thread that ties them (his early performances and current pieces) is that then I was touching myself, and now I am touching larger issues that concern me. I got tired of what I was doing before. I want to make things.”

To visit Burden, one travels a tortuous dirt road into the dry mountains that twist away from Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The artist has lived in these mountains for more than four years, in an assertive embrace of hardship that he says challenges him and satisfies his need for isolation, although he leaves it several times a week to teach art at UCLA, where he heads a part of the art department called New Forms and Concepts. He lives with his wife, sculptor Nancy Rubins, in an unfinished, barely furnished house with no refrigerator. They cook on camping burners. Until a few weeks ago, home was a tent at the bottom of a deep ravine just steps from the house. Leading the way there, Burden seemed to relish the steep descent. Like a tightrope walker, he placed one foot in front of another down the dirt path. “This is how you keep from slipping,” he said, hands in his pockets. The moment brought to mind a sentence in critic Donald Kuspit’s essay in the retrospective’s catalogue: “The question of the psychology of Burden’s production may seem irrelevant and digressive, but in fact the issue of his motivation has haunted every critical examination of him.”

In other words, what makes Burden tick?

Kuspit portrays Burden as someone testing his “ego strength” against a society that has the “tendency to engineer its own destruction.” The critic notes that Burden’s father is an engineer and suggests that the artist, reacting to his father’s view of the world, “seems to be calling for a rethinking of the use of technological power.” Burden thinks this psychobiography “is a little stretched for my taste,” yet he feels it holds some truth. His father is an engineer who advises developing nations on agricultural and energy technology. “One of my problems with technology is that you don’t have to do original research yourself,” Burden said. “There is this whole world of recorded knowledge and things that are made for you . . . rather than discovering things for yourself.

“When I kept reading about 50,000 Russian tanks (poised against NATO forces in Europe) on a printed page, and that this was why we had the neutron bomb, part of me wanted to see what that looks like. . . . That is what I was trying to do with ‘Shoot.’ I wanted to know: What is it to be shot? One drop of blood? And what does that number mean, with all those zeroes after it?”

Art as inquiry has been his guiding principle since he attended Pomona College in Claremont, where he started with a vague idea of becoming an architect and with artistic interests nurtured by a cosmopolitan upbringing. He was born in Boston, where his mother was an art restorer at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, grew up partly in Paris because it was his father’s occasional home base and attended private schools in Europe. Entering Pomona in 1965, he was drawn to sculpture. Teachers who shaped his idea of art as “a hunt, a perpetual hunt,” included Mowry Baden, who now lives in British Columbia. “I was using the human body in sculpture and Chris picked right up on that,” Baden said recently. “At the time, I was making seat belts connected to a length of seat belt strap that tethered people to the floor.”

Burden said he quickly “realized the process of making art could also be part of art” and shed his dependence on objects, evolving toward a kind of gymnastics involving ropes and pulleys.

As a graduate student at UC Irvine, he said, he was most influenced by artist Robert Irwin. Irwin’s experiments with light, space and human perception did not specifically make an impression on him, Burden said, but rather Irwin’s openness to “art that wasn’t painting.” For his UCI graduate show, Burden spent five days in a school locker. He got much media attention and endured what he saw as misreadings of his work.

In a 1976 piece called “King of the Avant-Grand,” Burden pasted a 1972 article by Time magazine art critic Robert Hughes on a piece of paper and critiqued it. Hughes, after referring to performances by Burden and others, had written that the avant-garde’s relentless search for new ideas had dissolved into a game that “now seems pointless.” In neat red script next to that line, Burden wrote one word: “Baloney.”